by Sean Wilentz
In fact, making this record was a generous act that was also oddly in keeping with Dylan’s past and with his developing art. The crass reason for artists to release special albums of Christmas songs had always been to cash in on the lucrative Christmas sales market. Dylan understood as much—but in the Christian spirit of caritas, he donated all of his royalties ahead of time to buy holiday meals for millions of needy people through the organization Feeding America. The artistic reason for cutting special Christmas collections had always been that there are so many wonderful Christmas songs, old and new—not least those in the American songbook of the past century and a half—and ambitious musical artists have been tempted to take them on. This was Dylan’s motivation as well. Some listeners heard Christmas in the Heart, with knowing irony, as a parody of 1950s white-bread music, but the album contains not a single ironic or parodic note. It is a sincere, croaky-voiced homage to a particular vintage of popular American Christmas music, as well as testimony to Dylan’s abiding faith: hence, its title.
Like Elvis Christmas Album, but in a more jumbled way, Christmas in the Heart mixes traditional carols (roughly one-quarter of the album) with Tin Pan Alley holiday songs, one seasonal hit that has become attached to the holiday (“Winter Wonderland”), and a novelty song or two. The album could have appeared as a large chunk of a Theme Time Radio Hour episode entitled “Christmas,” but this time with Dylan performing all of the songs instead of acting as DJ.
But the most salient thing about the album is how much of it consists of hits written and originally recorded in the 1940s and early 1950s—the years of Dylan’s boyhood, when these songs formed a perennial American December soundscape, even for a Jewish boy. “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” first appeared in the film Meet Me in St. Louis in 1944, as sung by Judy Garland (who, as Frances Ethel Gumm, nineteen years Dylan’s senior, had grown up in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, about thirty miles west of Hibbing).* Other standards on the album come from the same era: “The Christmas Song” (1944), later made famous by Nat “King” Cole; the Andrews Sisters’ “Christmas Island” (1946); Autry’s and, later, Presley’s “Here Comes Santa Claus” (1947); and Dean Martin’s “Christmas Blues” (1953).
It is just as striking that, much as Charley Patton’s shade presides over “Love and Theft,” the benign spirit of Bing Crosby haunts Christmas in the Heart. This is not entirely surprising: after he recorded “White Christmas” in 1942, Crosby practically owned the franchise on making popular recordings of Christmas music. Still, it cannot be coincidental that of all the Christmas material available to him, Dylan included three of the songs most closely identified with Crosby—“I’ll Be Home for Christmas” (1943), “Silver Bells” (1952), and “Do You Hear What I Hear?” (1962)—as well as others that were successful songs for Crosby, including “Here Comes Santa Claus” (written in 1947, recorded by Crosby with the Andrews Sisters in 1949), “The Christmas Song” (recorded by Crosby in 1947), and “Winter Wonderland” (written in 1934 and recorded by Crosby in 1962). In all, thirteen of the fifteen songs on Christmas in the Heart, including all of the carols, were also recorded by Crosby.
And so the album takes us back to the mid- to late 1940s, when Bobby Zimmerman was just a child—but it also takes us back to 1985, when Bob Dylan was touting Bing Crosby as a great master of phrasing, one of whose songs he hoped soon to record. And it also takes us back two years before that, to the Power Station recording studio in New York in late April 1983, when Dylan was recording Infidels. The eleventh recording session in as many days began with repeated efforts to complete “Foot of Pride,” but nine takes yielded nothing usable. To unwind, the band members jumped into a reggae jam—and then Dylan led them into “The Christmas Song,” followed by Louis Jordan’s jump-blues hit from 1946 “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie,” then “Silent Night,” and then the contemporary Australian Pentecostal songwriter Darlene Zschech’s “Glory to the King.” If a seed was planted in the era of World War II and just after, it matured in Dylan’s mind for at least a quarter century before he recorded Christmas in the Heart.
Dylan could not, of course, keep from importing his own style and preferences and melding them with the 1940s sound. (The results are best heard on “Winter Wonderland,” complete with Donnie Herron on pedal steel guitar.) His careful phrasing and arrangements could not erase the ragged effects of his badly worn and cracked vocal cords, which simply were not up to a tune as complicated as “The Christmas Song.” But the season’s warm and exuberant joys come alive on several tracks, not least my favorite, “Must Be Santa”—a dance-hall rendition (complete with David Hidalgo’s accordion and George Recile’s crash cymbal) that, although beholden to the Texas rock-polka band Brave Combo, revives the polka rave-ups of Whoopee John Wilfahrt and all the Midwestern polka band kings of Dylan’s youth. And even though Dylan’s voice strains and actually falters for a moment on “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing,” and an interlude by a female chorale starts off sounding dippy, the chorale’s line suddenly pauses, slows, and turns lovely, and Dylan joins in with “joyful, all ye nations rise / join the triumph of the skies,” and the season’s divinity comes to the ear, and to the heart.
For more than half a century, Bob Dylan had been absorbing, transmuting, and renewing and improving American art forms long thought to be trapped in formal conventions. He not only “put folk into bed with rock,” as Al Santos still announces before each concert; he took traditional folk music, the blues, rock and roll, country and western, black gospel, Tin Pan Alley, Tex-Mex borderlands music, Irish outlaw ballads, and more and bent them to his own poetic muse. At the start of the 1960s, influenced by the songs and milieu of the Popular Front–inspired folk revival, he turned them into something else, much as the Popular Front composer Aaron Copland had turned folk songs into orchestral music. His imagination and his voice blasted open by Beat aesthetics, Dylan then pushed his own reinventions of folk music into realms that were every bit as mysterious and mythic as the old traditional music, but in a pop sensibility of his own time that shocked the folk purists. And then he turned away again, moving to Blakean and biblical parable, time-fractured songs of love and heartbreak, hellfire preaching, and onward, through his recovered and revised modern minstrelsy of the 1990s and after.
Open to artistic inspiration anywhere he found it, Dylan was not so much a sponge (although he has always absorbed prodigious amounts) as an alchemist, taking common materials and creating new art. Nothing that came within his field of vision escaped him: 1930s French films, 1850s minstrel songs, the works of Shakespeare, Dolly Parton, Saint John of Patmos, Muddy Waters—anything of beauty, no matter how terrible, became something to seize upon and make his own. And yet, as he ended his seventh decade, Dylan also in some ways spiritually resembled Blind Willie McTell, traveling endlessly, performing endlessly, sharp to the wiles of the world, taking things from everywhere but fixing them up his own way, composing new songs and performing old ones that were sometimes sacred and sometimes secular, but neither black nor white, up nor down—and that had reference to everybody.
Then, all of a sudden, late in 2009, Dylan offered a red-ribboned gift to the world, not so much slipping back and forth through time, or recombining old and new as on his previous four albums, as instead evoking and in some ways replicating his own past and America’s, while providing Christmas dinner to families on relief—acting like a grander version of the Pretty Boy Floyd of his last proclaimed hero, Woody Guthrie, but as an artist, not a bank robber. Or perhaps Christmas in the Heart was not just a gift but another album of cover versions that, as in the past, marked an interlude before Dylan undertook yet another new phase of his career. With the masked, shape-changing American alchemist, it was impossible to know too much for sure.
* In Chronicles, Dylan recalls playing Garland singing “The Man That Got Away” on the jukebox during his early days in New York: “The song always did something to me, not in any stupefying, tremendous kind of way. It didn’t summon up any strange
thoughts. It was just nice to hear … Listening to Judy was like listening to the girl next door. She was way before my time, and like the Elton John song says, ‘I would have liked to have known you, but I was just a kid’ ” (49).
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful above all to my editor, the incomparable Gerald Howard, and his staff at Doubleday, especially his assistant, Hannah Wood. I am also indebted to Bette Alexander, Rebecca Holland, Brandy Flora, Emily Mahon, Rachel Lapal, Jeffrey Yamaguchi, and John Pitts. Deborah Bull skillfully tracked down numerous photographs and prints.
My colleagues at Princeton, as well as Judy Hanson and the staff of the Princeton History Department, are a continuing source of inspiration and support. I owe special thanks this time to Brooke Fitzgerald for her splendid work in helping with the illustrations.
As usual, I have avoided the dance of subjectivities that goes along with extensive interviewing, but I made a couple of exceptions: Al Kooper and Charlie McCoy gave generously of their time and recollections. Thanks also to Bill Flanagan, Tony Glover, and Donn Pennebaker for recollections and clarifications.
George Hecksher very kindly permitted me to consult the collection of Dylan manuscripts he has donated to the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, and Robert Parks patiently guided me through the holdings.
Apart from the chapters revised from previously published essays, smaller fragments of this book appeared in earlier writings of mine, and I’d like to thank those responsible for giving them their first, longer trying-out, especially Tina Brown and Edward Felsenthal of the Daily Beast, and Lindsay Waters of Harvard University Press.
Writing this book would have been impossible without the munificence, expertise, and camaraderie of Robert Bower, Callie Gladman, April Hayes, Diane Lapson, Damian Rodriguez, Lynne Okin Sheridan, and Debbie Sweeney. A big tip of the cap as well to Dan Levy.
I owe more than I can say to Jeff Rosen for, among other things, countless hours of conversation, argument, and discovery—and for our continuing improvisations in music appreciation.
SELECTED READINGS, NOTES, AND DISCOGRAPHY
There is an enormous body of commentary on Bob Dylan and his work, and there are numerous valuable research tools to aid current and future writers. The following is a highly select listing of the books and resources that I found most useful, including a discography of the key recordings I have cited.
GENERAL
Historians habitually work with primary materials in libraries and archives, but no official repository has been selected (if ever one will be) to house the bulk of Dylan’s manuscripts and private papers. The outstanding exception is the rich body of manuscripts of Dylan’s lyrics, collected by George Hecksher, which is held by the Morgan Library and Museum in New York. I have also been privileged to enjoy access to a wide range of materials, including session tapes, overseen by Jeff Rosen and his staff at Special Rider Music.
There are several copious and helpful reference books, although they are far from flawless and must be used in close conjunction with the other basic sources: Michael Gray, The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia (2006; New York, 2008); Clinton Heylin, Bob Dylan: The Complete Recording Sessions, 1960–1994 (New York, 1995); and Oliver Trager, Keys to the Rain: The Definitive Bob Dylan Encyclopedia (New York, 2004). Two very useful compilations of Dylan’s newspaper, magazine, radio, and television interviews are Jonathan Cott, ed., Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews (New York, 2006); and James Ellison, ed., Younger Than That Now: The Collected Interviews with Bob Dylan (New York, 2004).
Research on Dylan has been greatly facilitated by the Internet. The first place to look is Dylan’s own official Web site, www.bobdylan.com. For information on past concert tours, set lists, and recording dates, as well as for leads about other useful sites, see Bill Pagel’s Bob Links, www.boblinks.com; and Olof Björner’s About Bob, www.bjorner.com/bob.htm. For a continuing, comprehensive aggregation of the latest information on the Internet, with an archive that dates back to 1995, see Karl Erik Andersen’s indispensable site, Expecting Rain, www.expectingrain.com. Additional useful information and source material, some of it to be found nowhere else, is Giulio Molfese’s Bread Crumb Sins, www.interferenza.com/bcs, although the site has not been updated in some years. Pagel’s and Andersen’s sites also contain links to the most important Dylan fanzines, including two (now venerable) British publications, Isis and The Bridge. See also Derek Barker’s edited collections, Isis: A Bob Dylan Anthology (London, 2004); and 20 Years of Isis: Anthology Volume 2 (Surrey, U.K., 2005). Serious researchers will want to consult back issues of two other magazines no longer being published, Wanted Man and the Telegraph, as well as the volume edited by the late John Bauldie, Wanted Man: In Search of Bob Dylan (London, 1990).
Bob Dylan’s Lyrics, 1962–2001 (New York, 2004) contains the standard versions of Dylan’s song lyrics through “Love and Theft.” Readers may also consult www.bobdylan.com, which covers the lyrics of albums released since 2001 as well as all of the earlier work.
Biographies of Dylan vary widely in quality and accuracy, depending in part on their degree of celebrity worship. By far the most useful for my purposes is Clinton Heylin’s Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades: Take Two, which has been reissued as Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited (New York, 2003). Other informative general biographies (although, again, of varying quality as biographies) include: Robert Shelton, No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan (New York, 1986); Anthony Scaduto, Bob Dylan: An Intimate Biography (New York, 1971); Howard Sounes, Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan (New York, 2001); and Bob Spitz, Dylan: A Biography (1989; New York, 1991).
Among the memoirs, pride of place goes to Dylan’s superb Chronicles: Volume One (New York, 2004); two more volumes of his memoirs are expected to appear. On Dylan’s early years in New York—and, just as important, on the wider Greenwich Village scene—Suze Rotolo’s charming yet tough-minded A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties (New York, 2008) is essential. Dave Van Ronk did not, alas, live to complete the manuscript of his memoir, but Elijah Wald served his memory well in bringing to fruition The Mayor of MacDougal Street: A Memoir (New York, 2005). Other useful memoirs include Joan Baez, And a Voice to Sing With (1989; New York, 2009); Liam Clancy, The Mountain of the Women: Memoirs of an Irish Troubadour (New York, 2002); Levon Helm and Stephen Davis, This Wheel’s on Fire: Levon Helm and the Story of the Band (New York, 1993); the relevant portions of Phil Lesh, Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead (New York, 2005); and, for background, Israel Goodman Young, Autobiography: The Bronx, 1928–1938 (New York, 1969).
The number of serious studies of Dylan’s work has grown large enough to constitute a small library, written in several languages and covering topics ranging from Dylan as a Zen master to his style of playing the harmonica. Some of these works are of special importance. Of the many talented writers who pioneered rock-and-roll criticism in the 1960s, Greil Marcus has established himself as the foremost cultural critic, and his abundant work on Dylan ranks among his best. Above all, readers interested in further exploring Dylan’s larger cultural significance should read Marcus’s Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes (New York, 1997), which in its paperback edition was re-titled The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes. Similarly stimulating, from very different perspectives, are the latest edition of Michael Gray’s sprawling and endlessly fascinating Song and Dance Man III: The Art of Bob Dylan (London, 2000); Christopher Ricks’s highly formal, playful, and brilliant close readings of Dylan’s lyrics in Dylan’s Vision of Sin (New York, 2003); and the postmodernist-influenced readings in Stephen Scobie, Alias Bob Dylan Revisited (Calgary, 2004). Other important and illuminating works, focused on more selective aspects of Dylan’s career, include Paul Williams’s multivolume study of Dylan as performer, beginning with Performing Artist: The Music of Bob Dylan, Volume One, 1960–1973 (Novato, Calif., 1990); Aidan Day, Jokerman: Reading the Lyrics of Bob Dylan (Oxford, 19
88); Vince Farinaccio, Nothing to Turn Off: The Films and Video of Bob Dylan (n.p., 2007); C. P. Lee, Like a Bullet of Light: The Films of Bob Dylan (London, 2000); Michael Marqusee, Wicked Messenger: Bob Dylan and the 1960s (2003; New York, 2005); Andy Gill and Kevin Odegard, A Simple Twist of Fate: Bob Dylan and the Making of “Blood on the Tracks” (New York, 2004); David Hajdu, Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña, and Richard Fariña (New York, 2001); Stephen W. Webb, Dylan Redeemed: From “Highway 61” to “Saved” (New York, 2006); and Seth Rogovoy, Bob Dylan: Prophet, Mystic, Poet (New York, 2009). On the comic side of Dylan’s work, essential but often neglected, see Susan Wheeler’s fine essay “Jokerman,” in “Do You, Mr. Jones?” Bob Dylan with the Poets and Professors, ed. Neil Corcoran (London, 2003), 175–91. On “Visions of Johanna,” see Jonny Thakar, “Visions of Infinity,” The Owl Journal (University of Oxford, Hilary Term, 2004). The useful collections of essays and other critical writings about Dylan include Elizabeth Thomson and David Gutman, eds., The Dylan Companion: A Collection of Essential Writings About Bob Dylan (New York, 1990); Carl Benson, ed., The Bob Dylan Companion: Four Decades of Commentary (New York, 1998); Benjamin Hedin, ed., Studio A: The Bob Dylan Reader (New York, 2004); and Kevin J. H. Dettmar, The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan (New York, 2009).
