I’ve been walkin’ that lonesome valley,
You got to walk that lonesome valley . . .
Jesus walked that lonesome valley
—“Lonesome Valley,” African American spiritual
I’ve been walking that Lincoln highway
—Woody Guthrie, “Hard Travelling”
Tryin’ to get to heaven before they close the door.
She’s tryin’ to get to Heaven fo’ they close the do’
People on the platforms,
waitin’ for the trains.
I can hear their hearts a-beatin’,
like pendulum swingin’ on chains.
One foot is on the platform
The other one on the train,
I’m going back to New Orleans
To wear that ball and chain
— Alan Lomax, “The Rising Sun Blues,” Folk Songs of North America
I’m standing on a platform
Smoking a big cigar
Waiting for some old freight train
Carrying an empty car
—Woody Guthrie, “Poor Boy”
When you think that you’ve lost everything,
You find out you can always lose a little more.
I’m just going down the road feelin’ bad,
I’m going down the road feeling bad
I’m going down the road feeling bad
I’m going down the road feeling bad, Lord, Lord
And I ain’t gonna be treated this-a-way.
—Woody Guthrie, “Going Down the Road Feeling Bad”
Tryin’ to get to heaven before they close the door.
She’s tryin’ to get to Heaven fo’ they close the do’
I’m goin’ down the river,
Down to New Orleans.
They tell me everything is gonna be all right,
But I don’t know what “all right” even means.
I was ridin’ in a buggy with Miss Mary Jane,
Ridin’ in the buggy, Miss Mary Jane
Miss Mary Jane, Miss Mary Jane (twice)
—Alan Lomax, “Miss Mary Jane,” The Folk Songs of North America
Miss Mary Jane got a house in Baltimore.
Sally got a house in Baltimo’,
Baltimo’, Baltimo’
Sally got a house in Baltimo’
An’ it’s full of chicken pie
—Alan Lomax, “Miss Mary Jane,” The Folk Songs of North America
I’ve been all around the world boys,
I’m tryin’ to get to heaven before they close the door.
She’s tryin’ to get to Heaven fo’ they close the do’
Gonna sleep down in the parlor,
And relive my dreams.
I close my eyes and I wonder,
If everything is as hollow as it seems.
Some trains don’t pull no gamblers,
No midnight ramblers like they did before.
This train don’t carry no gamblers, this train,
This train don’t carry no gamblers, this train,
This train don’t carry no gamblers
No hypocrites, no midnight ramblers,
This train is bound for glory, this train.
—Woody Guthrie, “Bound for Glory”
I’ve been to Sugartown, I shook the sugar down,
I wanted su-gah very much,
I went to Sug-ah Town,
I climbed up in that sug-ah tree
An’ I shook that sug-ah down.
—Byron Arnold, “Buck-Eye Rabbit,” Folk Songs of Alabama
Now I’m tryin’ to get to heaven before they close the door.
She’s tryin’ to get to Heaven fo’ they close the do’
Dylan had done this sort of thing before, but never on such a grand scale. In “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven” he steals from a wide range of songs, a good example of what he meant in the 2012 interview we saw with Gilmore, worth repeating: “It’s called songwriting. . . . You make everything yours.”
Nobody but Dylan could integrate such a disparate range of source texts, which he knows as part of the songbook that is in his head, into the compellingly poetic story that the song becomes. Dylan has famously said that in “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” every line could have been the first line of a song. Where the lines in “Hard Rain” had come from places that even he did not understand, the Muse, that is, his memory of the whole tradition, was now handing him scripts, which he integrated, orchestrated, and expanded into the song he made. Here in 1997, he has control of a dizzying variety of fragments of traditional gospel and folk songs and he knows what he wants to do with them. As the song is set out here you can read the intertexts, but what matters is what Dylan does with them. “I wade muddy water” becomes “I’ve been wadin’ through the high muddy waters,” thus providing a foretaste of the “High water risin’ ” that will open the apocalyptic song “High Water (For Charley Patton)” on Dylan’s next album, “Love and Theft.”
The resulting song is a powerful piece of writing, the story of someone in trouble, on the run it seems, who had to get out of Missouri, where “they would not let [him] be,” now heading down to New Orleans. The biblical references to “that lonesome valley,” and the refrain of the title, convey a sense that the end may be close—“Tryin’ to get to heaven before they close the door.” As the original details of the song accumulate, there is a heightening of the mysterious. Why wouldn’t “they” let the narrator be back in Missouri, and why is he going down the river to New Orleans? Once we realize the components of the song and activate the contexts from which they come, the “I” of the song takes us with him, or her, or both, through the disparate worlds of those source texts, walking the lonesome valley like Jesus, going down the river bound for a version of the House of the Rising Sun, which has “been the ruin of many a young girl,” in the words of that song, doing penance by sleeping down in the parlor, not upstairs with the clients.
Along with the echoes of those other songs, there is the poetry and songwriting of Bob Dylan, which ties it all together and further complicates the scenes. The singer is getting over a love lost and he is still hurting: “Every day your memory gets dimmer / It doesn’t haunt me like it did before. . . . You broke a heart that loved you.” As the song works toward its end there seems to be little cause for hope: “When you think that you’ve lost everything / You find out you can always lose a little more.” The hope lies in the beauty of the song itself, the perfection of the writing and the tightness and progression of the verses, compensation here for the fact that the singer, as conveyed by the voice of Dylan, may not have too much time left before they close the door.
“HIGHLANDS”
Was Robert Burns, the great Scottish poet and songwriter, transfigured? Did he in fact become the singer of “Highlands,” the dramatic and narrative reflection that closes Time Out of Mind? At 16 minutes and 31 seconds, it is Dylan’s longest song—though in the few live performances of the song, Dylan sped it up and regularized the tempo, and cut some lines, getting it down to around 10 minutes. As he surely meant us to see, “Highlands” owes an obvious debt to Burns’s “My Heart’s in the Highlands.” As with other intertexts, this is meant to be noticed right from the beginning of the song:
Well my heart’s in the Highlands gentle and fair
Honeysuckle blooming in the wildwood air
Bluebells blazing where the Aberdeen waters flow
Well my heart’s in the Highland
I’m gonna go there when I feel good enough to go
Burns’s poem is only four verses long:
My heart’s in the Highlands, my heart is not here;
My heart’s in the Highlands a-chasing the deer;
A-chasing the wild-deer, and following the roe,
My heart’s in the Highlands wherever I go.
It’s a simple sentimental song-poem that is melancholic in its dwelling on memory and the absence of the object, but it hardly rises to a level of aesthetic beauty or mea
ning that has the power to affect us profoundly. Its AABB rhyme, the simplicity of the repeated frames, and the lack of any profound thought keep it on an unsophisticated level. Dylan found it, took what he wanted, and discarded the rest. But in the process, he tied himself to the folk tradition in which Burns was writing, a tradition within which Dylan himself has always been working, even before 1962, when at the Gaslight in New York City he sang a beautiful version of “Barbara Allen,” the traditional Scottish ballad that Burns would have known almost two hundred years before as “Bonny Barbara Allen”—already an old song for Burns.
The Burns poem comes across strongly at one point in Dylan’s song, fifteen verses in:
Well my heart’s in the Highlands, with the horses and hounds
Way up in the border country, far from the towns
With the twang of the arrow and a snap of the bow
Dylan’s verbal debt to Burns is in fact fairly slight, just the five or six words with which he and Burns both begin (“my heart’s in the Highlands”), and he has almost deliberately avoided further exact intertexts, replacing the targets of the Burns hunt (deer, roe) with its instruments (horse, hounds, arrows, bow). However, because of those opening words, and because of the geographical specificity (“Aberdeen waters”), the presence and mood of Burns’s poem is strongly felt, then transformed by the poetry of Dylan, who talked a bit about how parts of the album came together in a 2001 interview with Mikal Gilmore for Rolling Stone: “I’d been writing down couplets and verses and things, and then putting them together at later times.” Could Dylan have been aware of something very similar that Burns said about the process of writing his own song, “My Heart’s in the Highlands,” something I came across in a commentary on the songs of Burns? In Burns’s manuscript, “Notes on Scottish Song,” published in 1908, he wrote, “The first half-stanza [the five words in question] of this song is old; the rest is mine.” These words could easily have come from a Dylan interview, more proof that what he is doing is old, conscious, and fully deliberate, and in a tradition, taking what you need from wherever you find it and using it to create new art.
The structure of Dylan’s song is intricate and carefully devised, with the verses advancing the story of the song: chorus: 2 verses: chorus: 2 verses: chorus: 7 verses: chorus: 4 verses: chorus. In all, excluding the choruses, there are four verses on either side of the seven-verse-long scene, the heart of the poem. Those seven verses, beginning “I’m in Boston town, in some restaurant,” form a dreamlike narrative centerpiece that is a song in itself.
In each of the choruses, as in the one cited, “My Heart’s in the Highlands” is repeated from the first to the fourth line, while the second and third lines capture images from the beauty of the idyllic world held in the heart of the singer: “honeysuckle blooming,” “bluebells blazing,” “the wind, it whispers to the buckeyed trees in rhyme,” “big white clouds like chariots that swing down low,” “way up in the border country far from the town,” “where the Aberdeen waters flow,” and “by the beautiful lake of the Black Swan.” Each chorus ends with a fifth line speculating on when or how his heart and he will be united in the Highlands, the first four as follows:
I’m gonna go there when I feel good enough to go (1)
I can only get there one step at a time (4)
Only place left to go (7)
Can’t see any other way to go (15)
These idyllic scenes and the poetic colors with which Dylan paints them are all in stark contrast to what is going on in the life of the speaker. He seems in the first verse to be waking from a nightmare in a life of tedium and repetitive despair, looking “at the same old page / Same ol’ rat race / Life in the same ol’ cage.” Part of the genius of Dylan’s art in this new phase lies in his ability to establish voices, or sets of voices, of characters who use language that is old, archaic even. Sometimes that language is centuries old, sometimes decades old. This is a literary and musical development that has the brilliant effect of alienating the singer and setting him in a time that is unfamiliar and distant from that of any contemporary reality: “Strumming on my gay guitar,” off in “gay Paree,” “Dixie bound,” and in “Boston town.”
So in “Highlands” “same ol’ rat race” has a 1960s feel to it, situating the speaker in a time that is no more, a world in which he doesn’t fit. The third verse further brings out his alienation, a “prisoner in a world of mystery,” using language, such as “Wouldn’t know the difference between a real blonde and a fake,” that suggests the mystery has to do with his incomprehension of what has been going on in the 1980s and ’90s. “I wish someone would come / And push back the clock for me,” he says. To when, 1965? Even further perhaps, to the time of Robert Burns? The narrator is “listening to Neil Young,” as many of us still are, and he’s “gotta turn up the sound,” perhaps hard of hearing from too many loud concerts. Those listening to Dylan singing these lines may sympathize with his tastes, but the narrator’s tastes are not shared by those in the world around him in the song: “Someone’s always yelling turn it down.” This is part of the isolation of the character that Dylan is constructing.
Six minutes into “Highlands,” the song takes on the appearance of a dramatic interlude, a five-minute mini-play, verses 8–14 relating the experience in that Boston restaurant.” Clinton Heylin finds fault with the scene:
By then [at the recording session] Dylan had inserted a section of dialogue into the song—in which a series of non-sequiturs depict a run-in with a waitress in a New England bar-restaurant, stretching the song out while distancing it from its source.
Rather than being an insertion, I would maintain the dialogue is an integral part of the story Dylan is building in this song, a picture he is drawing of someone whom the world has passed by. The restaurant is empty, allowing the focus to be directed to the two players, the singer and the waitress: “Nobody in the place but me and her.” Why is it empty? “It must be a holiday, there’s nobody around,” not particularly logical, and at the end of the exchange he steps “outside back to the busy street,” so the emptiness inside is part of the design. There is a sense of attraction, or at least of appreciation—“She got a pretty face,” perhaps, he fancies—reciprocated: “She studies me closely as I sit down.”
This has happened before, in another lifetime, in reality perhaps thirty years earlier, before that waitress in Boston town was born even, a moment dramatized twenty-two years earlier in Dylan’s most famous song from the 1970s, “Tangled Up in Blue,” in a scene for which the singer of “Highlands,” or Bob Dylan if we want, has been searching:
She was workin’ in a topless place
And I stopped in for a beer
I just kept looking at the side of her face
In the spotlight so clear
And later on as the crowd thinned out
I’s about to do the same
She was standing there in back of my chair
Said to me, “Don’t I know your name?”
I muttered somethin’ underneath my breath
She studied the lines on my face
I must admit I felt a little uneasy
When she bent down to tie the laces of my shoe
Tangled up in blue
The past encounter recalled in “Tangled Up in Blue” has become the present of “Highlands,” or that’s what he hopes. Maybe she’ll pick him out again? The girl back then took him to her place, “lit a burner on the stove,” and got high with him, taking the lead: “I thought you’d never say hello,” she said. “You look like the silent type.” She was first to speak back then, but now, at least on the original recording of “Highlands,” he opens things up:
She got a pretty face and long white shiny legs
I say “Tell me what I want”
She says “You probably want hard-boiled eggs”
The exchange continues, still strangely,
I say “That’s right, bring me some.”
She says “We ain’t got any, y
ou picked the wrong time to come.”
Then why did she bring them up? This exchange may seem odd, intensely surreal, even in the official version in Bob Dylan: The Lyrics: 1961–2012:
She got a pretty face and long white shiny legs
She says, “What’ll it be?”
I say “I don’t know, you got any soft-boiled eggs?”
She looks at me, says “I’d bring you some
But we’re out of ’m, you picked the wrong time to come.”
But he has a purpose here. “Soft-boiled eggs” is blues slang, a reference to part of the female anatomy, rightly rhymed here with “long white shiny legs.” Dylan surely knows any number of versions of the blues song “Big Fat Woman,” which even made it onto blues and folk artist Tom Rush’s 1963 album, Blues, Songs & Ballads:
She’s a fine lookin’ woman, got great big legs
Big Fat Woman got great big legs
Ev’ry time she moves, move like a soft-boil’d egg
But in the Boston restaurant in the 1997 song, with that waitress on “Highlands,” that sort of innuendo wasn’t going to work. Unlike the woman who was “workin’ in the topless place” in “Tangled Up in Blue,” this one again reminds him of where he is in time: “you picked the wrong time to come,” she says. This is 1997, not 1965.
Undeterred, he keeps trying. Recognizing that he is an artist, she asks him to draw a picture of her, to which he replies, “I would if I could, / but I don’t do sketches from memory,” a suggestion that he would do so back at his place, a version of the early- to mid-twentieth-century pickup line, largely a joke, “come up and see my etchings.” She doesn’t get it and wants him to do it on the spot: “I’m right in front of you, or haven’t you looked?” As the exchange continues, he further pleads, “I don’t know where my pencil is at,” but the waitress produces one from behind her ear, and he proceeds to draw a few lines and “shows it for her to see.” To her claim that it doesn’t look a bit like her, he responds, “Oh kind miss, it most certainly does,” adding to her reply, “You must be joking,” his own rejoinder “I wish I was.” Who did it look like? Perhaps again that other woman who was working in the topless place back in time, perhaps even Sara, onetime Playboy Club Bunny, in the song of the same name that he sang more than twenty years before, lingering from the last line of the album Desire: “Don’t ever leave me, don’t ever go.”
Why Bob Dylan Matters Page 13