Dylan's Visions of Sin
Page 8
And I know no one can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell
This might sound negative, know no (no, no), but then that is how to convey that nothing could be more positive. Or more compacted (I know that no one can, and I know no one who can). Gratitude is called upon and called for, as it is in the warning voice (O . . . no . . . know . . . know . . . no) above Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost:
Sleep on,
Blest pair; and O yet happiest if ye seek
No happier state, and know to know no more.
(IV, 773–5)
After Guthrie in Dylan’s creative life, though before Guthrie historically, there comes – welcomed – a new arrival who is a newer rival. The rivalry has its chivalry.
BLIND WILLIE McTELL
Seen the arrow on the doorpost
Saying, this land is condemned
All the way from New Orleans
To Jerusalem
I traveled through East Texas
Where many martyrs fell
And I know no one can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell
Well, I heard that hoot owl singing
As they were taking down the tents
The stars above the barren trees
Was his only audience
Them charcoal gypsy maidens
Can strut their feathers well
But nobody can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell
See them big plantations burning
Hear the cracking of the whips
Smell that sweet magnolia blooming
See the ghosts of slavery ships
I can hear them tribes a-moaning
Hear the undertaker’s bell
Nobody can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell
There’s a woman by the river
With some fine young handsome man
He’s dressed up like a squire
Bootlegged whiskey in his hand
There’s a chain gang on the highway
I can hear them rebels yell
And I know no one can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell
Well, God is in his heaven
And we all want what’s his
But power and greed and corruptible seed
Seem to be all that there is
I’m gazing out the window
Of the St. James Hotel
And I know no one can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell
There is a road that runs for twenty years from the one travelling song, Song to Woody, to the other, Blind Willie McTell. Take, for instance, Dylan’s sequence “This land is”, moving on to “from New Orleans / To Jerusalem”. Guthrie didn’t own the franchise on this sequence of words, but it has a way of summoning him. This Land is Your Land was his.93
The land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York island
Dylan puts his own grim spin on this by having the phrase “This land is” be consummated not by “your land” but by “condemned”. It is a withering word, once you think of how much it might compact: “condemned” as blamed, censured, judicially sentenced, doomed by fate to some condition, pronounced officially to be unfit for use (we often hear of a house as being condemned, but a land?), or – and this is an odd twist – just the opposite, not unfit for use but so fit for use that the government claims the right to take it over: to pronounce judicially (land etc.) as converted or convertible to public use. (“The condemnation of private lands for a highway, a railroad, a public park, etc.”) All these might be seething in the word “condemned”, and so perhaps – since the train of thought is “Seen the arrow on the doorpost / Saying, this land is condemned” – might be the application to “a door or window: to close or block up”. Henry James, Portrait of a Lady: “the door that had been condemned, and that was fastened by bolts”.
“This land” was all the more Woody Guthrie’s because not his alone. Behind it there is an inheritance that is respected in Blind Willie McTell, too. The phrase “this land” has its own substantial entry in Cruden’s Concordance to the Bible, and the phrase’s being more than a casual pointer in Dylan’s song will be clear if we recall the word in whose company “this land” repeatedly appears in the Bible: “Unto thy seed will I give this land” (Genesis 12:7, repeated in 24:7); “Unto thy seed have I given this land” (Genesis 15:18); “I will multiply your seed as the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have spoken of I will give unto your seed” (Exodus 32:13). “The stars” rise in Dylan’s second verse, but the song then bides its time, and it is not until the final verse that “this land” meets the word that is sown so often in its vicinity: “seed”.
But power and greed and corruptible seed
Seem to be all that there is
The indeflectible internal rhyme greed / seed then has “seed” succeeded immediately by “Seem” rounding the corner of the line, and this with a two-edged effect, compounding the insistence (clinched by this assonance and consonance) and yet at the same time mitigating it. For to give emphasis to “Seem” must be to hold open some hope. This final verse does not say that power and greed and corruptible seed are all that there is. Only (only!) that they seem to be all that there is. At which point one realizes the conjunction of the Old Testament’s “this land” and “seed” with the New Testament’s offering its hope: “being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God, which liveth and abideth for ever” (the First Epistle of Peter 1:23). So the song’s “corruptible seed” cannot but call up the affirmation that makes divine sense of it by antithesis: “not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God”.
This final verse of Dylan’s has begun with a repudiation of hopefulness, for the line “Well, God is in his heaven” does not follow through to the naivety of the famous moment in Victorian poetry (dramatized naivety, there, for Browning’s poem Pippa Passes is darkened by the larger older sadder story within which it has its young hopes):
God’s in his heaven –
All’s right with the world!
When Dylan moves from “Well, God is in his heaven” to “And we all want what’s his”, he ignites a flash of doubt. We want to seize what is not ours but his? Or we do want what he wants, want what is his wish? It is an equivocal line to take, and furthermore the benign reading is itself equivocal, since not necessarily to be taken straight. Do we genuinely pray, “Thy will be done”? Or is our prayer lip-service? (We kid others and ourselves that we all want what’s His.) But Dylan’s run of lines does keep open the respectful colouring of “And we all want what’s his”, since he moves at once to a chastening “But”, where otherwise the rotation of “But” wouldn’t fit:
Well, God is in his heaven
And we all want what’s his
But power and greed and corruptible seed
Seem to be all that there is
Dylan does not go along with the blitheness of “God’s in his heaven – / All’s right with the world!” But his song does not rebound into All’s wrong with the world, it proceeds as “power and greed and corruptible seed / Seem to be all that there is”. Blind Willie McTell, which contemplates cruel injustice (“Hear the cracking of the whips”, cracking its rhyme with “the ghosts of slavery ships”), does not succumb either to hopefulness or to hopelessness. Try hope. (And while you’re at it, try faith and charity.) Remember that those verses of the Epistle of Peter proclaim “the word of God, which liveth and abideth for ever”, and remember that this hope is immediately reasserted there in the face of mortality and loss:
For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away: but the word of the Lord endureth for ever.
Yet not only the word and the voice of the Lord, but the words and the voice of a great singer.
Well, God is in his heaven
And we all want what’s his
But power and greed and corruptible seed
Seem to be all that there is
I’m gazing out the window
Of the St. James Hotel
And I know no one can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell
What kind of answer can those last two lines of this final verse, the enduring refrain, be to its first four lines? Only an answer at once partial and heartening; McTell’s singing is one of the things that there is. And we arrive at this conclusion, at art’s being a glory of man that does not wither, via the two lines about the singer of this song itself: “I’m gazing out the window / Of the St. James Hotel”. I admire and love the way in which this claims so little, even perhaps claims nothing, does no more than report one of those moments when, abstracted from evil, you gaze out of a window in contemplative regard that is not self-regard.94
It is as if the question of envy doesn’t even arise. And yet it is knowing this, knowing that envy does not even arise, that plays so generous a part throughout this lucid mysterious song.
And I know no one can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell
If Dylan were someone who never sang the blues (someone who limited himself to Living the Blues), then this might be a comparatively easy generosity, rather as someone who is a tennis champion might have little difficulty in granting that no one can play table tennis like A. N. Other. And if Dylan were someone who sang only the blues, then this might be demanding too much of him – or of us when it came to trusting his self-abnegation. The refrain is perfectly pitched and poised. And even the form that the magnanimous praise takes –
And I know no one can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell
– is one that very humanly and decently combines the utmost praise with a somewhat different inflection, one that emphasizes McTell’s uniqueness, not simply or solely his superiority. That no one can sing the blues like him: this endearingly combines the superlative and the highly individual, without having to enter competitively into the proportions of the one to the other. Perfectly judged, and determined to do justice to McTell. More, determined to see and hear justice done at last to him.
After the final refrain, there is no more to be said. Or sung. But there is more to hear, the fully instrumental that is yet an end in itself.
It was the repudiation of envy that brought the hoot owl into the picture or into the soundtrack. This, with a courteous comedy. Keats had assured his nightingale that the poet’s heartache was not caused by envy: “’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot”. Dylan’s night bird sings beautifully in its way, and its way is one with which neither Blind Willie McTell nor Dylan is in any way in competition. The owl doesn’t fuss about how big or how enthusiastic his audience is:
Well, I heard that hoot owl singing
As they were taking down the tents
The stars above the barren trees
Was his only audience
Like the rain in Lay Down Your Weary Tune, the hoot owl “asked for no applause”. Hooting, the opposite of applause, is how they drive you off the stage. The hoot owl could well be – though it is happily not – pleased with itself. But then so could the others who are good at what they do, whom we now meet:
Them charcoal gypsy maidens
Can strut their feathers well
Well, “well” is a word that had opened this verse (as it will again the final verse), and that chimes with Blind Willie McTell. The owl does well, as others do, too – but, come on, admit it,
Them charcoal gypsy maidens
Can strut their feathers well
But nobody can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell
Those others have their accomplishments – to wit the owl, and the maidens to woo – but when it comes to the blues . . . And what an accomplishment is the placing of the phrase “Can strut their feathers well”. It doesn’t forget the owl and his feathers (which it is important not to ruffle), and it brings together so much that makes up what it is to strut. There is “to brace or support by a strut or struts; to be fixed diagonally or slantwise”. (I used to hear “Construct their feathers well”.) But plainly this should then be puffed out with “to puff out” (The Oxford English Dictionary quotes “His lady looked like a frightened owl, with her locks strutted out”). Moreover, there is “to walk with an air of dignity” (this, particularly “of a peacock or other fowl”). And given Dylan’s full phrase, “Can strut their feathers well”, there is the performing art: to strut one’s stuff = to display one’s ability.95 The young Dylan strutted his stuff as Blind Boy Grunt.96 I don’t know whether there enters into this tribute to Blind Willie McTell any shade of Dylan’s ruefully remembering this. It is sure, though, that the song takes blindness seriously, tragically. The first word of Blind Willie McTell, inviting us to trust that it is not being insensitive, is “Seen”. There is a shape given to the senses throughout the song. The first verse’s opening, “Seen”, moves to the third verse’s opening, “See” – and then to the last verse as it nears its ending: “I’m gazing out the window”. The second verse brings us to our sense, the one that brings us Willie McTell and which brought him, in his blindness, so much of what fostered him: “Well, I heard”. And this is the sense of which we hear tell in the fourth verse: “I can hear them rebels yell”. The word “yell” is in a different register from the other words in the song (even from “bootlegged whiskey”), and, like a sudden yell, it bursts in on us like Tennyson’s use of the down-to-earth word “scare” in the high heavenly world of his classical poem Tithonus: “Why wilt thou ever scare me with thy tears?”
But it is the third verse, there at the centre of the song, that is moved to a celebration of the senses’ riches, even while almost all of what the senses yield is a sad business, the wages of sin, the South’s sin, though not the South’s alone:97
See them big plantations burning
Hear the cracking of the whips
Smell that sweet magnolia blooming
See the ghosts of slavery ships
I can hear them tribes a-moaning
Hear the undertaker’s bell
Nobody can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell
In this verse, the movement See / Hear is extended into See / hear / Hear, hearing being of its very nature the sense that matters most to song and to Blind Willie McTell. The stroke of genius, it strikes me, is the sudden arrival, wafting in along the way, of “Smell that sweet magnolia blooming”. The eye and the ear have been known to put on airs, too confident that they are the two senses that rule; how good that the sense of smell puts in its unexpected claim. Good, too, that the smell of burning does not overpower the sweet magnolia. It is a rich moment, snuffing the air. As Dylan put it in 2001, “There’s a secret sanctity of nature.”98 Even within tragedy the life that is nature may reassert itself. The tragedy could be that of Strange Fruit.99 Smell the sweet magnolia after the lynching:
Pastoral scene of the gallant South, the bulging eyes and the twisted mouth, Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh, and the sudden smell of burning flesh!
Strange Fruit invokes the magnolia to point a moral; Dylan, to adorn a tale, hauntingly. “See them big plantations burning”.
The fresh flesh of the magnolia, which incited the poet William Empson,100 anticipates the sudden arrival of the four lines about the “woman by the river” and “some fine young handsome man”, no tragedy now but a pastoral moment that thankfully gratifies the remaining two senses (touch and taste, the bodies and the whiskey) that we had not been sure of – a moment that is not rescinded, though it is changed, by what immediately follows, the return of tragedy: “There’s a chain gang on the highway”.
The tragedy of blindness is not lessened, it is widened, in the tradition that sees the blind poets as inspired by their suffering. There is Homer. There is Milton, who calls up as his inspiration not only Homer but three other poet-pro
phets, and who prays that through his blindness he may “see and tell / Of things invisible to mortal sight”. And, perhaps even more darkly, there is the cruelty that inflicts blindness upon birds in the belief that they will sing the better. A hideous castration for the caged bird-chorister. This is the suffering behind the lines that open a poem by Dylan Thomas:
Because the pleasure-bird whistles after the hot wires,
Shall the blind horse sing sweeter?
– a question that may have combined with a nursery rhyme101 to prompt two moments in Dylan:
This is the blind horse that leads you around
Let the bird sing, let the bird fly
(Under the Red Sky)
The Cuckoo is a pretty bird, she warbles as she flies
I’m preachin’ the Word of God
I’m puttin’ out your eyes
(High Water)
Our pity for the blind horse and for the blinded bird might serve to remind us how free of self-pity is the art of Blind Willie McTell. Dylan:
What made the real blues singers so great is that they were able to state all the problems they had; but at the same time, they were standing outside of them and could look at them. And in that way, they had them beat. What’s depressing today is that many young singers are trying to get inside the blues, forgetting that those older singers used them to get outside their troubles.102
They could look at them: true of Blind Willie McTell.
Ballads love myth, including the myth of love, the blindfolded archer Cupid. Ballads respect legends, including those of the master-bowman: Robin Hood, or (on Desolation Row) “Einstein, disguised as Robin Hood”, Einstein who had no time for Time’s Arrow. Eddington: “I shall use the phrase ‘time’s arrow’ to express this one-way property of time which has no analogue in space.”103 The maidens have their feathers; style in literature has been characterized as the feather in the arrow, not the feather in the hat.