After “Oxford Town,” Dylan returned to an antimilitarist theme in “John Brown,” the tale of an innocent sent “off to war to fight on a foreign shore” (the song does not appear on any of Dylan’s sixties albums, but it became a staple of his live performances in the nineties, along with other antiwar material). The young soldier’s proud mother dispatches him with the advice: “Do what the captain says, lots of medals you will get.” She brags to the neighbors “about her son with his uniform and gun, / And these things you called a good old-fashioned war.” And Dylan hammers home the ghastly refrain: “Oh! Good old-fashioned war!”
The same year Dylan wrote “John Brown,” the Kingston Trio was enjoying success with Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” which included an antiwar verse considered daring in its time:Where have all the soldiers gone
Gone to graveyards ev’ry one
When will they ever learn?
Dylan’s song is less wistful and more graphic in its account of the costs of war. When the soldier returns from overseas and is met at the station by his mother, she is shocked at his condition:Oh his face was all shot up and his hand was all blown off
And he wore a metal brace around his waist.
He whispered kind of slow, in a voice she did not know,
While she couldn’t even recognize his face!
Though the disabled soldier’s “mouth can hardly move,” he manages to address his mother in all his bitterness: “Don’t you remember, Ma, when I went off to war
You thought it was the best thing I could do?”
Then he tells her something of the reality of war. He tells her how in the midst of battle he asked himself, “God, what am I doing here?”
But the thing that scared me most was when my enemy came close
And I saw that his face looked just like mine.
And a terrified, indignant Dylan wails in refrain: “Oh! Lord! Just like mine!” Finally, Brown recalls how “through the thunder rolling and stink” it came to him that he “was just a puppet in a play.” In “John Brown” Dylan told the story of Ron Kovic—disabled Vietnam veteran, antiwar crusader and author of Born on the Fourth of July—some seven years before Kovic lived through the nightmare and drew the lesson of the song from his own experience. The writing in “John Brown” is sometimes cumbersome, the naturalism is crude, and the hysteria less disciplined than in “Hollis Brown,” but in its repugnance at jingoism, glancing references to class, filial rage, and anguished opening to an internationalist vision, the song shows Dylan working to synthesize something new, a contemporary folk music that was emotionally raw and politically uncompromising. In “John Brown” social patriotism has begun to go sour. Not long after writing the song, Dylan would make his first trip abroad. Albert Grossman had somehow persuaded the BBC to cast Dylan in a small role in an original drama, and to pay his fare across the Atlantic.
In April 1951, the Communist Party of Great Britain organized a conference in London on “the American threat to British culture.” That threat emanated, it was argued, from the drive by American big business to foist “the American way of life”—greed, violence, and racism—on the British people, not least through the popularity of Hollywood films and “commercial dance music.” The party condemned a number of films—Kiss of Death, The Set-Up, White Heat, Brute Force, all now considered noir classics—for promoting sadism. The BBC was attacked for preferring American over British songwriters. American popular music played on “the hopes and frustrations of the people . . . brushing aside the idea of struggle.” It was a music of “wish fulfillment” and “sloppy eroticism,” “drugging the minds of the people,” most worryingly, young people: “Our youngsters are being brought up to know no other films or songs than American. They are being encouraged to wear American clothes, speak with American accents, ape American ways.” The antidote to this poison was “to popularize and re-discover our cultural heritage . . . to develop a popular, progressive culture based on our traditions.”64
If the aim was to reach out to coming generations of working-class British youth, the party’s antagonism to American popular culture was to prove a major misjudgment. Ironically, the party itself, in its turn to folk culture, helped foster a growing interest in American musical idioms. The Communist Party’s early Ballads and Blues events—which an expatriate Alan Lomax helped to organize—were refreshingly eclectic, featuring both British folk and American jazz and blues artists, not least Big Bill Broonzy, who had also graced Hammond’s From Spirituals to Swing gig in 1938. As Raphael Samuel recalled, the early British folk revival displayed a relaxed and innovative attitude toward heritage. It broke from the conservative pastoralism of the old Cecil Sharpj societies and preferred smoky pubs to concert halls.65
It was out of this new interest in old American music—especially New Orleans jazz—that the skiffle fad emerged in the mid-fifties. Lonnie Donegan had a hit with a thumping version of Leadbelly’s “Rock Island Line” and across the country teenagers emulated him—which was easy enough, because the musical elements of skiffle were rudimentary. When he arrived in London in 1955, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott was startled to find these familiar tunes clothed in English accents; he concluded that English skiffle wasn’t “worth shit.” But Alan Lomax disagreed.
At first it seemed very strange to me to hear these songs, which I had recorded from convicts in the prisons of the south, coming out of the mouths of young men who had suffered, comparatively speaking, so little. But I soon realized that these young people felt themselves to be in a prison—composed of class-and-caste lines, the shrinking British empire, the dull job, the lack of money—things like these. They were shouting at the prison walls, like so many Joshuas at the walls of Jericho.66
Lomax was prescient. Skiffle opened the door to a generation of British youth; it introduced them to the rhythmic enchantments and earthy realism of the African-American tradition. It was through skiffle that Lennon met McCartney. “This American-amalgamated, British-derived Africanized music has already filled a large vacuum in the musical life of urban Britain,” Lomax wrote. People were once again making their own music, and that was a phenomenon he always welcomed. Lomax urged the skifflers to continue their efforts, but warned them against indulging in “sophisticated chord progressions, like the jazz boys.” Instead, he advised them to “discover the song-tradition of Great Britain . . . Probably the richest in western Europe.”
During his stay in Britain, Lomax introduced Bert Lloyd (author of The Singing Englishman, an adventurous early Marxist essay in popular musicology) to Ewan MacColl, a working-class militant from Salford. MacColl had spent a decade as an actor and singer in left-wing theater companies but was now looking for a new approach to building a people’s culture. Following Lomax’s example, Lloyd and MacColl set about constructing a canon of working-class British folk music—shifting the focus from the feudal countryside to the industrial proletariat, and emphasizing a continuing tradition of protest from below. Lomax also introduced MacColl to Peggy Seeger, daughter of Charles and Ruth Crawford Seeger. The meeting inspired MacColl to write the delicately haunting “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” and led to a partnership that ended only with MacColl’s death in 1989.k
As the American challenge to homegrown music intensified, one wing of the folk movement became more purist. “I was convinced that we had a music that was just as vigorous as anything America had produced, and we should be pursuing some kind of national identity,” MacColl explained, “not just becoming an arm of American cultural imperialism.” Under the influence of MacColl and the Left, many Ballads and Blues clubs turned themselves into Singer’s Clubs, with policy rules governing what should and should not be performed. MacColl felt that “if the singer was English, then the songs should be from the English tradition”—which sparked off debates about the regional roots of English folk, not to mention its relationship to Irish, Scottish, and Welsh music. In 1957, there were said to be 1,500 Singer’s Clubs with 11,000 membe
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The big boost for the British folk revival came in the following year, with the formation of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the first of the Aldermaston marches. These demonstrations were many times the size of the U.S. ban-the-bomb marches of the early sixties, and their political impact was much greater (they succeeded in making unilateral nuclear disarmament, briefly, an official Labour Party policy). They provided an impetus for the nascent New Left (the first of many) and a cradle of the sixties youth culture, as working-class Young Communists, university students, and footloose beatniks mingled in a common crusade and found a common interest in guitar-based music.
The British folk revival was more overtly politicized than its U.S. counterpart, and the influence of the organized Left, including the Communist Party, was significant. As in America, however, there was a conviction that folk music was the authentic voice of the oppressed and a refuge from the soullessness of commercial mass culture. “The clubs themselves seem to have served as some kind of refuge for the sociologically orphaned,” wrote Samuel, “the ex-working class from whose ranks the new generation of singers were largely recruited.”68
When Pete Seeger toured Britain in 1961, he was impressed by the buoyancy of the folk movement and in particular by the new topical songwriting promoted by MacColl and Lloyd. He heard modern ballads for modern times—though always set to traditional tunes and traditional accompaniments—and on his return urged his American colleagues to follow the British example, which led to the launching of Broadside.
Dylan arrived in London in December 1962. He checked into the Mayfair, where the BBC had booked him a room, but felt uncomfortable in such plush surroundings (“I knew then what it is like to be a Negro,” he told Robert Shelton). He set off to the folk clubs, where he felt much more at home. Here he soaked up the contending schools of folk practice and the various political perspectives that lay behind them. He met and heard many of the younger singers, including Martin Carthy, who introduced Dylan to the original British sources of the Appalachian songs he knew from the work of Lomax and Harry Smith. “His time in England was actually crucial to his development,” said Carthy, “it had a colossal effect on him.”69
Dylan reworked Carthy’s arrangement of “Scarborough Fair” into two of the best of his early love songs, “Girl from the North Country” and “Boots of Spanish Leather.” Jean Ritchie’s version of “Nottamun Town”—an Appalachian adaptation of a song from an English mummers’ play—was refashioned into “Masters of War.” In the coming months “Lord Franklin” would become the prematurely nostalgic “Bob Dylan’s Dream.” “The Road and the Miles to Dundee” would become “The Walls of Red Wing,” which deals with the repressive conditions in a juvenile detention center. Most significantly, Dominic Behan’s “The Patriot Game” (itself derived from an old Appalachian tune) would give birth to “With God on Our Side.” Behan had written:Come all you young rebels and list while I sing
For the love of one’s country is a terrible thing.
It banishes fear with the speed of a flame
And it makes us all part of the patriot game.
In London Dylan learned that Behan had taken his cue from Samuel Johnson’s definition of patriotism as “the last refuge of the scoundrel.” The idea clearly made an impression on him, and runs through his work from “With God on Our Side” to “Tombstone Blues.”l But in London he told a British interviewer, “I don’t like singing to anybody but Americans. My songs say things. I sing them for people who know what I’m saying.” He took this chip-on-the-shoulder American identity into the heart of the London folk scene, won over some and antagonized many.
The Singer’s Club at the Pindar of Wakefield on Gray’s Inn Road was run by MacColl and Peggy Seeger and reflected their priorities. Dylan sang “Masters of War” and “Ballad of Hollis Brown.” MacColl and Seeger were not impressed. Strangely, Dylan was doing what MacColl wanted young singers to do: use old tunes to comment on current political realities. But there was, from the beginning, something about Dylan that MacColl could not accept. “I have watched with fascination the meteoric rise of this American idol,” MacColl told Sing Out! readers in 1965. “And I am still unable to see in him anything other than a youth of mediocre talent. Only a completely non-critical audience, nourished on the watery pap of pop music, could have fallen for such tenth rate drivel . . . What poetry? The cultivated illiteracy of his topical songs or the embarrassing schoolboy attempt at free verse?”70
Yet in the course of his visit to London (he also popped over to Paris), Dylan’s work took a decidedly political turn. When he met up with his friend, the novelist and songwriter Richard Fariña, toward the end of his time abroad, he told him: “Man, there’s things going on in this world you got to look at, right? You can’t pretend they ain’t happening. Man, I was in New York when that Cuba business came over the radio, and you think that don’t put something in your head? Man, you can keep on singing about Railroad Bill and Lemon Trees, or you can step out, right?”71 And when Dylan returned to New York he made a similar point to Shelton, “I need some more finger pointin’ songs . . . Cause that’s where my head’s at right now.”
The interchange between the English-speaking cultures on either side of the Atlantic was constant and complex throughout the decade. Without this mutual influence, it’s impossible to imagine the evolution of either British or American popular music, or the dissident subcultures that sprouted in both countries. The impact of African-American music on British youth was immeasurable, but there was also significant traffic in the opposite direction. A month after Dylan’s visit, “Please, Please Me,” the Beatles’ first hit, entered the British charts. It was a momentous development for which the British Communist Party, to name but one, found itself unprepared.
Both “Masters of War” and “With God on Our Side” burst the boundaries of the soft-focus pacifism of previous antiwar songs. Both are concerned not merely with the imminence of war, but with its deeper causes, with the forces that promote and profit from fear and violence. Both are magnificently enraged and enduringly radical. Five years before students in large numbers were to take action against campus collusion with the Pentagon and the weapons industry, “Masters of War” unmasked the military-industrial complex:You fasten the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you set back and watch
When the death count gets higher
Dylan points the finger of guilt at the war-makers and the war-profiteers and jabs it in their faces. The song is dry, sparse, and unwavering in its indictment and its anger. The bare, archaic-sounding guitar chords hint at momentous tragedies past and to come, while the flat, steely voice speaks of hard lessons learned and not forgotten. Not least a lesson from Woody Guthrie: that the greatest criminals are those that “hide behind desks.” Enraged by the omnipotent, unaccountable manipulators who threaten to annihilate his world, Dylan once again asserts his right to speak out:How much do I know
To talk out of turn
You might say that I’m young
You might say I’m unlearned
But there’s one thing I know
Though I’m younger than you
Even Jesus would never
Forgive what you do
Fully aware of his temerity in speaking out, he is nonetheless convinced of its urgent necessity. Paradoxically, the sense of impotence in the face of a prospective nuclear holocaust emboldened both Dylan and his generation. Confronted with such recklessness, there was no time to waste and nothing to lose. A voice had to be raised—if only to pronounce a curse. The climactic verse (which Joan Baez refused to sing) is morbidly unforgiving:I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I’ll watch while you’re lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I’ll stand o’er your grave
’Til I’m sure that you’re dead
The vindictive note was uncharacteristic of the civil rights and peace mo
vements of the first half of the decade—but it was characteristic Dylan. And it strengthens the song. For this is not merely a desire to bury a group of wicked individuals, but to bury a social interest and a system that breeds war.
That Dylan was no liberal even before he made his break with the liberals is confirmed by “With God on Our Side,” another composition of early 1963. Here he subjects the epic narrative of American history and national identity to an iconoclastic revision worthy of Malcolm X. Effacing himself in the first verse (“Oh my name it is nothin’ / My age it means less”), he notes that he was taught that “the land that I live in / Had God on its side.” He then embarks on a coruscating survey of the genocide and militarism engendered by this nationalist fundamentalism. “Oh the history books tell it / They tell it so well”—but they do not tell the truth: about the Indians, about the Spanish-American War and World War I, about the post-World War II rehabilitation of ex-Nazis. Dylan brings the story up to the minute, observing “I’ve learned to hate Russians / All through my whole life,” and spells out what this latest incarnation of the national mission means:But now we got weapons
Of the chemical dust
If fire them we’re forced to
Then fire them we must
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