Bob Dylan in America

by Sean Wilentz

  Dylan has neither confirmed nor denied that he took his title from Lott’s book, although when he placed the words inside quotation marks, he strongly suggested that he did. But there is plenty of theft and love (and divinity) in “Love and Theft,” some of it obvious, especially in the lyrics. One needn’t know much more about the blues than the songs of Robert Johnson, Robert Wilkins, and the rest of the Delta and Memphis players or the versions copped by the Rolling Stones in order to recognize the po’boy prodigal son or the line in “Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum” about someone’s love being “all in vain.” Johnson again, but also the up-country white pickers Clarence Ashley and Dock Boggs provide elements of “High Water (for Charley Patton),” the best song on the album. Patton, who is something of the presiding shade of “Love and Theft,” also wrote and recorded a song about the great 1927 flood in Mississippi, “High Water Everywhere.” (Likewise, “Dirt Road Blues,” on Time Out of Mind, borrows from Patton’s “Down the Dirt Road Blues.”) “Lonesome Day Blues” was the title of a song by Blind Willie McTell (recorded with Ruby Glaze under the name Hot Shot Willie), although Dylan’s song also echoes the Carter Family’s “Sad and Lonesome Day.” Dock Boggs, among many others, recorded a song called “Sugar Baby.” The melody of “Floater (Too Much to Ask)” is the same as the Joe Young and Carmen Lombardo tune “Snuggled on Your Shoulder,” recorded by Bing Crosby in 1932; and “Bye and Bye” sounds a great deal like “Having Myself a Time,” as recorded by Billie Holiday in 1938.

  An early minstrel sheet music cover, highlighting the supposed differences between the “dandyism” of the northern blackface performers (top) and the strange contortions of southern slaves (bottom), from Boston Minstrels, “The Celebrated Ethiopian Melodies” (Boston, 1843).

  Charley Patton, circa 1920s. (photo credit 9.2)

  Dylan had been committing this common kind of theft all of his working life, right down to swiping his own surname. The tune of his tribute to Woody Guthrie, “Song to Woody,” on his very first album, comes directly from Guthrie’s own “1913 Massacre,” which Guthrie appropriated from a traditional song. And Dylan has never simply been a brilliant, deeply knowledgeable, opportunistic folkie; nor has he been, either legally or spiritually, a plagiarist, although some critics and rivals have claimed he is.* He has been a minstrel, or has worked in the same tradition as the minstrels (a tradition that includes vaudeville as well as the southern songster performers, among them Blind Willie McTell)—copying other people’s mannerisms and melodies and lyrics and utterly transforming them and making them his own, a form of larceny that is as American as apple pie, and cherry, pumpkin, and plum pie, too. As American as the hybrid music of Aaron Copland or “The Lone Pilgrim.” Or as American as Chang and Eng, the original Siamese twins, who, though born in Siam, started touring the United States in proto-carny style in 1829, coming to town right beside the minstrels, before they signed up with P. T. Barnum in 1832, for whom they worked for seven years. They then retired to Wilkesboro, North Carolina, became American citizens, married a pair of sisters, and raised two families; and they show up on “Love and Theft” in “Honest with Me.”

  But even when Dylan has sung or adapted ancient words and melodies, he has been a modern minstrel—a whiteface minstrel. The hard-edged racism taken for granted by the nineteenth-century minstrel troupes is of another age, at least in Dylan’s art. The disguises that Dylan has sported onstage—recall him telling his audience in Philharmonic Hall, off the cuff, on Halloween night 1964, “I have my Bob Dylan mask on”—have been more of himself, his time, and his America, even when, since the 1990s, he has worn his Rockmount cowboy shirts. (When Dylan, in recent years, has dipped back sartorially into the nineteenth century, he is most likely to wear a long black coat and a riverboat gambler’s hat—looking a bit as I imagine Herman Melville’s Confidence Man, or maybe one of his marks, must have looked, churning down the Mississippi aboard the mythic paddle wheeler Fidèle.) While he has tipped his hat to the old-time minstrels, Dylan has inverted their display, as when he actually whitened his face for the Rolling Thunder Revue—turning himself into a classic European Pierrot mime, but also alluding to the old practice of “blackin’ up,” in reverse.

  Poster advertising a Boston appearance by Chang and Eng Bunker, the original Siamese Twins, 1829. (photo credit 9.3)

  As a modern minstrel, Dylan has continually updated and widened his ambit, never more so than on “Love and Theft,” lifting what he pleases from the last century’s great American songbook. Folk songs, as ever: the wonderful tagline of “Mississippi” (a song originally intended for Time Out of Mind)—“Only one thing I did wrong / Stayed in Mississippi a day too long”—comes from an old work song called “Rosie.” (Rosie herself gets mentioned in the lyrics.) “The Darktown Strutters’ Ball” is here, plain as day. But there are also melodies and lyrics reminiscent of, and sometimes taken wholesale from, blues and pop songs of the 1920s through the 1950s. Listen to “Cry a While,” then compare its melody with the Mississippi Sheiks’ “Stop and Listen Blues” from 1930. Compare “Lonesome Day Blues” with the Sheiks’ song’s opening line: “Yes, today have been, baby, long old lonesome day.” Then compare “Cry a While’s” refrain with that of “I Cried for You,” written by Gus Arnheim, Abe Lyman, and Arthur Freed in 1923, and later performed brilliantly by Count Basie and Sarah Vaughan, as well as Billie Holiday:

  I cried for you, now it’s your turn to cry for me.

  Every road has its turning, that’s one thing you’re learning.

  As “Cry a While” continues, make a note to check out Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Your Funeral and My Trial,” from 1958, or to listen to the line “Feel like a fighting rooster / Feel better than I ever felt,” on Victoria Spivey’s “Dope Head Blues,” released in 1927. Then track down a copy of the 1960s East L.A. hot-rod song “Hopped-Up Mustang,” by a group called the Pacifics, and listen again to the lyrics of “Summer Days” and “High Water,” on “Love and Theft.”

  After a while, a listener stops looking for antecedents and sampling and begins to wonder which versions of the quoted songs (and bits of quoted songs) might have been in Dylan’s head, not necessarily with the idea of emulating them, but to learn what he could about phrasing and dynamics. “Sugar Baby” contains one line—“Look up, look up, see your maker / ’fore Gabriel blows his horn”—taken word for word, and note for note, from “The Lonesome Road,” credited to the 1920s hit makers Nathaniel Shilkret and Gene Austin (though it sounds like a much older African-American spiritual) and recorded by dozens of performers. Did Dylan have in mind Paul Robeson’s version of the song, recorded in 1929; or Stepin Fetchit’s, released that same year, at the conclusion of an early film version of Edna Ferber’s Showboat; or a young Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s recorded version from 1938 or her movie version from 1941; or perhaps Frank Sinatra’s stylish, hipped-up rendition, on Sinatra’s album A Swingin’ Affair! released in 1957?* Sinatra, the original Ol’ Blues Eyes, should not be discounted: Sinatra also sang “I Cried for You,” as part of his starring role in the film The Joker Is Wild from 1957.

  (In a disarming little story about three jolly kings that became the liner notes to John Wesley Harding, Dylan pokes fun at the Dylanologists who search for the great true meaning in his songs: “Faith is the key!” one king says.3 “No, froth is the key!” the second says. “You’re both wrong,” says the third, “the key is Frank!” In the story, the third king is right, sort of—but who would have ever imagined that Frank might turn out to be someone like Sinatra?)

  Nor does Dylan confine himself to musical sources. “Summer Days” contains a verse that refers to a politician running for office in jogging shoes—when I first heard the album, my mind ran immediately to Bill Clinton—who has “been sucking the blood out of the genius of generosity.” The allusion is, in part, political, as Dylan borrowed the line from a little-known speech by Abraham Lincoln, written in 1842, while Lincoln was still an aspiring local politician. But the allusion (i
f that is what it is) is to something else—for Lincoln’s speech, addressed to the Washington Temperance Society of Springfield, Illinois, endorsed the group’s nonjudgmental, openhearted approach to getting drunkards to reform; noted that the afflicted seemed, to an unusual extent, to include “the brilliant, and the warm-blooded”; and observed that “the demon of intemperance ever seems to have delighted in sucking the blood of genius and of generosity.”4 That Dylan would have read this particular speech, in whatever context, says something about his outsized reading interests; that he salted the line away in his memory, or wrote it down, and then recycled it on “Love and Theft” may mean no more than that he knows a great line when he discovers it.*

  And, of course, among the great old last-century songwriters whom Dylan recycles is himself—and not just from his songs or his adaptations of other people’s. In New Orleans, there was a streetcar line that had as its destination a street called Desire. Tennessee Williams used it for the title of his play; Dylan appears to have adapted it (or used Williams) for the title of an album. (Streetcar, the play, may have turned up in one of Dylan’s early songs, “Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word,” echoing Blanche DuBois’s immortal line about how her family’s “epic fornications” led to the loss of its estate on a called-in mortgage. “The four-letter word deprived us of our plantation,” Blanche remembers wryly. More likely, though, Dylan was thinking of the film version of Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, in which the alcoholic Brick Pollitt, played by Paul Newman, tells his father, Big Daddy, played by Burl Ives: “You don’t know what love means. To you, it’s just another four-letter word.”) Well, Desire, the streetcar, is back on “Love and Theft,” ridden by Tweedle-dee Dum and Tweedle-dee Dee to their rural retirement. “Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum” and “Honest with Me” and “Cry a While” are all variations of standard twelve-bar blues, but listen hard and I think you’ll catch the musicality of “Buick 6” (especially the bootleg outtake version) and of “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat” (a standard number in Dylan’s live shows in 2001) and of “Pledging My Time.” Same thing with the eight-bar blues “Po’ Boy” and the eight-bar “Cocaine,” yet another concert standard in 2001. The opening guitar lick of “High Water” brings my ear back to “Down in the Flood,” and the rest of the song recalls John Lee Hooker’s “Tupelo,” as rendered on the complete bootleg version of The Basement Tapes. Dylan had been singing his own version of “The Coo Coo” (which turns up, fleetingly, in “High Water”) at least since his Gaslight days forty years earlier.

  There’s no message to this modern minstrel style. It is a style, a long-evolving and still-evolving one, not a doctrine or an ideology. But that’s not to say that Dylan, a craftsman, has ever been unaware of that style and how he has worked with it and altered it, or that we should be either. Several years before “Love and Theft” appeared, Johnny Cash released an excellent album of traditional songs that he called American Recordings. “Love and Theft” could have the same title, though Dylan’s musical reach is even wider than the great Cash’s was, and his minstrelsy more complicated.5 He unfurled that American flag once again, the masked man remaking his art out of (mainly) American materials.

  In keeping with the seemingly miscellaneous but highly structured randomness of the minstrel shows, “Love and Theft” is an album of songs—greatest hits, that haven’t become hits yet, Dylan said at the time. And like the minstrel shows (and their successors, the vaudeville shows), the album is funny, maybe the funniest Dylan had produced since he was writing songs like “Outlaw Blues.” Some of the jokes, like the minstrels’, read flat on the page—“Freddy or not here I come”—but Dylan’s delivery of them makes me laugh out loud. Here’s another one, a rim-shot pun that could have come right from an old minstrel show or vaudeville sketch—dull to read, but funny when sung:

  I’m stark naked, but I don’t care

  I’m goin’ off into the woods, I’m huntin’ bare.

  When asked who his favorite poets were in 1965, Dylan mentioned a flying-trapeze family from the circus, Smokey Robinson, and W. C. Fields (who through vaudeville had his own connections to minstrelsy); now, in “Lonesome Day Blues,” he pays a little homage to Fields’s snowbound gag line in The Fatal Glass of Beer: “T’ain’t a fit night out for man nor beast!”

  Many of the other jokes are high-low literary and operatic. Don Pasquale’s 2:00 a.m. booty call in “Cry a While” comes right out of Donizetti’s Don Pasquale, a farce about a foolish old man who disinherits his own nephew, unknowingly marries the nephew’s girlfriend, and comes to misery—a work first performed in Paris in 1843, high-minstrel time in America. Then there are the Shakespearean jokes about shivering old Othello and the bad-complexioned Juliet. All of these high-low jokes, too, are in the updated minstrel style, last heard from Dylan in this humorous way on Highway 61 Revisited: the blackface companies regularly performed spoofs of grand opera and Shakespeare (Hamlet was a particular favorite)—popular works as familiar to American audiences a century and a half ago as Seinfeld and The Little Mermaid are today.

  Bob Dylan and his “Love and Theft” period band aboard tour bus. Left to right: Dave Kemper, Tony Garnier, Bob Dylan, Larry Campbell, and Charlie Sexton (kneeling). (photo credit 9.4)

  Dylan delivers every joke deadpan, like someone out of something by the minstrel show patron Twain. And some of the jokes come close to being sinister. To the steel-guitar background in “Moonlight,” all is songbirds and flowers in the heavy dusk, when, lightly lilting, the crooner sings:

  Well, I’m preaching peace and harmony,

  The blessings of tranquillity,

  Yet, I know when the time is right to strike.

  I’ll take you ’cross the river, dear,

  You don’t need to linger here;

  I know the kinds of things you like.

  Ah, the silver-tongued devil. Rudy Vallée turns into someone else—maybe Clark Gable, or, far more frightening, Robert Mitchum. It sounds as if it could be scary—much depends on what the singer means by “strike”—and yet it’s also hilarious.

  And there is plenty more serious and fearful play on “Love and Theft.” More than any old-time minstrel (and much like most of the later songsters, bluesmen, and country singers), Dylan thinks about the cosmos contained in every grain of sand. All of those floods aren’t just floods; they’re also the Flood. Why else do Charles Darwin and his ultra-materialist friend George Lewes (lover of the great novelist George Eliot) turn up in “High Water,” wanted dead or alive by a snarling Mississippi judge? Lewes tells the believers, the Englishman, the Italian, and the Jew (Protestant, Roman Catholic, Hebrew?), that, no, they can’t open their minds to just anything, and for that the high sheriff’s on his tail.* “Some of these bootleggers,” Dylan sings on “Sugar Baby,” “they make pretty good stuff.” He could be sending a little shout-out to the dedicated fans who assiduously (and covertly) record his shows from the audience, night after night, or he could be warning once again about the allure of false prophets, or he could be singing about himself.

  “Love and Theft” ought to correct any lingering impression that Dylan left his religion or his religious preoccupations behind in the 1980s. At times, the singer becomes the Lord’s messenger, who is vengeful. Hear what Dylan does with “The Coo Coo” on “High Water”:

  Well, the cuckoo is a pretty bird, she warbles as she flies

  I’m preachin’ the word of God, I’m puttin’ out your eyes.

  And Jesus isn’t any pushover either. Listen to “Bye and Bye,” another crooner’s tune, and imagine that, alongside Augie Meyers’s wickedly goopy organ, the crooner is Christ himself, in some of the verses anyway. The song begins sweetly enough, albeit with a touch of irony, including one of the hokier of Dylan’s puns:

  Bye and bye, I’m breathin’ a lover’s sigh

  While I’m sittin’ on my watch so I can be on time

  I’m singin’ love’s praises with sugar-coated rhyme.

  But it ends with lyrics that
might have been written by Saint John of Patmos:

  I’m gonna baptize you in fire so you can sin no more

  I’m gonna establish my rule through civil war

  Gonna make you see just how loyal and true a man can be.

  Christ comes with peace—and a sword.

  And there are other seers and magicians here too, the hoodoo men of the Delta blues—bragging mannish boys with their Saint John the Conqueroo who say if you can do it, it ain’t bragging. From “High Water”:

  I can write you poems, make a strong man lose his mind

  I’m no pig without a wig, I hope you treat me kind.

  “Cry a While”:

  I don’t carry dead weight, I’m no flash in the pan

  All right, I’ll set you straight, can’t you see I’m a union man?

  Feel like a fighting rooster, feel better than I ever felt.

  And this, from “Lonesome Day Blues”:

  I’m going to spare the defeated, I’m going to speak to the crowd

  I’m going to spare the defeated, boys, I’m going to speak to the crowd

  I’m going to teach peace to the conquered, I’m going to tame the proud.

  That last verse may just also be a paraphrase from Virgil’s Aeneid. But they all show Dylan writing about asserting power, especially sexual power—which reaches into the emotional core of “Love and Theft.”

  A preoccupation with aging and ardor surfaced in Dylan’s work as early as World Gone Wrong, when Dylan covered Blind Willie McTell’s “Broke Down Engine Blues.” It reappeared on Time Out of Mind in “Make You Feel My Love.” On “Love and Theft,” Dylan presented songs such as “Summer Days,” which portrays an older man boasting that, even though he might be in the September of his years, he’s no worn-out star; he’s the man that you really love, pretty baby, and he knows a place where something’s still going on. Yet as the song proceeds, the singer is funnier, more candid, and less certain—he’s got eight carburetors, but he’s low on gas and starting to stall. His hammer’s ringing, but can’t drive in the nails. He still has the balls to claim, in a line taken directly from some dialogue between Jay Gatsby and Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, that it’s perfectly possible to repeat the past, but it sounds unconvincing.