Sat. February 3rd & Sat. February 10th, 2007 This Stuff Sounds Like Bob Dylan! Songs the Inspired Bob Dylan Show Blog:
Blurb For the Show: Eli's Comments: These are songs that Dylan has heard and then used the melody, the lyrics or parts of both to create his own songs. In this way he has taken the older forms of music that he was exposed to and changed the feeling to suit himself and his contemporary audience. Bob Dylan takes various songs and forms of music and "Bob-Dylanifies" them. Bob Dylan is one of the most successful popular assimilators and remakers of American folk/vernacular music from his generation- and his generation was a kind of pioneer generation. The development of music in the last 80-100 years has been very rapid so its hard to say where things begin, but the 60's was a watershed era and Dylan was there from the very early stages with a fresh and compelling approach. Dylan achieved a powerful mix of forces and an alchemy which is in many ways very hard to dissect. What's in his sauce?! We hope this show offers some perspective on that and gives people some traction. However, as great as it is to become aware of Bob Dylan's direct sources, its his talent and ability to combine them, creating a whole greater than the sum of its parts, that is truly inspiring.
**If you know of any tracks that directly relate to a Bob Dylan song and that we missed on these programs, please email me that information at DownHomeRadio@hotmail.com . Thanks.
Tracks played on the 1st hour of this show: A= Dylan Song, B=prototype source recording 1. A. Hard Times In New York Town – Bob Dylan, “The Bootleg Series vol. 1-3” 3. A. Talkin’ New York- Bob Dylan, “Bob Dylan” 5. A. Paths of Victory- Bob Dylan, “The Bootleg Series vol. 1-3” 7. A. I Shall Be Free- Bob Dylan, “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” 9. CIA Dope Calypso with spoken introduction about Dylan’s advice on using old songs as templates for your own ideas. – Allen Ginsberg, “New York Blues: Rags, Ballads and Harmonium Songs” (Download the liner notes and read- turns out Ginsberg was listening to Henrietta's stuff on WNYC when he was a kid!) 10. A. Farewell, Angelina- – Bob Dylan, “The Bootleg Series vol. 1-3” 12. B. The Bonny Ship the Diamond- A.L. Lloyd, “Leviathan” 14. A. A Hard Rain’s A-gonna Fall- Bob Dylan, “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” 16. B. Pastures of Plenty- Woody Guthrie, “Classic Folk Music from Smithsonian Folkways”
- Then at the end I played a mix up of Dylan’s own Maggie’s Farm and Mike Seeger playing a Dock Boggsesque banjo version of it on the album “Retrograss.” After that I play a bit of Muddy Waters’ version of “Rolling and Tumbling” and then the beginning and end of Bob Dylan’s version of “Rolling and Tumbling “from his new album “Modern Times.” All the spoken interjections by Bob Dylan are taken from a recording of Dylan appearing on Cynthia Gooding’s radio show “Folk Singer’s Choice” on WBAI in New York in 1962.
Bob Dylan claims authorship of the old song “Rolling and Tumbling” on his new album “Modern Times.” However it should be noted that apart from the first verse as far as I know all the lyrics are his own. You can’t copyright a title and people have been claiming authorship of slightly changed old folk songs for years, forever, so why not Bob Dylan now? I think its perfectly fine, and no one suffers for it in any case. Plus our whole system of intellectually property rights, authorship, royalties, etc. is completely screwed up anyway. But I won’t even get started on that. Read Mat Callahan’s book “The Trouble with Music” for a discussion of that. On the other hand, it seems like Dylan's flagrantly claiming authorship of "Rolling and Tumbling" is a somewhat deliberate attempt to stir up the pot on this issue.
Tracks played on the 2nd hour of this show: A= Dylan Song, B=prototype source recording 1. A. With God On Our Side- Bob Dylan, Time’s They Are A-Changin’ 3. Baby How Long- Howlin’ Wolf, Moanin’ In The Moonlight (This track has a very similar sound to Dylan’s own mid 60’s electric sound. I’m sure that is due to Dylan and his sidemen at the time being inspired by and emulating Howlin’ Wolf and other Chicago blues musicians.) 4. A. Ain’t No More Cain (Go Down Old Hannah) – Bob Dylan, The Gaslight Tapes 1962 8. A. Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest- Bob Dylan, John Wesley 11. B. Joe Hill- Earl Robinson, Songs for Political Action 12. A. Two Soldiers- Bob Dylan, World Gone Wrong 14. A. Sugar Baby- Bob Dylan, Love and Theft 17. Pirate Jenny- Nina Simone, Best Of According to Dylan’s autobiography, put in simple terms he was most inspired by the combination of “[Robert] Johnson’s dark night of the soul and Woody [Guthrie]’s hopped-up union meeting sermons and the ‘Pirate Jenny’ framework.” P. 288, “Chronicles, vol.1” by Bob Dylan . Clearly as demonstrated by this show he was inspired often times directly by many other sources. But I think that that is an interesting and concise way to state the influences at the core of his development. It seems like Dylan has been real into Gene Austin lately (and many other things as well I’m sure). In fact he’s getting to be rather like Gene Austin in a Bob Dylanified way. He’s taking his music into the same sort of folkloric country jazz territory that Austin did back in the 1920’s. When I was a clerk at a record store, Down Home Music, in El Cerrito, CA in 2005, Greil Marcus stopped in and he was the one who told me about Austin and the Lonesome Road song. Thanks Greil. Also thanks to my co-host Steve Strohmeier who discovered the connections between a bunch of these songs. And also thanks go to Nathan Salsburg for sending me the Luke the Drifter track.
The chorus of the Dylan song “Mississippi” from Love & Theft is taken directly from a Mississippi prison song collected by Alan Lomax at the Parchman State Penitentary in Mississippi. (The Land Where The Blues Began, by Alan Lomax, ch. 6, p. 256) To see a film version of Lomax's book Click Here - You can watch it for free any time, on your computer courtesy the amazing website, Folkstreams.net
Some other songs that didn’t make it onto the show: It Makes A Long Time Man Feel Bad- Kelly Pace, Alan Lomax, Field Recordings - Vol 2 - NC, SC, Georgia, Tenn, Arkansas (1926-43) Meet Me By The Moonlight Alone- The Carter Family, In The Shadow Of Clinch Mountain, Disc 7 I Cried For You- Gene Austin, Voice Of The Southland Also, Bob Malenky suggested to me that the song “Betty and Dupree” particularly Brownie McGhee’s version, might be the template for “She Belongs to Me.” They have the same chords and structure and a similar kind of melody.
Links for this episode: Harry Smith Archives - Website for the artist, recordist and record collector who compiled the Folkways Anthology of American Folk Music back in 1952 Smithsonian Global Sound - You can here a lot of great music at this site, and buy it right there if you wanna hear the whole track. If you want to know more about the music we played today on the show that Dylan was inspired by this is a great place to start. BobDylanRoots.com - An ok site, not very well organized and many of the links on it don't work. But worth checking out. Henry Timrod- "The Poet Laureate of the Confederacy." In September 2006 an article for The New York Times noted similarities between Bob Dylan's lyrics in the album, "Modern Times" and the poetry of Timrod. A wider debate developed in The Times as to the nature of "borrowing" within the folk tradition and in literature. Read the NY Time article. Love & Theft: Black Face Minstrelsy and the American Working Class- Book by Eric Lott with the same title as Dylan's record. Annotated Love & Theft website - This is a really cool website telling all about Dylan's sources on L & T. Dylan Blog- This links to an interesting exchange on a Dylan blog The Annotated Bob Dylan - This site has a lot of material, maybe more than one wants to know, but there's some good stuff in here. Arthur Rimbaud - French poet that Dylan liked. List of Bob Dylan Related Internet Sites - Fan sites, other stuff, etc.
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