Although he is often referred to as a folk musician, Bob Dylan's relationship to the folk tradition has been less that harmonious. Although the traditional tunes of the American musical landscape have influenced his work for decades, he and the scene have frequently chafed against each other. During the mid-1960s, for example, Dylan was decried for his entry into the world of rock music and his abandonement of purely acoustic instrumentation. An article from Antoni E. Gollan is representative of the attitude toward the new Dylan:
Dylan today is accompanied on records and in concert by a fiercely rhythmic rock band and plays electric guitar himself, anathema to many folk purists. He was booed at the Newport Folk Festival last year, but has decided to play the Festival again this year. His "folk-rock" records are bought in volume by the teenage screamies whose tastes are huckster-dictated and shallow. ("I just want to get along," said Dylan a few years ago. "If I had a lot of money, what would I do?") (638).The folk scene's reaction to Bob Dylan's changing work is well-documented, so I won't spend an article recapitulating what is already known. Instead, I shall try to tackle the question of whether Bob Dylan properly fit into the folk tradition to begin with. To do so, I shall first identify some relevant traits of folk music, so that we may have a point of comparison. Then I will look at his first album, titled Bob Dylan, and see whether it bears the qualities of folk music, is indicative of Dylan's lack of fidelity to the tradition, or a combination of both.
Traits of Folk Music
Defining folk music is an endeavour outside the scope of this article, but some relevant characteristics of the folk music tradition should be outlined. A loose definition of folk music would be "the music of the people", but what is meant by this? Part of this definition refers to the manner in which the folk song is made and then transmitted though the population. In the folk tradition, according to Zhou Xizheng, a tune "is created by the masses together and spread in the masses as well" (73). It would not be unfair, then, to say that the folk song is a community effort, albeit an unconscious one.
At first, it may be difficult to see how the masses may create a work, as opposed to a single artist or even a defined collective. How exactly does an abstract group, the "masses", create a song? To illustrate how this can be done, John Tasker Howard, Jr. gives the composition of the ballad as an example: "One villager composes the first stanza, his neighbor adds another, and when the rest of the community has had its share the ballad is a lengthy affair" (452).
This suggests that the folk song is by nature a collaborative process. Even if one supposes that John wrote and composed a ballad on his own, when he plays and teaches it to his neighbor, Peter may added some new verses or change the order. And his friends may rewrite the lyrics altogether, keeping only the tune, until only a vague sense of the original concept remains, and the identity of the original author becomes unclear. What is clear, though, is that the folk song is a living beast, passed down from generation to generation is various forms.
Howard, Jr. suggests that there is another essential aspect of folk music. Not only is folk music created by the people, but is about the people as well; they express the emotions and describe the condition of the group as a whole. As he puts it:
We should bear in mind that the songs that come into being at the Negro camp meeting, the songs of the Russian peasant, yes, even the satirical songs of the creoles, are a vital expression of the temper of the people that gave them birth. Such songs are a part of these peoples' existence, and it is this quality that makes them folk music; they are of the folk. (452)This trait would suggest that songs which are specifically about the condition of one person should not be considered folk music, as they do not express the condition of the group as a whole. This contention is overly strict. What does one make of the love song, for example? Many are undeniably personal in origin, yet they remain applicable to society at large. More fair to say is that a folk song must be relatable, that is, the author cannot be the only person for whom it can have meaning.
From this brief discussion, we can derive three core traits of folk music to apply to Dylan's music:
- Folk music transmitted on a person-to-person level.
- Folk music is flexible: elements may be changed, or even repurposed for other songs.
- Folk music aims at describing universal experiences of the group, whether social, political or emotional.
Although he was born in Minnesota, Bob Dylan made his way to New York City, a central folk revival hotspot, in the early 1960s. After some initial struggles, he signed with Columbia records and began his career as a recording artist. Bob Dylan's first album, Bob Dylan, was recorded in last 1961 and released in March of the following year. Virtually no one took notice then, and it remains fairly obscure when considered alongside his subsequent works. Nevertheless, Bob Dylan is perhaps the Bob Dylan album which is most strongly tied to the folk music tradition.
The most obvious point in favor of this claim is that, despite his renown as a lyricist, Dylan only wrote two songs on the album: "Talkin' New York" and "Song to Woody". The other ten songs are either traditional folk tunes or covers of songs with known writers. By putting these songs on a commercially released record, Dylan can engage in both the reinterpretation of the past's culture and the process of spreading knowledge of the people's culture to a wider audience.
However, the question remains, how well does Bob Dylan adhere to the three characteristics of folk music laid out above? Although not every song on the record observes all three traits, the album as a whole exhibits them all.
Ordinarily, the first trait, person-to-person transmission, would be quite difficult to demonstrate. Perhaps a diary entry might mention learning a song from someone else, but that is information not ordinarily available. However, there is one instance on Bob Dylan where the reality of person-to-person transmission is explicitly stated. Dylan introduces the song "Baby, Let Me Follow You Down" by saying, "I first heard this song from Rick [Eric] von Schmidt. He lives in Cambridge. Rick's a blues guitar player. I met him one day in the green pastures of Harvard University."
With regards to the second trait, flexibility, I would like to highlight two songs: "Song to Woody" and "Highway 51". "Song to Woody", as its title might suggest, is a tribute to American folk musician Woody Guthrie. Appropriately, the tune which Dylan uses is often linked a Guthrie composition, "1913 Massacre." Repurposing the music of his idol for a tribute is logical extension of folk music; it reinterprets the past for the purposes of the present. You can listen for yourself; you will find that the two tracks are remarkably similar.
The second instance of flexibility is more speculative on my part, but it would suggest that the flexibility in folk music does not imply an attempt to erase the past culture in favor of the present. One of the covers on Bob Dylan is of Curtis Jones' "Highway 51". Upon first listening to Bob Dylan's rendition, my first thought was that it sounded similar in both tune and tempo to another Dylan song from 1965: "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)". If there is in fact a link between the two, it demonstrates that the folk singer may both straightforwardly and obliquely acknowledge past music.
The third trait, communal relatability, is perhaps the most easily observed aspect of the folk on Bob Dylan. The most common subject matter on the record is perhaps the sole universal aspect of human existence: death. Songs such "In My Time of Dyin'", "Fixin' to Die" and "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean" deal with the matter right in there title, and others that aren't specifically about death certainly touch on it. For example, in "Gospel Plow", Dylan sings, "Mary, Margaret, Luke and John / All them prophets are dead and gone," then subsequently contemplates heaven.
Even the love songs on Bob Dylan, which as I mentioned are somewhat problematic for folk music, are universal enough in presentation that they remain applicable to just about anyone. The sentiments expressed in "Baby, Let Me Follow You Down" (longing) and "You're No Good" (resentment and hopelessness) are easy to relate to, regardless of whether or not they include specific details about the relationship in question. They are the sort of songs which can pass amongst a diverse group of people quite easily.
However, Bob Dylan also contains the seeds of his impending split with the folk scene, one which would become evident by 1964 or 1965. The key lays not with the first or second criteria, but the third one. The expressly personal lyrics which Dylan would become famous for bubble up on the record, and it was this conflict between the universal and the personal which would ultimately drive Dylan from identifying with the 1960s folk scene.
This is especially evident on the two original compositions of the album, which both describe Dylan's relationship to folk music and hint at an impending split. "Song to Woody" is the less overt of the two in this regard, as it is a direct tribute to a folk music legend which musically quotes one of the man's well-known composition. However, compared to the rather general songs of love and death which comprise the vast majority of the album, "Song to Woody" seems oddly specific to Bob Dylan.
Take the song's second stanza:
Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie, I wrote you songOn the surface, this seems to keep with the tradition of folk music quite well: acknowledging the past, commenting on the state of human affairs and so forth. But the fact that Dylan is stating up front that he is the author of the song, taken with the varied detail in the lyrics, suggests that he is taking ownership of the song, which is antithetical to the communal nature of folk music.
'Bout a funny old world that's a-coming along
Seems sick and it's hungry; it's tired and it's torn
It looks like it's a-dying and it's hardly been born
"Talkin' New York", on the other hand, displays some repressed contempt for the folk scene which Dylan entered in the early 1960s. The song is a humorous portrait of the Greenwich Village music crowd, and is particularly biting when Dylan describes first trying to break into the scene in the coffee-houses:
I walked down there and ended upThe recording industry associated with the folk scene is similarly skewered. He mentions being a harmonica player for one studio, where an executive raves about his playing; he loves it "a dollar-a-day's worth." Even when Dylan gets a deal as a recording artist, the business dealings are called into question:
In one of them coffee-houses on the block
I'd get on the stage, sing and play
Man'd now say, "Come back some other day.
You sound like a hillbilly.
We want folk singers here"
Now, a very great man once saidOne gets the impression listening to "Talkin' New York" whether Dylan could ever stay in the folk scene for an extended period of time. Even if one takes the song as tongue-in-cheek, there at least appears to be an undertone of resentment in the lyrics.
That some people rob you with a fountain pen
It don't take too long to find out
Just what he was talking about.
Even though he would release two more albums which fit fairly comfortably in the folk tradition (1963's The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan and 1964's The Times They Are a-Changin'), by the end of 1964 he had seemingly left the movement for good. Even though Another Side of Bob Dylan maintain the sparse instrumentation of his earlier work, the subject matter was purely that of Bob Dylan's concern. and "My Back Pages" is often read as a repudiation of his previous time in the folk scene.
Rather than a sudden shift, then, a reading of Bob Dylan raises the possibility that the great American folk-singer's transition to the more personal, more rock-oriented work he produced in the mid-1960s was in some sense inevitable. This is not to say that the folk tradition ceased to influence his work. Far from it; after all, the previously mentioned "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" comes from 1965's Bringing It All Back Home. However, Dylan impurity as a folk musician was present right from the start.
Works Cited
Gollan, Antoni E. "The Evolution of Bob Dylan." National Review 28 June 1966: 638-
640. The National Review Archive. Web. 22 July 2012.
Howard, Jr., John Tasker. "On Folk Music." Art & Life 11.8 (1920): 451-3. JSTOR.
Web. 23 July 2012.
Xizheng, Zhou. "Probe into the Debate on the Position of 'New Folk Song'." Cross-
Cultural Communication 8.2 (2012): 73. Academic OneFile. Web. 23 July 2012.
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