Revolution in the Air

by Clinton Heylin

  Yes, Dylan hitched his wagon to Broadside for a while, donating some eighteen hot-off-the-press songs in as many months. But it was never—as he later claimed—mere opportunism. It is hard to imagine ‘Sis’ Cunningham having a greater effect on the man than his girlfriend at the time, Suze. And it was her stamp of approval he sought night and day. As he told Robert Shelton on a bone-weary flight to nowhere in March 1966: "[Suze]’ll tell you how many nights I stayed up and wrote songs and showed them to her and asked her, ‘Is this right?’ Because I knew her father and mother were associated with unions and she was into this equality-freedom thing long before I was. I checked the songs out with her."

  "Emmett Till," published by and subsequently recorded for Broadside, was the first such song from this protest pen. At the time that Dylan wrote his account of the murder of Emmett Till, he considered it the most important song he had ever written. After he talked about it to Izzy Young on February 1, 1962, the folklorist wrote down a shorthand account of their conversation for his journal: "Wrote a song the other night—‘Ballad of Emmett Till.’ After I wrote it someone said another song was written but not like it. I wrote it for CORE—I’m playing it February 23. I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever written. Only song I play with a capo. Stole the melody from Len Chandler—a song he wrote about a Colorado bus driver."

  Two years later to the day, Dylan dismissed the song in scathing terms, calling it "a bullshit song" and questioning his own motivation for writing it in the first place. In the hiatus between Times . . . and Another Side, no longer content to let Suze check songs out, he began to distance himself from the broadside ballads he’d written when words of righteous concern teemed out of him ("My Back Pages" was but a couple of months away):

  I used to write bullshit songs. I went through a phase of writing bullshit songs about two and a half years ago. . . . I made this second record, then people wanted me to sing songs I wrote. I used to write songs, like I’d say, "Yeah, what’s bad, pick out something bad, like segregation, O.K., here we go" and I’d pick one of the thousand million little points I can pick and explode it, some of them which I didn’t know about. I wrote a song about Emmett Till, which in all honesty was a bullshit song . . . but when I wrote it, it wasn’t a bullshit song to me. But I realize now that my reasons and motives behind it were phony, I didn’t have to write it; I was bothered by many other things that I pretended I wasn’t bothered by, in order to write this song about Emmett Till, a person I never even knew. . . . It was quick at hand, and knowing that people knew who Emmett Till was, I wrote the song.

  "Emmett Till" delighted his highly impressionable lass, who was a part-time volunteer at the Campaign of Racial Equality (CORE) and had put his name down for their February 23 benefit. It was an ideal place to present another new Dylan, who was now responding to the call from "people [who] wanted me to sing songs I wrote." He later told Scott Cohen, "I started writing because things were changing all the time and a certain song needed to be written. I started writing them because I wanted to sing them. . . . I stumbled into it, really."

  He didn’t stumble for long. The new songs gave him a renewed sense of purpose, pouring out of him in the aftermath of "Emmett Till." As Suze recalls, "He was very fast about his writing." Such polemics certainly weren’t cut from the same cloth as the songs penned the previous year. And he knew it. When he aired "Emmett Till" for the first time on Cynthia Gooding’s radio show, he informed his host, "I don’t claim to call [my songs] folk songs. I just call them contemporary songs. You know, there’s a lot of people paint . . . if they’ve got something that they wanna say. . . . Well, I just write a song. It’s the same thing." The songs of a new Depression, it seemed, were gone for good.

  Yet the events portrayed in this new ballad hardly qualified as contemporary. Notorious, yes; contemporary, no. Emmett Till had been murdered back in August 1955, ostensibly for whistling at a white woman. Two white men were later charged with his murder but were acquitted by an all-white jury. They subsequently owned up to the deed but could not be tried again under the "double jeopardy" rule. So when Dylan refers in his song to the two brothers that "confessed that they had killed poor Emmett Till . . . to stop the United States of yelling for a trial," he shows himself to be hopelessly confused about the facts of the case (a pattern he would repeat on two more Southern murder ballads: "Only a Pawn in Their Game" and "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll").

  A long feature in the January 24, 1956, issue of Look magazine by William Bradford Huie told the story from the murderers’ point of view, suggesting that Till actually touched the white woman, who was the wife and sister-in-law of the accused; that they only intended to frighten the boy; that he had ample opportunity to escape; and that it was his continuing insolence and repeated claims to have had white girlfriends that finally drove the brothers to silence him for good. Such motivations were simply disregarded by a Dylan bent on his own verbal execution. The couplet, "They said that they had a reason / I disremember what"—the only line in the song in which the narrator addresses the listener directly—is an open admission that the facts of the case held zero interest for this zealot. This is a pattern Dylan was to repeat a number of times, while holding those interested in such "detail" to ridicule. For the next eighteen months he would prefer "lies that life is black and white," even if the result was a "bullshit song."

  {49} BALLAD OF DONALD WHITE

  Published lyric: Sing Out! October 1962; Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.

  First known performance: Cynthia Gooding’s apartment, March 1962.

  Known studio recordings: Broadside session, June 1962 [BR].

  Having decided to address head-on the notion of selecting "one of the thousand million little points I can pick and explod[ing] it," Dylan waited barely a fortnight before exploding another. "The Ballad of Donald White" again appropriated its tune and rudimentary template from a "traditional" predecessor, in this case "The Ballad of Peter Amberly," a nineteenth-century ballad about the death of a Prince Edward Island lumberman. Penned by John Calhoun around 1880, the evocative "Peter Amberly" had been covered by the likes of Paul Clayton and Sandy Ives. It was also part of Bonnie Dobson’s repertoire circa February 1962, as she was making her Gerde’s Folk City debut. Both Dylan and Gil Turner were there on opening night, and when the latter heard Dylan perform "Donald White" later the same month, he knew right away where he had last heard that familiar refrain.

  The story of Donald White was a lot more topical than Emmett Till’s, having been inspired by a TV program Dylan watched at his Fourth Street apartment with girlfriend Suze and their friend Sue Zuckerman. The show in question—a program about crime and capital punishment called "A Volcano Named White"—was broadcast on February 12. The twenty-four-year-old Donald White (who was, appropriately, black) was filmed on Death Row talking about how his cries for help were ignored until he finally went and killed someone, and now he was waiting to be executed. According to Zuckerman, "Bobby just got up at some point and he went off in the corner and started to write. He just started to write, while the show was still on, and the next thing I knew he had this song written."

  Yet Dylan did not play the song to Izzy Young until March 14. I suspect Zuckerman overstates the case, and that it took him a while to get the song’s lyrics—told in the first person, like "Dope Fiend Robber"—sufficiently sanctimonious for his new set of friends. He told Gil Turner the song’s seed had been planted some time earlier: "I’d seen Donald White’s name in a Seattle paper in about 1959. It said he was a killer. The next time I saw him was on a television set. . . . He murdered someone ’cause he couldn’t find no room in life. Now they killed him ’cause he couldn’t find no room in life. . . . When are some people gonna wake up and see that sometimes people aren’t really their enemies, but their victims?" Though the song stayed in his set for a few months and was recorded for a Broadside radio show in June, Dylan didn’t even at
tempt to foist it on Columbia. He knew he could do better.

  {50} LET ME DIE IN MY FOOTSTEPS

  Published lyric: Broadside #3; Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985;

  Lyrics 2004.

  Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, April 25, 1962—1 take [FR ver.1] [TBS—tk.1].

  First known performance: Finjan Club, Montreal, July 2, 1962.

  Most Dylan chroniclers would probably designate "Blowin’ in the Wind," written in April, as his first major composition. I would argue he reached his first real writing plateau a month before. In March 1962 he finally got a handle on what he wanted to say about "the bomb," composing the majestic "Let Me Die in My Footsteps," a.k.a. "I Will Not Go Down Under the Ground." At the time, he claimed it was an idea he had carried around in his head for quite some time, informing Izzy Young that he had originally "wanted to write a song about 1½ years ago on fallout shelters, to tune of ‘So Long, It’s Been Good To Know You.’" The now-lost "Strange Rain" may have been another attempt at a "bomb" song, but it took a little longer for Dylan to find the right way to proclaim the importance of "learning to live, ’stead of learning to die."

  Though "Let Me Die in My Footsteps" would also end up discarded—remaining officially unreleased (though widely bootlegged) until 1991—Dylan knew it represented a real breakthrough. Forty-two years after its last performance, he described it in his memoir as "a slightly ironic song . . . based [around] an old Roy Acuff ballad . . . [It] was inspired by the fallout shelter craze that had blossomed out of the Cold War. . . . When I began performing [it], I didn’t even say I wrote it. I just slipped it on somewhere, said it was a Weavers song."

  Actually, he was no longer remotely coy about the songs he was writing. On the verge of his majority, and a new-found maturity, he was especially proud of this one. Not only did he perform it for Izzy Young on March 19, but he also knew it would be perfect fodder for the magazine that Turner and Cunningham were struggling to keep going. It duly appeared in issue #3 under the title, "I Will Not Go Down Underground." The following month he cut the song at Columbia in a single take—usually a good sign—and set about assigning it pride of place on the album to come. In the fall, he talked about its composition at great length to sleeve-note scribe Nat Hentoff, again affirming that it was an idea he had carried around for some time:

  ["Let Me Die in My Footsteps"] has been on my mind for about two years. . . . I was going through some town . . . and they were making this bomb shelter right outside of town. . . . I was there for about an hour, just looking at them build and I guess I just wrote the song in my head back then, but I carried it with me for two years until I finally wrote it down. As I watched them building [the shelter], it struck me sort of funny that they would concentrate so much on digging a hole underground when there were so many other things they should do in life. If nothing else, they could look at the sky, and walk around and live a little bit instead of doing this immoral thing. I guess that . . . you can lead a lot of people by the hand. They don’t even really know what they’re scared of. I’d like to say that here is one song that I am really glad I made a record of. I don’t consider anything that I write political. But . . . this is one song that people won’t have to look at me or even listen closely or even like me, to understand.

  Yet by December 1962, when he tried to tape it for his new music publisher, Witmark Music, he couldn’t even make it through the whole song, stopping after a couple of verses and calling it "a drag . . . I’ve sung it so many times." The first flush of enthusiasm had evidently faded. Unsurprisingly, it became one of the songs pulled from the recalled version of Freewheelin’ the following April.

  {51} TALKIN’ FOLKLORE CENTER

  Published lyrics: Bob Dylan in His Own Words (Omnibus Press, 1978); Words Fill My Head.

  First known performance: Gerde’s Folk City, New York, April 1962.

  Throughout the winter of 1962 Dylan made a regular habit of stopping by Izzy Young’s Folklore Center to play the owner his latest bout of inspiration. During one such visit, on March 19, after hearing "Let Me Die in My Footsteps," Young convinced the boy wonder to pen a talkin’ blues celebrating this inestimable Village institution. The result—which he signed on the original manuscript, "Bob Dylan ’62 of Gallup, Phillipsburg, Navasota Springs, Sioux Falls and Duluth"—was printed up and sold as the center’s very own broadside.

  Though this was one talkin’ blues intended for the printing press, rather than as a performance piece, Dylan integrated a chunk of it into a live performance of "Talkin’ New York" at Gerde’s in April. Indeed the lyrics are in many ways an extension of that earlier talkin’ blues, describing how he first found the Folklore Center: "On MacDougal Street I saw a cubby hole / I went in to get out of the cold / Found out after I entered / The place was called the Folklore Center." The kind of thing that Dylan could write in a coffee break, it was a therapeutic diversion from the real stuff . . .

  {52} BLOWIN’ IN THE WIND

  Published lyrics: Broadside #6; Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.

  First known performance: Gerde’s Folk City, New York, April 1962.

  Known studio recordings: Studio A, NY, July 9, 1962—3 takes [FR—tk.1]; Studio B, NY, June 30, 1970.

  Q: Where was Dylan’s political strand lost?

  John Hammond: I think it was lost with "Blowin’ in the Wind," and money, and being with Grossman. . . . He made Dylan a businessman. —Fusion, 1969

  Dylan’s third Gerde’s residency, but first as a headliner, in April 1962, included the introduction of a song that would change his world—nay, the world—fusing much of what he’d been reaching for in his foundation year. At the time he wrote "Blowin’ in the Wind," sometime during the second week in April, he was still considered by his contemporaries (and his record label) a performer first and a songwriter a distant second. Not surprisingly he was visibly excited by the experience of writing something that set folks thinking. Gil Turner recalls how Dylan "came flying into Folk City where I was singing, [saying], ‘Gil, I got a new song I just finished. Wanna hear it?’"

  The moment had such resonance that Dylan used it in his own 1977 film, Renaldo and Clara, where a brightly lit David Blue (né Cohen) relates the evening in question as he remembers it: "[After] Bob wrote ‘Blowin’ in the Wind,’ he came over to Gerde’s Folk City and played it for Gil Turner, who was scheduled to play that night. Turner thought it was incredible. Bob wrote the words and music down on a sheet of paper, and when Turner went on stage he taped the paper up on the microphone and played the song. Everybody was stunned. As far as I know that was the first time that song was ever played to an audience." The songwriter had announced himself.

  On those few occasions when he has ignored his own dictum—and looked back—Dylan has made it clear that "Blowin’ in the Wind" was one song that came very quickly. Conversing with Hilburn in 2004, he claimed he "wrote ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ in ten minutes, just put words to an old spiritual. . . . That’s the folk music tradition. You use what’s handed down." Forty years earlier, talking to Gargoyle, he was only marginally more modest, claiming he "wrote [it] in twenty minutes . . . in the Black Pussycat, down on MacDougal Street. I just wrote it just like that."

  As with all things Dylan, the truth is not so simple. Yes, he wrote the song most hurriedly. But on that first occasion—and for a couple of weeks more—the song had just two verses, the first and the third. Indeed, it was like this when he performed it at a (taped) Gerde’s performance in mid-April, which he prefaced with the statement, "This here ain’t a protest song or anything like that, ’cause I don’t write protest songs. . . . I’m just writing it as something to be said, for somebody, by somebody."

  Why so defensive all of a sudden? One can only presume that the song was already being misinterpreted and misrepresented, in roughly equal measures, within days of its composition. For the first time the young Dylan was h
aving to provide himself with some artistic elbow room. At the same time, he remained positively effusive about the song and its theme/s to Gil Turner, the man who actually performed it first. When his friend was preparing a Sing Out! profile (and cover story) that summer, Dylan genuinely tried to explain what inspired him to write it:

  There ain’t too much I can say about this song except that the answer is blowing in the wind. It ain’t in no book or movie or TV show or discussion group. Man, it’s in the wind—and it’s blowing in the wind. Too many of these hip people are telling me where the answer is but oh I won’t believe that. I still say it’s in the wind and just like a restless piece of paper it’s got to come down some time. . . . But the only trouble is that no one picks up the answer when it comes down so not too many people get to see and know it . . . and then it flies away again. . . . I still say that some of the biggest criminals are those that turn their heads away when they see wrong and know it’s wrong. I’m only 21 years old and I know that there’s been too many wars. . . . You people over 21 should know better . . . ’cause after all, you’re older and smarter.

  Though he had already debuted it, he didn’t feel he had reached that finishing end. An extra verse, written by early May, was presumably composed after two days at Studio A (on April 24–5), given that he did not even attempt a single studio take of the song that would make his name (and make Albert Grossman rich). It was to the likes of "Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie," "Talkin’ John Birch," "Emmett Till," and "Let Me Die in My Footsteps" that he turned his mind when John Hammond rolled tape.