Bob Dylan in America

by Sean Wilentz

  * Dylan seems to have been especially pleased by Brady’s superb work, recorded on Andy Irvine and Paul Brady (1976) and Welcome Here Kind Stranger (1978), and performed it even though he could never replicate Brady’s guitar playing or sweet tenor. Numerous concerts on the Never Ending Tour included Dylan’s rendition of Brady’s rendition of “The Lakes of Pontchartrain.” He would also record, but release only many years later, a version of Brady and Irvine’s arrangement of “Mary and the Soldier.”

  * Bill Monroe and His Bluegrass Boys later performed “White House Blues” as a bluegrass breakdown, its lyrics somewhere between straight and comical.

  * “Duncan and Brady” would also prove popular, and Dylan sang it often in concert between 2000 and 2002.

  * According to The Oxford English Dictionary, “rounder” is an American term dating to the late nineteenth century that refers to a person “who makes the round of prisons, workhouses, drinking saloons, etc.; a habitual criminal, loafer, or drunkard.” In the version Odum collected, the rounder was Delia, not Cooney. Although unusual to find in a song, Odum observed, “the term ‘rounder’ is applied not only to men but to women also.”

  * A musical aside: this line echoes the very first line in one of the many versions of “Stagolee,” as recorded by Mississippi John Hurt in 1928, further suggesting the two songs were connected: “Police officer, how can it be? / You can arrest everybody but cruel Stagolee.”

  8

  DYLAN AND THE SACRED HARP:

  “Lone Pilgrim,” Malibu, California, May 1993

  In his quirky liner notes to World Gone Wrong, Dylan described “Lone Pilgrim” (he slightly clipped the song’s original title, “The Lone Pilgrim”) and said what he thought the song meant: “the lunacy of trying to fool the self is set aside at some given point. salvation & the needs of mankind are prominent & hegemony takes a breathing spell.” It’s a very modern reading of a very old song—and an unsettled reading. Hegemonic technology has reached the point, Dylan went on to say, where virtual reality can wipe out and supplant the truth; and, sooner or later, it will. When that happens, “look out!” Dylan wrote, “there wont be songs like these anymore. factually there aren’t any now.”

  A decade after he recorded “Blind Willie McTell,” Dylan was still thinking about salvation, humanity, and old songs, but now with a sense that those songs—which could keep the world’s power and greed at bay—were doomed; and that he might be one of the dwindling last generation of singers to remember and sing them; and that all he can do in the face of that knowledge is to sing them anyway.* And for the conclusion to World Gone Wrong, Dylan chose an old song of death, spiritual rebirth, and consolation that appeared in the most venerated collection of Anglo-American songs.

  The history of The Sacred Harp, the legendary American hymnal, started with a fight.

  Sometime in 1835, a Baptist singing master and song collector named William Walker journeyed north from his home in Spartanburg, South Carolina, carrying with him a selection of what he called “Tunes, Hymns, and Anthems” as well as “a number of excellent new Songs.”1 The music was transcribed in the popular form of shaped notes on musical staves. According to a much later, not wholly trustworthy account, Walker had collected the melodies and lyrics with the help of his brother-in-law Benjamin Franklin White, and Walker agreed to set out alone in order to get the collection published for the both of them. Yet once Walker arranged for publication, it looks as if he completely forgot about White.

  Later that year, when The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion appeared—one source says in New Haven, Connecticut, although the earliest extant edition was printed in Philadelphia—Walker’s name alone appeared beneath the preface, which he dated “Spartanburg, S.C., September 1835.” The book was an oblong rectangular hymnal of more than two hundred pages, with about half its songs credited to well-known earlier writers, above all the early-eighteenth-century British Nonconformist Isaac Watts, later celebrated as the father of English hymnody. Many of the other songs were credited to no one; still others were credited to disparate authors ranging from Walker’s brother, David, to a late-sixteenth-century writer known by the initials “F.B.P.” Three songs were partly credited to American Indians, and Walker claimed quite a few of the best selections for himself, including the peculiarly fatalistic, haunting, and encouraging “Hallelujah!”:

  And let this feeble body fail,

  And let it faint or die;

  My soul shall quit this mournful vale,

  And soar to worlds on high.2

  And I’ll sing hallelujah,

  And you’ll sing hallelujah,

  And we’ll all sing hallelujah,

  When we arrive at home.

  Walker, who said he wanted to include only the best songs in his book, appropriated freely, and he feigned utter candor about it. Given the existence, he wrote, of a “great many good airs (which I could not find in any publication nor in manuscript),” he conceded that he had sometimes thought up lines of his own and called himself the song’s author.3 In fact, he borrowed more of the lyrics than he let on.

  Title page to an early edition of The Sacred Harp, 1860. (photo credit 8.1)

  As soon as Ben White learned that he had been denied the credit due him for helping to compile The Southern Harmony—so the story goes—he ceased speaking to Walker for the rest of his life. What is certain is that in 1844, White (having since relocated to Harris County, Georgia, and having found a new collaborator, the young tunesmith E. J. King) saw his own book appear in Philadelphia—The Sacred Harp, presenting more than 250 songs, including, its title page proclaimed, “nearly one hundred pieces never before published.” The two hymnals, drawing on many common sources, then battled against each other and several other collections for public favor. White and King’s book eventually prevailed. Published today in two separate editions (one of which has been through seven major revisions atop three that White himself made during his lifetime; the other edition has seen six revisions), The Sacred Harp remains the predominant hymnal for sacred singing groups in large parts of the American South. The only known occasion when The Southern Harmony remains in regular use appears to be at an annual conclave known as the Big Singing in Benton, Kentucky, which, having been held since 1884, does give Walker’s book a smaller but undeniable distinction.

  The success of The Sacred Harp has led many writers and listeners to lump together all shape-note (or fasola) singing as Sacred Harp music. It has tied that singing style closely in history to the eruption of religious revivalism before the Civil War described as the Second Great Awakening. The so-called Sacred Harp tradition is also known primarily as an American southern hymnody—what the pioneering folklorist George Pullen Jackson called “white spirituals in the southern uplands.”

  Each of these propositions contains some justice but is also misleading. Although The Sacred Harp greatly helped to spread and popularize the shape-note form, neither it nor The Southern Harmony was the first important collection of its kind. The songs performed by shape-note-singing assemblies over the decades have included many with texts dating back to the seventeenth century and in a few cases even earlier, and with melodies as old as Gregorian chants. Likewise, shape-note melody, far from being a distinctly American form (let alone southern regional form), blends styles from the British Isles and the European continent as well as from various parts of what has become the United States. Indeed, by traveling north to get The Southern Harmony published in 1835, William Walker carried an American sacred hybrid closer to where it had originated more than a century earlier, in Massachusetts.

  Although colonial New Englanders were long used to the recitation and singing of psalms by the early eighteenth century, ministers had become alarmed at the poor quality of vocalizing in church, which they blamed on a shortage of both printed music and ordinary parishioners who could read it. Drawing on the existing model of the evening literary schools, they founded singing schools for instructing large numbers of Yanke
e farmers and artisans in the basic elements of music. Harvard-trained clerics duly supplied the required hymnals. The first sacred songbook published in the American colonies, John Tufts’s Introduction to the Singing of Psalm-Tunes, dates to 1715. Instead of using the standard note head in his scores, Tufts inserted the first letter of the easily learned syllabic mnemonic for each note in the musical scale: fa, sol, la, fa, sol, la, mi. Thus simplified, the music became extremely popular during the colonial period through the American Revolution, as taught in singing schools that spread westward with the white population. The music in turn inspired numerous songbook composers from outside the ranks of the ministry, including the Boston tanner William Billings. In 1770, at age twenty-four, Billings published the first of his six major sacred song collections, The New-England Psalm-Singer. Musicologists would eventually regard him as the greatest master of choral music in early America.

  Paul Revere, “A Music Party,” engraving, frontispiece for William Billings, The New-England Psalm-Singer (Boston, 1770). (photo credit 8.2)

  In the 1790s, just as Billings’s career was ending, John Connelly, a Philadelphia storekeeper, devised a new system of notation, replacing geometric shapes for the syllables: a triangle for fa, a circle for sol, a square for la, and a diamond for mi. The use of shapes in musical notation dated back at least to the Middle Ages, but Connelly’s was the first system to denote the individual notes of the scale in this way. First utilized in a collection by William Smith and William Little, The Easy Instructor; or, A New Method of Teaching Sacred Harmony, which first appeared in Albany, New York in 1798, the shape-note system caught on immediately and became the standard for singing classes around the country. Both The Southern Harmony and The Sacred Harp adopted its shape-note scheme, as did numerous other new songbooks.

  The opening decades of the nineteenth century brought additional developments, liturgical and theological, that altered the geographical locus of fasola singing. Beginning in the 1820s, in New England and the Middle Atlantic cities, a so-called better music movement, led by the Presbyterian banker, organist, educational reformer, and music instructor Lowell Mason, displaced the eighteenth-century singing-school curriculum in churches and public schools with music drawn from the European classical masters, including Mozart and Haydn. In place of a hard-edged but harmonically complex tune such as “Prospect,” with lyrics taken from Isaac Watts—“Why should we start, or fear to die? What tim’rous worms we mortals are”—the “better music” advocates substituted genteel fare such as “Joy to the World,” its lyrics also written by Watts yet with music that apparently was written by George Frideric Handel and arranged by Lowell Mason.4 Fasola singing retreated into the rural backcountry, especially the relatively remote upland South, where northeastern gentility carried little force.

  Over these same decades, the rural camp-meeting evangelicalism of the Second Great Awakening, originating in the great revival at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in 1801, crested. Alongside the major evangelical churches—Baptists, Methodists, and so-called revival Presbygationalists—arose a dizzying array of new Protestant denominations, cults, and sects, in the greatest outbreak of Anglo-American religious invention since the English Puritan revolution of the seventeenth century. The demand for new songbooks rose accordingly, not simply for use at the camp meetings and in proliferating singing societies, but for private domestic worship, in the rural South as well as the more dignified, Eurocentric Northeast. The former provided the spiritual hunger and commercial market that William Walker, Benjamin Franklin White, E. J. King, and other fasola songbook writers aimed to tap, aided by recent innovations in printing technology that made the issue of mass editions more efficient and inexpensive than ever before. Precise numbers are impossible to determine, but Walker claimed that The Southern Harmony sold about 600,000 copies in its first half century on the market. One observer noted that in the years just preceding the Civil War, the only book more likely to be found in a southern household other than The Sacred Harp was the Holy Bible.

  The fasola compilers, especially Walker, White, and King, were driven by more than a desire to cash in. “I have endeavoured to gratify the taste of all,” Walker wrote in his introduction to the first edition of his book.5 This meant supplying the entire array of evangelical churches “with a number of good, plain tunes” suited to the meters of their different existing hymnals—but also including older, contrapuntal “fugued” compositions at which Billings had excelled, as well as newer melodies picked up from hither and yon, often credited to one of the compilers. Eclecticism as well as excellence dominated the selection process. “Those that are partial to ancient music, will find here some good old acquaintances,” The Southern Harmony claimed, while “youthful companions, who are more fond of modern music,” would find enough to satisfy them. (The former included selections from Billings, as well as from European sources as old as John Calvin’s Genevan Psalter; the latter included music by Mozart and Carl Maria von Weber.) Across the abundance of sects and denominations, the hymnals would spread the lessons and pleasures of musical fellowship, open to all believers just as God’s grace was open to all sinners who sought it. And musically, the songbooks proved flexible to adapting all sorts of influences—including those aimed against the supposed vulgarities of fasola singing. The third edition of The Southern Harmony, published in 1854, took note of Lowell Mason’s collection Carmina Sacra, which had appeared thirteen years earlier—and Walker included a shape-note version of “Joy to the World.”

  As its influence spread in the 1840s and 1850s, fasola singing remained firmly participatory rather than grandly performative. The major singing sites became gatherings known as conventions, including the Southern Musical Convention (organized in Upson County, Georgia, in 1845, with The Sacred Harp as its official book) and, after the Civil War, the Tallapoosa Singing Convention (organized in Haralson County, Georgia, in 1867), along with countless others located in towns from the Carolinas to Texas. Although reputed to be uniquely popular among Baptists (especially Primitive Baptists or those who preferred to be known simply as “plain old Baptists”), the fasola conventions admitted of no distinctions other than the desire to sing of and to the Lord, a cappella, with the assembled faithful seated in a square, arranged section by section—trebles, altos, tenors, and basses—and with a group leader conducting from the square’s center. The basic layout survives at the scores of fasola singing conventions still held today chiefly in the Deep South.

  Musically, the fasola tradition is most readily identifiable by its insistent modality, reinforced by the frequent absence of a fifth in the chordal structure. Harmonies are present, but they are odd, with each vocal part sounding as if it follows its own line only to converge at climactic moments. The style, known to musicologists as dispersed harmony, was typical of the early American singing-school idiom; it also retained vestiges of Renaissance polyphony. Apart from Native American chants, it remains the most ancient form of popular music sung in the United States.

  Lyrically, the hymns, psalms, and odes strongly reflect the nonconformism of the early eighteenth century and after, both in their theology and in their poetry. The songs chiefly concern human frailty and death (the essence of American secular balladry) as well as faith and redemption. But there are many fasola songs that, while pursuing these themes, break out in a strange beauty all their own. Consider the Sacred Harp psalm tune “Africa,” its melody composed by Billings, who lifted the lyrics from Watts in 1778. The song has nothing explicitly to do with Africa. (Billings freely chose the names of New England towns and foreign continents as titles for his songs.) It begins with a leap of joy at the solemn oaths that have turned God’s mercy drops into a shower of salvation upon Sion-Hill (which in the patriot Billings’s compositions often means America). Sion would dwell on the heart of everlasting love, says the Lord, even “should nature change / And mothers monster prove.” But the final verse, carried along by Billings’s majestic musical cadences, suddenly describes a painfu
l act of human redemption, with blood gushing in a Sion that has fallen to pieces:

  Deep on the palms of both my hands

  I have engraved her name;

  My hands shall raise her ruin’d walls,

  And build her broken frame.6

  Perhaps Billings thought he was updating Watts in order to refer to war-torn America; or perhaps the choice of “Africa” was a deliberate reference to slavery; or perhaps the composer was simply struck by Watts’s startling image. No matter: the amazing lines would resound over hills and valleys across the South for a century and a half.

  A full accounting of Sacred Harp singing’s effects on American literature as well as on American music has yet to be written. Only when George Pullen Jackson published the first major study of the genre in 1933 did it come to broad notice as a popular art form. Beyond Joe Dan Boyd’s fine biography from 2002 of Judge Jackson, who produced The Colored Sacred Harp in 1934, much remains to be learned about the distinctive African-American renditions of fasola music. The form seems to be enjoying a new lease on life, decades after the 1960s folk revival, as shape-note assemblies gather regularly in such unlikely places as Waldoboro, Maine, and Brooklyn, New York. And those with a taste for the weird revenants of American culture need only listen to Bob Dylan’s rendition, on World Gone Wrong, of a hymn that appeared in The Sacred Harp, “The Lone Pilgrim.”

  The first song that Dylan describes in the notes to World Gone Wrong is Willie McTell’s “Broke Down Engine,” from the middle of the album’s track list—a blues in which the singer cries out to the Lord, not for religion, but to “give me back my good gal, please.” Dylan calls it “a Blind Willie McTell masterpiece” that is “about trains, mystery on the rails—the train of love, the train that carried my girl from town—The Southern Pacific, Baltimore & Ohio whatever—it’s about variations of human longing—the low hum in meter & syllables.” The last song that Dylan describes, and the last song on the album, is “Lone Pilgrim,” which, although Dylan doesn’t note it and may not have known, was among the hymns included in both The Southern Harmony and The Sacred Harp.