The Centennial Of Pete Seeger’s Birthday (1919-2014)- For Bob Dylan-Tracing The Roots Of The Roots- The Music That Influenced Bob Dylan

Click On Title To Link To YouTube's Film Clip Of Mountain Music Performer Roscoe Holcomb Doing "John Henry". You want the roots. You want what influenced Dylan. Hell, you might as well start here.

DVD Review

Down The Tracks: The Music That Influenced Bob Dylan, White Eagle Productions, 2008

Okay, okay I have gone on and one over the past year or so about the influence of Bob Dylan’s music (and lyrics) on me, and on my generation, the Generation of ’68. But, please, don’t blame me. Blame Bob. After all he could very easily have gone into retirement and enjoyed the fallout from his youthful fame and impressed one and all at his local AARP chapter. But, no, he had to go out on the road continuously, seemingly forever, keeping his name and music front and center. Moreover, the son of a gun has done more reinventions of himself than one could shake a stick at (folk troubadour, symbolic poet in the manner of Rimbaud and Verlaine, heavy metal rocker, blues man, etc.) So, WE are left with forty or so years of work to go through to try to sort it out. In short, can I (or anyone else) help it if he is restless and acts, well, like a rolling stone?

All of this is by way of introduction to a recent (2008) very worthwhile addition to the immense commentary on Bob Dylan’s work, “Down The Tracks: The Music That Influenced Bob Dylan”. Those influences form the stated central premise of this little documentary, filled with many, many knowledgeable “talking heads” that have, apparently, gotten far more hooked on the "meaning” of Dylan than is healthy. That is, however, a separate question for another day.

Here the commentators are full of information about the recording artists, poets, politicos, and other cultural figures that one way or another influenced Bob Dylan’s work at various periods (mainly the youthful parts) of his life. I, nevertheless, have a sneaking suspension that Brother Dylan is merely a foil for a larger project under the following rubric- Bob Dylan as the vital link, the transmission belt, in the chain of the folk tradition going back over the past century or more up to the present.

In aid of that premise the producers of this documentary have brought in seemingly every big and little contributor to what is known as the “American Songbook”, excluding, incorrectly I believe, Tin Pan Alley. Those who have followed the reviews in this space will not be surprised by the names of the performers who influenced Dylan. They form a virtual who’s who of those who influenced the Generation of ’68 as we tried to sort out what was genuine in the American musical tradition and what was merely pabulum. Thus, Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Pete Seeger and Josh White are given ample time, especially the folk troubadour Woody Guthrie, a personal idol of Dylan’s on his way up.

Additionally, the pantheon of country blues artists ‘rediscovered’ during the folk revival of the early 1960’s are well represented by Mississippi John Hurt (his material, along with other country blues artists like Skip James, has been covered by Dylan in his early and late periods). A decent amount of space is given to the influence of the "beats" from the 1950's (his growing up period) not so much for the music as for the sensibility. Not so well known, are the country and western influences which, if one thought about it, seem natural for a ‘country boy’ like Dylan growing up in Hibbing, Minnesota. Number one here, and not by accident, is Hank Williams a similarly, at times, dark lyricist. Less apparent is mention of the influence of The Carter Family and Jimmy Rodgers from the white rural and mountain country scene.

Finally, the producers here have not only gotten some very knowledgeable commentators to give their take on Dylan (I especially note Tom Paley from the original New Lost City Ramblers, a fountain of information about the New York folk scene as it developed prior to Dylan's splashy entrance) but have buttressed their case for Dylan’s role as the transmission belt for the traditional folk culture by having younger performers play not his music but the music that influenced him (a standout here is a male-female guitar-banjo couple playing the old classic “Banks Of The Ohio”). Nice touch.

Song to Woody Lyrics

I'm out here a thousand miles from my home
Walkin' a road other men have gone down
I'm seein' your world of people and things
Hear paupers and peasants and princes and kings.

Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song
'Bout a funny old world that's a-comin' along
Seems sick and it's hungry, it's tired and it's torn
It looks like it's a-dyin' and it's hardly been born.

Hey, Woody Guthrie, but I know that you know
All the things I'm a-sayin', and many times more
I'm a-singin' every song, but I can't sing enough
Cause there's not many men done the things that you done.

Here's to Cisco and Sonny and Leadbelly, too
And to all the good people that traveled with you
Here's to the hearts and the hands of the men
That come with the dust and are gone with the wind

I'm a-leavin' tomorrow, but I could leave today
Somewhere down the road someday
The very last thing that I'd want to do
Is to say I'd been hittin' some hard travelin' too.

Once Again Haunted By The Question Of Questions-Who Represented The “Voice” Of The Generation Of ’68 When The Deal Went Down-And No It Was Not One Richard Millstone, Oops, Milhous Nixon

By Seth Garth

I have been haunted recently by various references to events in the early 1960s brought to mind by either seeing or hearing those references. First came one out of the blue when I was in Washington, D.C. on other business and I popped in as is my wont to the National Gallery of Art to get an “art bump” after fighting the dearies at the tail-end of the conference that I was attending. I usually enter on the 7^th Street entrance to see what they have new on display on the Ground Floor exhibition areas. This time there was a small exhibit concerning the victims of Birmingham Sunday, 1963 the murder by bombing of a well-known black freedom church in that town and the death of four innocent young black girls and injuries to others. The show itself was a “what if” by a photographer who presented photos of what those young people might have looked like had they not had their precious lives stolen from them by some racist KKK-drenched bastards who never really did get the justice they deserved. The catch here, the impact on me, was these murders and another very disturbing viewing on television at the time, in black and white, of the Birmingham police unleashing dogs, firing water hoses and using the ubiquitous police billy-clubs to beat down on peaceful mostly black youth protesting against the pervasive Mister James Crow system which deprived them of their civil rights.

Those events galvanized me into action from seemingly out of nowhere. At the time I was in high school, in an all-white high school in my growing up town of North Adamsville south of Boston. (That “all white” no mistake despite the nearness to urban Boston since a recent look at the yearbook for my class showed exactly zero blacks out of a class of 515. The nearest we got to a black person was a young immigrant from Lebanon who was a Christian though and was not particularly dark. She, to my surprise, had been a cheer-leader and well-liked). I should also confess, for those who don’t know not having read about a dozen articles  I have done over the past few years in this space, that my “corner boys,” the Irish mostly with a sprinkling of Italians reflecting the two major ethic groups in the town I hung around with then never could figure out why I was so concerned about black people down South when we were living hand to mouth up North. (The vagaries of time have softened some things among them for example nobody uses the “n” word which needs no explanation which was the “term of art” in reference to black people then to not prettify what this crowd was about.)

In many ways I think I only survived by the good graces of Scribe who everybody deferred to on social matters. Not for any heroic purpose but because Scribe was the key to intelligence about what girls were interested in what guys, who was “going” steady, etc. a human grapevine who nobody crossed without suffering exile. What was “heroic” if that can be used in this context was that as a result of those Birmingham images back then I travelled over to the NAACP office on Massachusetts Avenue in Boston to offer my meager services in the civil rights struggle and headed south to deadly North Carolina one summer on a voting drive. I was scared but that was that. My guys never knew that was where I went until many years later long after we had all gotten a better gripe via the U.S. Army and other situations on the question of race and were amazed that I had done that.         

The other recent occurrence that has added fuel to the fire was a segment on NPR’s Morning Edition where they deal with aspects of what amounts to the American Songbook. The segment dealt with the generational influence of folk-singer songwriter Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’ as an anthem for our generation (and its revival of late in newer social movements like the kids getting serious about gun control). No question for those who came of political age early in the 1960s before all hell broke loose this was a definitive summing up song for those of us who were seeking what Bobby Kennedy would later quoting a line of poetry from Alfred Lord Tennyson call “seeking a newer world.” In one song was summed up what we thought about obtuse indifferent authority figures, the status quo, our clueless parents, the social struggles that were defining us and a certain hurried-ness to get to wherever we thought we were going.

I mentioned in that previous commentary that given his subsequent trajectory while Bob Dylan may have wanted to be the reincarnation Plus of Woody Guthrie (which by his long life he can rightly claim) whether he wanted to be, could be, the voice of the Generation of ’68 was problematic. What drove me, is driving me a little crazy is who or what some fifty plus years after all the explosions represented the best of what we had started out to achieve (and were essentially militarily defeated by the ensuing reaction before we could achieve most of it) in those lonely high school halls and college dormitories staying up late at night worrying about the world and our place in the sun.

For a long time, probably far longer than was sensible I believed that it was somebody like Jim Morrison, shaman-like leader of the Doors, who came out of the West Coast winds and headed to our heads in the East. Not Dylan, although he was harbinger of what was to come later in the decade as rock reassembled itself in new garb after some vanilla music hiatus but somebody who embodied the new sensibility that Dylan had unleashed. The real nut though was that I, and not me alone, and not my communal brethren alone either, was the idea that we possessed again probably way past it use by date was that “music was the revolution” by that meaning nothing but the general lifestyle changes through the decade so that the combination of “dropping out” of nine to five society, dope in its many manifestations, kindnesses, good thought and the rapidly evolving music would carry us over the finish line. Guys like Josh Breslin and the late Pete Markin, hard political guys as well as rabid music lovers and dopers, used to laugh at me when I even mentioned that I was held in that sway especially when ebb tide of the counter-cultural movement hit in Nixon times and the bastinado was as likely to be our home as the new Garden. Still Jim Morrison as the “new man” (new human in today speak) made a lot of sense to me although when he fell down like many others to the lure of the dope I started reappraising some of my ideas -worried about that bastinado fate.  

So I’ll be damned right now if I could tell you that we had such a voice, and maybe that was the problem, or a problem which has left us some fifty years later without a good answer. Which only means for others to chime in with their thoughts on this matter.