Mike Schneider: Stirring Up the “Great Folk Scare”

You could regard “A Complete Unknown,” the hit Bob Dylan movie released on Christmas Day, as the nativity story of a great artist. It’s an enduring plot — a star is born — and its appeal depends on the star. Drawing attention to both his ambition and self-awareness, the Dylan character says as much early on when he ruminates about what it takes to be on stage.

You can be beautiful. You can be ugly. But you can’t be plain. You have to be something people can’t stop looking at, like a train wreck or car crash.

It’s easy to nod along with this, but as an astrophysicist might say — stars are born in swirls of gas and dust called molecular clouds. For Robert Zimmerman, an unknown 19-year-old from Hibbing, Minnesota, the molecular cloud was the 1960s Greenwich Village Folk Revival, and it’s hard to imagine him becoming Bob Dylan in circumstances other than the creative ferment of that time and place.

To appreciate these circumstances, it helps to step back a few decades to the 1930s. As Dave Van Ronk observed in his memoir, The Mayor of MacDougal Street, there have been “folk revivals” going back at least to Sir Walter Scott. In the 20th-century, a major European folk revival happened in a country that spells “folk” with a “V.” Some folk revivals, in other words, have been oriented toward extreme nationalism with disastrous militarist consequences. Unlike National Socialism, however, the Greenwich Village Folk Revival — termed by Van Ronk the “Great Folk Scare” — grew out of Depression-era leftist movements, a few remarkable individuals, and climate tragedy.

Greenwich Village has been a haven and den — both words apply — for artists, writers and intellectuals of many stripes and allegiances, socialist and communist, Stalinist and Trotskyite, a stew of immigrants, Irish, Italian, Eastern European and beyond, many of them Jewish, going back at least to the social-media master (pamphleteering) of the American Revolution, Tom Paine. Music has been abundantly part of Village culture, and in the 1930s — not unrelated to that decade’s depressed economy — music became, more than before, mixed-up with politics.

For many in the Village at that time, “fellow travelers” as well as members, Communist Party policy operated as existential guidelines, and until 1934 the Party’s official position, publicized in the Daily Worker, was that folk music was “complacent, melancholy, defeatist . . . intended to make the slaves endure their lot — pretty, but not the stuff for a militant proletariat to feed on.” Through a Composers Collective, co-founded by Charles Seeger (Pete’s father), party-approved music came from academy-trained modernists, among them Aaron Copland and Marc Blitzstein.

Later in his career, Copland, of course, produced great music with populist leanings, notably “Billy the Kid” and “Appalachian Spring” — which in a folk vein brought familiarity to the Shaker hymn “Simple Gifts.” Blitzstein, whose work strongly influenced Leonard Bernstein, devoted years to translating “The Threepenny Opera.” Immensely popular in 1928 Weimar Berlin, the anti-capitalist, anti-war musical by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill had more than 10,000 European performances by 1933.

Blitzstein transformed Brecht’s German — which gives voice to an assemblage of crooks, pimps and prostitutes — into street-smart American vernacular. Musically, some of the songs sound like Protestant hymns, but are revealed by their lyrics as outlaw ballads, highlighting bourgeois hypocrisy. Blitzstein’s brilliant adaptation, staged in 1954 at Theatre de Lys in the Village, ran until the end of 1961 and is often credited with igniting off-Broadway theater. When Louis Armstrong had an international hit with “Mack the Knife,” the opening song from “Threepenny,” Blitzstein — for his last few years — was no longer a starving artist.

Through Blitzstein, from Europe to the Village, another “Threepenny” song, “Pirate Jenny” profoundly affected Dylan. At the urging of his girlfriend Suze Rotolo, Dylan saw a revue of Brecht/Weill songs called “Brecht on Brecht,” which — according to Sean Wilentz — led him to the original cast album of the 1954 production, to which he listened almost obsessively. “Songs with tough language,” wrote Dylan in Chronicles. “They were erratic, unrhythmical and herky-jerky — weird visions . . . They were like folk songs in nature, but unlike folk songs too, because they were sophisticated.”

Among these, the show-stopper “Pirate Jenny” (performed by Weill’s widow, and original Berlin cast member, Lotte Lenya) shook Dylan’s notions of what a song could be. “The scrubbing lady is powerful,” he wrote, “and she’s masquerading as a nobody—she’s counting heads.” The song expresses a fantasy of social flip-flop; the lowest in social status becomes the top-most boss, with life-or-death authority over the former bosses. Dylan lingered with the lyrics and melody, and in short order, inspired by the “Pirate Jenny” chorus — “a ship, a black freighter, with a skull on its masthead, will be coming in” — he penned “When the Ship Comes In.”

A dream-like vision of social revolution, for Dylan more Biblical than Marxist — “like Pharoah’s tribe, they’ll be drownded in the tide” — the song is seasoned with surrealism: “The fishes will laugh . . . and the seagulls they’ll be smiling.” He sang it for one of the first times publicly — with Joan Baez humming along — in August 1963 at the March on Washington, the occasion of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech.”

As David Hajdu relates, after this event — looking out at about 200,000 mostly dark-skinned faces — Dylan stopped putting himself forward as a performer for the Civil Rights Movement. While he fully supported its aims, he felt uncomfortable as a white person urging Black people to act. He had, in fact, been criticized along these lines by comedian Dick Gregory, who turned his back during Dylan’s Washington performance. “It’s not that I’m pessimistic about Negroes’ rights,” said Dylan, “but the word Negro sounds foolish coming from my mouth.”

Dylan released “When the Ship Comes In” six months later on his third album, “The Times They Are A-Changin.” Peter, Paul and Mary played it in concert, with Peter’s earnest introduction: “There will come a time when there will be no more hate in the world. That time will be the hour when the ship comes in.” Others also took the song seriously. The closing line of the third verse — “the whole [wide] world is watchin” — became a chant for protesters in Grant Park, Chicago, August 1968.

* * * *

In 1934, responding to European fascism, the Communist Party shifted its previous go-it-alone stance to favor alliances with other leftist organizations in a “Popular Front,” and suddenly Marxists in the Village embraced folk music. Frequent Brecht collaborator, composer Hanns Eisler — exiled from Germany, where his work had been banned —traveled to New York City in early 1935. His influence helped spur the Party to publish the New Workers’ Song Book.

With rare exception, such as “Joe Hill,” by Composer’s Collective member Earl Robinson, such composed songs of worker solidarity (often intended for mass chorus) weren’t what most of us now hear as “folk music.” Authentic folk songs from the USA hinterlands — indeed, the idea of “authenticity” — only gradually seeped into musical life in New York City. A huge factor was the work of John and Alan Lomax.

As a professional discipline, folklore was still finding its footing in the 1930s. It had kicked off twenty years earlier with Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads. This classic compilation, by Mississippian John Lomax (with an introduction by Theodore Roosevelt) contained the first published versions of standards like “Sweet Betsy from Pike” and “Home on the Range” — songs that have long since entered America’s collective musical consciousness.

Beginning in July 1933, Lomax and his son Alan — with a 315-pound aluminum disk recorder in the trunk of their Ford — traveled around the South. They sought people who played music not infected (in their view) by the commercialized jazz, blues and swing that had developed along with radio. They toured Texas prison farms and recorded work-songs, reels, ballads and blues. At the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, they met and recorded Huddie Ledbetter, a twelve-string guitar player better known as Leadbelly.

Over the course of a prodigiously energetic career, Alan vastly extended his father’s work. He co-authored American Ballads and Folk Songs (1934), and with various collaborators, including Zora Neale Hurston — in Florida and the Bahamas —continued field recording. From 1937-42 he led (at almost no salary, dependent on grants) the Library of Congress Archive of Folk Song, which eventually held more than ten-thousand field recordings. In 1940, under Lomax’s supervision, RCA made two landmark LPs: Woody Guthrie’s Dust Bowl Ballads and Leadbelly’s The Midnight Special and Other Southern Prison Songs.

After 1942, due to a war-induced shortage of acetate, the Library of Congress discontinued folk-song collecting. Southern members of Congress, meanwhile, had begun to worry that field recording was civil-rights agitation in disguise, and post-war it resumed only sporadically. In 1950, Lomax’s name appeared — along with 150 other entertainers and journalists — in Red Channels, a pamphlet that putatively identified communist sympathizers. It was the beginning of the “blacklisting” that hindered many careers. He sailed to London that fall and spent most of the 1950s there, collecting and compiling archives of European folk traditions.

In 1952 another song collector produced a magnum opus that indelibly stamped the folk revival with his signature, even if few people knew it. Harry Smith collected 78-rpm records. He found them in antique shops, estate sales and junk lots, and eventually had gathered, reputedly, more than 20,000 of them. In particular, he collected recordings from 1927 to 1932, when for a few years — before the Depression — there were phonographs in middle-class homes and a record-buying consumer market.

Aware of himself as historian of an ”Invisible Republic,” Smith prized “hillbilly” music — the Carter Family, for instance, and less well-known others, including Clarence Ashley, Dock Boggs, Blind Willie Johnson and groups like Cannon’s Jug Stompers and Hoyt “Floyd” Ming & His Pep-Steppers. From his vast pool of recordings, Smith harvested 84 performances, organized into three “volumes” — Ballads, Social Music, and Songs — creating a fastidiously curated, transitional last blast of pre-electronic American musical culture.

Many of the songs remain familiar in folk circles, including “The Coo-Coo Bird,” “See That My Grave is Kept Clean” (which Dylan covered on his 1962 debut album), and “Frankie” (a version of “Frankie and Johnny”) by Mississippi John Hurt. In 1952 Folkways released the compilation on six LPs, titled “The Anthology of American Folk Music. ” In 1997 Smithsonian Folkways re-released the “Harry Smith Anthology,” as it’s often called, in a boxed set of six CDs, which remains available.

A few months before his death in 1991, Smith — an eccentric, irascible personality well known among Village artists and musicians — received a Chairman’s Merit Award at the Grammy ceremony. “I’m glad to say that my dreams came true,” he told the audience. “I saw America changed through music.” “The Anthology was our Bible,” said Van Ronk, speaking of the Village folk community. “We all knew every word of every song on it, including the ones we hated.” It “is probably the most significant example,” wrote New Yorker music critic Amanda Petrusich, “of how a particular collector’s preferences can shape a canon.”

Jealousy, love, lust, rage, revenge, joy — the Smith Anthology, it’s often remarked, expresses a wide range of feeling. In the first song, “Henry Lee,” the eponymous Henry declines an invitation to sleep with a woman — out of fidelity, he says, to his girlfriend in another town. The spurned woman stabs Henry to death and throws his body in a well until, she says to dead Henry, “the flesh drops from your bones.” The melody is an unassuming waltz. The performer, from a 1932 Brunswick record, is Dick Justice. (This is real.)

In 1993, in “World Gone Wrong,” the second of Dylan’s acoustic solo, return-to-roots albums — after “Good As I Been To You” — “Henry Lee” reappears as “Love Henry.” Dylan wrote a complete set of liner notes, as he hadn’t done in decades, including this for “Love Henry”:

. . . a perverse tale. Henry — modern corporate man off some foreign boat, unable to handle his “psychosis” responsible for organizing the Intelligentsia, disarming the people, an infantile sensualist — white teeth, wide smile, lotza money, kowtow to fairy queen exploiters & corrupt religious establishments, career minded, limousine double parked, imposing his will & dishonest garbage in popular magazines. he lays his head on a pillow of down & falls asleep. he shoulda known better, he must’ve had a hearing problem.

In his classic book-length essay The Old, Weird America — which could be a title for the Harry Smith Anthology — Greil Marcus explored the cultural foundations of “The Basement Tapes,” Dylan’s 1967 garage recordings with the musicians who became The Band. Placing Dylan in a lineage with Hawthorne and Melville, Marcus observes that “Smith’s Anthology is a backdrop to the basement tapes. More deeply, it is a version of them, and the basement tapes a shambling, twilight version of Smith’s Anthology.”

When Alan Lomax returned to New York in 1959, ending his transatlantic retreat from red-baiting, he produced a series of concerts featuring musicians from folk traditions. After two of these in 1961, he invited performers to his West Third Street apartment for a “song swap.” Captured on film (by Jean Ritchie’s husband George Pickow), the revelers, in addition to Lomax and Ritchie, included Roscoe Holcomb, Doc Watson, Memphis Slim, Willie Dixon, Peter LaFarge, the New Lost City Ramblers (Mike Seeger, Tom Paley, and John Cohen), and Ramblin Jack Elliott (playing Woody Guthrie’s “Talking Merchant Marine”). Restored and released on DVD in 2012, “Ballads, Blues & Bluegrass” is a 35-minute cinema-verité portrait of the Village folk-revival in its prime.

* * * *

On Palm Sunday, April 14, 1935, 22-year-old Woody Guthrie may well have thought Judgement Day had come to Pampa, Texas. A great wall of blackness extended east and west as far as anyone could see. As the “Great Dust Storm” rolled-in, it was like an unmoored mountain striding through town, blowing swirls of thick brown dust into parlors and kitchens through loose windows, doorways and cracked walls.

In Woody’s small house with his pregnant wife Mary and a few friends, a bare lightbulb glowed like a cigarette in the dark. For three hours, wrote Guthrie, a Pampan couldn’t see “a dime in his pocket, the shirt on your back, or the meal on your table, not a dadgum thing.” There had already been four summers of drought, with “dust pneumonia” becoming a common local health hazard.

From a middle-class family that had suffered great loss, Woody — who grew up more or less as an orphan — managed some small income as a sign-painter, and a few dollars playing guitar (Carter family style) with two friends — as The Corncob Trio — for occasional barn dances and house parties. He often saw migrants passing through headed west, heard about green valleys in California, and had seen “Help Wanted” handbills.

One afternoon in Spring 1937, Woody kissed Mary on the cheek, slung his guitar over his shoulder, and took off for the west coast “Garden of Eden.” Within months, he had become a celebrity for KFVD Radio in Los Angeles, half of a popular singing duo with “Lefty Lou” Crissman, a woman he’d met through an LA friend. By year-end he had a contract and salary, and sent for Mary and his two girls.

Part of his appeal was his “filosofizing.” From seeing farmers go broke and lose their homes, and his own run-ins with freight-yard security, Guthrie tended to hold governmental authority in low regard. His attitude wasn’t improved by police violence against immigrants in California. In 1939, he began writing a column for the Daily Worker, and became friends with actor Will Geer (later of TV’s “The Waltons”), an activist in migrant-worker organizing.

After about two years, Woody’s schtick had begun to show signs of wear with his LA audience. In New York, Geer was starring on Broadway and had dangled a standing invitation to Woody. By Thanksgiving, he drove Mary and the kids — now two girls and a boy — across the desert back to Pampa. Early in 1940, he hitched north and east across foggy Appalachia to the jazz-age biggest-of-big cities.

No one knew it at the time, but 1940 was going to be a cornucopia year for American folk music. That winter “God Bless America,” the Irving Berlin song, became a pop-music fixture. It seemed that every time Woody stopped for a bowl of chili and warm-up shot of whiskey, he’d hear it on the radio or jukebox. Having lived most of the previous five years never far from hunger and homelessness — his own and many he knew — it was to Woody one more narcotic Bing Crosby song telling people not to worry, have faith, everything will be fine.

By the time he got to New York and found himself in a fleabag hotel — having fairly quickly used up his welcome with Geer’s wife Herta — he noticed words running around in his head. Across the top of a sheet of paper, he scribbled “God Blessed America” and started writing verses. Out came “This land is your land, this land is my land, etc.” — six stanzas worth, each with the tag-line “God Blessed America for me.” He dated the page — February 23, 1940 — put it away and forgot about it.

Through Geer, Woody soon met Alan Lomax, and on March 3, at a “Grapes of Wrath” benefit concert for Oklahoma “progressive” organizations, Lomax for the first time heard Woody perform. It was at the Forrest Theater, where Geer —starring in an adaptation of Erskine Caldwell’s “Tobacco Road” — was on the marquee and had arranged the event:

Off in the wings, Alan Lomax snapped to attention and felt a surge of adrenaline as he realized — quickly, viscerally, no question about it — that the little man onstage was someone he’d often thought about but feared he’d been born too late to meet: the great American frontier ballad writer. [Klein, 147]

To Lomax he was “Shakespeare in overalls.” Not only was Woody bursting with simple but brilliant politically-edged songs, he also drew roars of laughter as a jokester, astonished by New York City. “Trains were so crowded today, you couldn’t even fall down. I had to change stations twice, and both times I came out with a different pair of shoes on.”

Lomax that night invited Woody to visit his house in Arlington, Virginia. That same March evening, Woody also met 20-year-old Pete Seeger, whom Geer knew via leftist-theater circles and invited to the “Grapes of Wrath” benefit. With Woody at Lomax’s house, the tall, thin, shy Harvard drop-out — who then lived in Washington with his stepmother, composer Ruth Crawford Seeger — became an almost permanent presence. Although he’d been around folk music most of his life, Pete had just begun — at Lomax’s encouragement — to teach himself five-string banjo. “He just looked like a banjo,” said Lomax.

There were parties and notable guests. Put-off by Woody’s lefty-folksy politics and, from his point-of-view, poor manners, Alan’s father John, nevertheless, granted that no one could sing his beloved cowboy songs better than Woody. For Alan, the point of Woody’s visit was to record. In three sessions at a Department of the Interior studio, Woody talked, via interview with Lomax, about his songs and background, and sang some of his classics, including “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You” and “Pretty Boy Floyd.” Re-released on CDs by Rounder Records in 1988, the Library of Congress sessions remain available.

With Woody back in New York a few months later, Lomax persuaded RCA Victor that his songs held commercial potential — which resulted in “The Dust Bowl Ballads,” eleven cuts on a three-disc set of 78s. Part of the pitch was to “capitalize” on the popularity of the Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck’s novel and the John Ford movie. On both sides of one disc — to the tune of the outlaw ballad “John Hardy”— RCA placed Woody’s fresh 17-verse, musical plot-summary, “The Ballad of Tom Joad.”

As Seeger told the story, he was visiting a friend in the Village when Guthrie asked if he knew where to find a typewriter. “Victor wants me to do a whole album of Dust Bowl songs, and they say they want one about Tom Joad . . . .” Seeger’s friend had a typewriter, and Woody brought a half-gallon jug of wine.

He would stand up every few seconds and test out a verse on his guitar and sit down and type some more. . . . In the morning we found Woody curled up on the floor under the table; the half gallon of wine was almost empty and the completed ballad was sitting near the typewriter. [Klein, 164].

“Seen the pitcher last night,” wrote Woody in People’s World, “‘Grapes of Wrath,’ best cussed pitcher I ever seen.” Forty-five years later, Bruce Springsteen echoed Woody’s ballad with “The Ghost of Tom Joad.”

With a few hundred dollars in his pocket from recording, and a new Plymouth, Woody headed out to visit Mary and the kids in Pampa. On the way, he stopped in Washington to lend a hand on a Lomax project. Seeger was helping his stepmother transcribe Lomax field-recordings.

When Woody continued to Pampa, he had Pete as a road-trip companion. Although drinker, talker, ladies-man Woody and his younger vice-free pal were chasms apart in personality and background, they shared passions for folk-music and communism and, no doubt, had many things to talk about. Visiting friends in Oklahoma City along the way, Woody wrote “Union Maid,” which soon became his most popular organizing song.

Arriving in Pampa, Seeger didn’t expect a Guthrie mansion, but was surprised, nevertheless, to see a shotgun shack in a neighborhood that looked “like a shantytown.” After a few days and some music sessions with Woody and a few of his old friends, he departed to hitch north and eventually back to New York City.

* * * *

By summer 1941, the Almanac Singers, the world’s first urban folk-singing group (as far as anyone knows), had formed in New York City — originally Seeger, Lee Hays, Millard Lampell and, briefly, Bess Lomax (Alan’s sister). Riding a cattle car from Seattle, where he’d been finishing his “Columbia River Ballads,” Guthrie soon joined them.

That July, the four Almanacs — with Guthrie driving a spacious Buick — embarked on a city-hopping road-trip to San Francisco. At stops along the way, they played union rallies and house parties. Guthrie was in the bloom of his activism — writing his “Woody Sez” column for the Daily Worker, and they became a traveling factory of songs, often topical, some written down, many not.

At a concert for steelworkers in Pittsburgh, for instance, Guthrie “wrote” — i.e., spontaneously ad-libbed, to the tune of the folk-song “Crawdad” — “Pittsburgh Town”:

Pittsburgh town is a smoky ol’ town, Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh town is a smoky ol’ town, Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh town is a smoky ol’ town
Solid iron from McKeesport down
Pittsburgh, Lord God, Pittsburgh

Subsequent verses lead with “Well what did Jones and Laughlin steal?” and “All I do is cough and choke in Pittsburgh, From the iron filings and the sulphur smoke.”

By September, having separately made their way back to New York City, the singers moved into “Almanac House,” near the corner of Tenth Street and Greenwich Avenue, which they operated as a “communal” living space. Seeger organized Sunday afternoon “hootenannies” — a word the Almanacs had learned in Seattle. Over the course of a few years, residents included Leadbelly, Cisco Houston, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Will Geer and Burl Ives.

By that fall, with a national reputation from touring, the Almanacs were in demand, playing as many as six gigs a day around the city. New songs included “The Sinking of the Reuben James,” memorializing the first U.S. Navy ship lost to a Nazi torpedo in World War II —along with 115 lives.

Soon, with a growing anti-Axis repertoire, they were on network radio and, through their agent, scored an audition at the Rainbow Room, the nightclub on top of Rockefeller Center. For their second number, they swung into “New York City,” an improvisational song, with Woody and Lampell trading verses about the Rockefellers: “In the Rainbow Room, soup’s on the boil/ They toss their salad with Standard Oil . . . .” Despite having tried, they failed to offend the producers, and their commercial success grew — until word got out, via the New York World-Telegram, that the Almanacs “have long been the favorite balladeers of the Communists . . . .”

When the Army drafted 22-year-old Seeger in 1942, the Almanacs more or less evaporated. After training as an airplane mechanic, he served most of the war as an “Entertainment Specialist,” singing and playing banjo for troops in the South Pacific.

Guthrie, despite by then having four children, was also drafted, by a local board unfriendly, to say the least, to his communist involvements. In part to avoid the Army, he shipped out in the merchant marine — with his pal and sometime singing partner Cisco Houston and a friend, Jim Longhi (who wrote a book about their time as shipmates). Working as “mess boys,” they played poker and folk-songs on three trans-Atlantic voyages, surviving a torpedo near Sicily and a mine in the North Atlantic.

In 1943, Guthrie wrote “Talking Hitler’s Head Off Blues,” which — along with a sticker he saw affixed by factory-workers to their machine tools — led him to put the famous “THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS” sign on his guitar. In April 1944, during recording sessions with Moe Asch of Folkways Records, Woody re-discovered the song he had written four years earlier. He changed the tag-line to “This land was made for you and me,” and the title to “This Land Is My Land.”

At the time Asch didn’t have money to release the remarkable music he had recorded, although later said he realized “This Land . . .” was a very important song. Eventually, in 1951 Folkways let it out into the world as the first track on “Songs to Grow On, Vol. 3: This Land is My Land: American Work Songs.” Even then, a question remained about the title — “. . . My Land,” as on the cover, or “. . . Your Land,” as on the track listing?

With this and other ambiguities — such as verses left out of most recordings and songbooks — it’s easy to see why there would be some cultural nervousness:

As I went walking, I saw a sign there,
And on the sign it said “No Trespassing.”
But on the other side it didn’t say nothing,
That side was made for you and me.

In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?

McCarthy-era concerns, with little doubt, led Asch and others to be cautious about foregrounding the socialist outlook underlying Woody’s seemingly robust patriotism.

Over time, the song has settled into being “This Land is Your Land” — spoken of often as an alternative national anthem. It’s the one song — out of thousands he penned as lyrics, and a few hundred recorded — most associated with Woody Guthrie, as a near-legendary figure of the emergent folk culture of mid-twentieth century America, an historical “text” of both the Dust Bowl and Great Depression. In June 2013, the Kennedy Center celebrated his 100th birthday with a live PBS Broadcast and a full stage of celebrity singers. To close out the show, Ramblin Jack Elliott, at 80-plus years, Jackson Browne and Judy Collins led the audience in “This Land Is Your Land.”

After the war, Seeger co-founded “People’s Songs,” an organization dedicated to applying folk music to social activism. He performed on his own for a while, then joined The Weavers, whose version of “Goodnight, Irene,” by Leadbelly, was, for thirteen weeks in 1950, the best-selling record in America.

Production of Woody’s legacy started, arguably, even before his death in 1967, when in March 1956 his colleagues staged a benefit concert at New York’s Pythian Hall. The purpose was to raise money for Woody’s family while he was hospitalized with Huntington’s Disease. “Years later,” says Klein [432], “Seeger and others would look back on the evening as an important moment in the rebirth of the folk music revival.”

* * * *

By 2001, for Love and Theft, his first album of the new millennium — released on September 11 — Bob Dylan circled back to the American South, which he knows, in part, from Lomax field recordings. “Mississippi” from that album, probably his most covered post-millennial song, builds around its refrain: “Only one thing I did wrong/ I stayed in Mississippi a day too long.”

In context with the verses, it refers to the 1927 Mississippi flood. “My clothes are wet, tight on my skin/ Not as tight as the corner that I painted myself in.” This major tragedy took thousands of mostly African-American lives and led to establishment, under Herbert Hoover, of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

With attention to the historical reference, in a song that seems to linger at the precipice of wherever we go (so the lyric implies) when we’re done here, we might ask — Who’s Rosie? “I was thinkin’ about the things that Rosie said/ I was dreaming I was sleeping in Rosie’s bed.”

Because we’re in Mississippi of the 1920s, it’s easy to think of her as the Rosie of “Rosie,” a prison work-song Lomax recorded in 1948, inside Parchman Farm, a Mississippi State penitentiary. “Be my woman, gal I’ll (Be your man!)” — the inmates sing, call and response, imploring a woman to remain faithful and to be waiting at the prison gate. “Stick to the promise, gal, that (You made me!)”

Powerful music from a rarified, vivid corner of American history, far from anything we’ll hear on radio, or likely to find on record — thanks to Lomax (and no small thanks to the Internet), it’s there for us to hear.

“A true believer in the religion of folk” — wrote Mike Marqusee, reviewing Dylan’s Chronicles. Dylan has no doubt been called worse. The Greenwich Village revival was his call to the altar. In structure and style, Dylan’s memoir recalls Guthrie’s Bound for Glory, a memoir in the form of a novel, or vice-versa. “I went though it from cover to cover like a hurricane,” says Dylan of his encounter with Guthrie’s book, “totally focused on every word, and the book sang out to me like the radio.”

For Dylan, however, unlike Guthrie’s sense of open skies and big country, Chronicles is bound by smoky, jumbled interiors. Where Bound for Glory leads to Guthrie’s discovery of his vocation as a people’s singer, Chronicles traces a more equivocal journey, involving loss as well as discovery.

“As for what time it was,” wrote Dylan, “it was always just beginning to be daylight . . . .” There’s nothing easy-going about the folk songs of the Greenwich Village revival, not the ones Dylan sang — a man-killing woman, catastrophic floods, a man driven insane by love — songs that taught him there’s nothing new on Earth. “They weren’t friendly or ripe with mellowness. They didn’t come gently to the shore.”

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Mike Schneider, an award-winning poet and essay-writer, has three times taught his Bob Dylan course for the Osher Lifelong Learning Program at Carnegie Mellon University. His poetry collection, Spring Mills, came out in 2023. His fourth chapbook, “Many Hats,” will appear in May.

Sources Consulted:

Cocks, Jay and James Mangold, Screenplay of A Complete Unknown, https://deadline.com/2025/01/a-complete-unknown-script-read-the-screenplay-bob-dylan-movie-1236245828/

Dylan, Bob, Chronicles (Simon & Schuster: NYC, 2004).

Gordon, Eric, Mark the Music: The Life and Work of Marc Blitzstein (iUniverse: Bloomington, Indiana, 2000).

Guthrie, Woody, Bound for Glory (Signet: NYC, 1970).

Guthrie, Woody, House of Earth, ed. Brinkley & Depp (Harper Collins: NYC, 2013).

Hajdu, David, Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña, and Richard Fariña (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: NYC, 2001).

Klein, Joe, Woody Guthrie: A Life (Random House: NYC, 1980). (great source)

Lenya, Lotte, “Pirate Jenny,” song by Brecht/Weill, trans. Marc Blitzstein, 1966 TV [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZecKsm0Mfw].

Lomax, Alan, “Ballads, Blues & Bluegrass,” film, restored and released on DVD by John Bishop, (Media Generation, Portland, Oregon: 2012).

Longhi, Jim, Woody, Cisco & Me: Seamen Three in the Merchant Marine (University of Illinois Press: Urbana & Chicago, 1997).

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Marqusee, Mike, “Maximum Bob,” The Guardian (October, 15, 2004).

Petrusich, Amanda, “Harry Smith’s Musical Catalogue of Human Experience,” The New Yorker, online, (September 28, 2020). in print as “Inventing the Tradition,” (October 5, 2020).

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Van Ronk, Dave, The Mayor of MacDougal Street: A Memoir, with Elijah Wald (Da Capo Press: Cambridge, Mass., 2006).

Wald, Elijah, lecture, “Dylan Goes Electric!: Music, Myth, and History,” American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, March 16, 2016.

Wald, Elijah, Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties (Harper Collins: NYC, 2015).

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