by Bob Dylan
During the next few weeks I went back a few times to Lyn’s house to listen to those records. He was the only one who seemed to have so many of them. One by one, I began singing them all, felt connected to these songs on every level. They were cosmic. One thing for sure, Woody Guthrie had never seen nor heard of me, but it felt like he was saying, “I’ll be going away, but I’m leaving this job in your hands. I know I can count on you.”
Now that I crossed the divide, I was head over heels in singing nothing but Guthrie songs—at house parties, in the coffeehouses, street singing, with Koerner, not with Koerner—if I had a shower I would have sung them in there, too. There were a lot of them and outside of the main ones, not easily to be found. There were no reissues of his older records, there were only the original ones, but I would move heaven and earth to find them, even went to the Minneapolis public library to the Folkways section. (Public libraries were the one place for some reason that had most of the Folkways records.) I’d always be checking the repertoires of every out of town performer who came through to see what Guthrie songs they knew that I didn’t, and I was beginning to feel the phenomenal scope of Woody’s songs—the Sacco and Vanzetti ballads, Dust Bowl and children songs, Grand Coulee Dam songs, venereal disease songs, union and workingman ballads, even his rugged heartbreak love ballads. Each one seemed like a towering tall building with a variety of scenarios all appropriate for different situations. Woody made each word count. He painted with words. That along with his stylized type singing, the way he phrased, the dusty cowpoke deadpan but amazingly serious and melodic sense of delivery, was like a buzzsaw in my brain and I tried to emulate it any way I could. A lot of folks might have thought of Woody’s songs as backdated, but not me. I felt they were totally in the moment, current and even forecasted things to come. I felt anything but like the young punk folksinger who had just begun out of nowhere six months previously. It felt more like I had instantly risen up from a noncommissioned volunteer to an honorable knight—stripes and gold stars.
Woody’s songs were having that big an effect on me, an influence on every move I made, what I ate and how I dressed, who I wanted to know, who I didn’t. In the late ’50s and early ’60s, teenage rebellion was beginning to make noise, but that scene hadn’t appealed to me, not in a wholehearted way. It had no organized shape. The rebel-without-a-cause thing wasn’t hands-on enough—even a lost cause, I thought, would be better than no cause. To the Beats, the devil was bourgeois conventionality, social artificiality and the man in the gray flannel suit.
Folk songs automatically went up against the grain of all these things and Woody’s songs even went against that. In comparison, everything else seemed one-dimensional. The folk and blues tunes had already given me my proper concept of culture, and now with Guthrie’s songs my heart and mind had been sent into another cosmological place of that culture entirely. All the other cultures of the world were fine, but as far as I was concerned, mine, the one I was born into, did the work of them all and Guthrie’s songs even went further.
The sun had swung my way. I felt like I’d crossed the threshold and there was nothing in sight. Singing Woody’s songs, I could keep everything else at a safe distance. This fantasy was short-lived, however. Thinking that I was wearing the sharpest looking uniform and the shiniest boots around, all of a sudden I felt a jolt and was stopped short in my tracks. It felt like someone had taken a chunk out of me. Jon Pankake, a folk music purist enthusiast and sometime literary teacher and film wiseman, who’d been watching me for a while on the scene, made it his business to tell me that what I was doing hadn’t escaped him. “What do you think you’re doing? You’re singing nothing but Guthrie songs,” he said, jabbing his finger into my chest like he was talking to a poor fool. Pankake was authoritative and a hard guy to get past. It was known around that Pankake had a vast collection of the real folk records and could go on and on about them. He was part of the folk police, if not the chief commissioner, wasn’t impressed with any of the new talent. To him nobody possessed any great mastery—no one could succeed in laying a hand on any of the traditional stuff with any authority. Of course he was right, but Pankake didn’t play or sing. It’s not like he put himself in any position to be judged.
He was a bit of a film critic, too. While other intellectual types might be discussing poetic differences between T. S. Eliot and e. e. cummings, Pankake would come up with arguments about why John Wayne was a better cowboy in Rio Bravo then he was in Legend of the Lost. He expounded on directors like Howard Hawks or John Ford, that they get Wayne when other directors don’t. Maybe Pankake was right, maybe not. It wasn’t that big a deal. Actually, as far as Wayne goes, I’d meet the Duke in the mid-’60s. He was the big male movie star at the time and was filming a war movie about Pearl Harbor, In Harm’s Way, over in Hawaii. A girl I used to know in Minneapolis, Bonnie Beecher, had become an actress and was playing a supporting role. Me and my band, The Hawks, had stopped through there on our way to Australia and she invited me down to the set, a naval battleship. She introduced me to the Duke, who was in full military uniform, an army of people surrounding him. I watched him film a scene and then Bonnie brought me over to meet him. “I hear you’re a folksinger,” he said and I nodded. “Sing something,” he said. I took out my guitar and sang “Buffalo Skinners” and he smiled, looked at Burgess Meredith who was sitting in a canvas chair, then he looked back at me and said, “I like that. Left that drover’s bones to bleach, heh?” “Yup.” He asked me if I knew “Blood on the Saddle.” I did know “Blood on the Saddle,” a little bit of it, anyway, but I knew “High Noon” better. I thought about singing it and maybe if I was standing there with Gary Cooper, I would have. But Wayne wasn’t Gary Cooper. I don’t know if he would have liked that song. The Duke was a massive figure. He looked like a heavy piece of hauled lumber, and it didn’t seem like any man could stand shoulder to shoulder with him. Not anybody in the movies, anyway. I thought of asking him why some of his cowboy films were better than others, but it would have been crazy to do that. Or maybe it wouldn’t have been…I don’t know. In any case, I never would have dreamed that I’d be standing there on a battleship, somewhere in the Pacific singing for the great cowboy John Wayne, while back in Minneapolis face-to-face with Jon Pankake…
“You’re trying hard, but you’ll never turn into Woody Guthrie,” Pankake says to me as if he’s looking down from some high hill, like something has violated his instincts. It was no fun being around Pankake. He made me nervous. He breathed fire through his nose. “You better think of something else. You’re doing it for nothing. Jack Elliott’s already been where you are and gone. Ever heard of him?” No, I’d never heard of Jack Elliott. When Pankake said his name, it was the first time I’d heard it. “Never heard of him, no. What does he sound like?” John said that he’d play me his records and that I was in for a surprise.
Pankake lived in an apartment above McCosh’s bookstore, a place that specialized in eclectic old books, ancient texts, philosophical political pamphlets from the 1800s on up. It was a neighborhood hangout for intellectuals and Beat types, on the main floor of an old Victorian house only a few blocks away. I went there with Pankake and saw it was true that he had all the incredible records, ones you never saw and wouldn’t know where to get. For someone who didn’t sing and play, it was amazing that he had so many. The record he took out and played for me first was Jack Takes the Floor on the Topic label out of London—an imported record, a very obscure one. There were probably only about ten of these discs in the whole U.S.A., or maybe Pankake had the only one in the country. I didn’t know. If Pankake hadn’t played it for me most likely I would have never heard it. The record started to spin and Jack’s voice blasted into the room. “San Francisco Bay Blues,” “Ol’ Riley” and “Bed Bug Blues” go by in a flash. Damn, I’m thinking, this guy is really great. He sounds just like Woody Guthrie, only a leaner, meaner one, not singing the same Guthrie songs, though. I felt like I’d been cast into sudden hell.
Jack was some master of musical tricks. The record cover was mysterious, but not in an ominous way. It showed a character with certain careless ease, rakish looking, a handsome saddle tramp. He’s dressed like a cowboy. His tone of voice is sharp, focused and piercing. He drawls and he’s so confident it makes me sick. All that and he plays the guitar effortlessly in a fluid flat-picking perfected style. His voice leaps all over the room in a lazy way and he is explosive when he wants to be. You could hear that he had Woody Guthrie’s style down pat and more. Another thing—he was a brilliant entertainer, something that most of the folk musicians didn’t bother with. Most folk musicians waited for you to come to them. Jack went out and grabbed you. Elliott, who’d been born ten years before me, had actually traveled with Guthrie, learned his songs and style firsthand and had mastered it completely.
Pankake was right. Elliott was far beyond me. There were a few other Ramblin’ Jack records that he had, too—one where he sings with Derroll Adams, a singer buddy of his from Portland who played banjo like Bascom Lamar Lunsford and sang in a dry and laconic witted style suiting Jack perfectly. Together they sounded like horses galloping. They did “More Pretty Girls Than One,” “Worried Man Blues” and “Death of John Henry.” Jack alone was something else, though. On the cover of his record Jack Takes the Floor, you could almost see his eyes. They were saying something, but I knew not what. Pankake let me listen to the record repeated times. It was uplifting, but it was being thrown down at the same time. Pankake said something earlier, like Jack being the king of the folksingers, the city ones, anyway. Listening to him, you wouldn’t doubt it. I don’t know if Pankake was trying to enlighten me or put me down. It didn’t matter. Elliott had indeed already gone beyond Guthrie, and I was still getting there. I had nothing near the compelling poise of self that I heard on the record.
I sheepishly left the apartment and went back out into the cold street, aimlessly walked around. I felt like I had nowhere to go, felt like one of the dead men walking through catacombs. It would be hard not to be influenced by the guy I just heard. I’d have to block it out of my mind, though, forget this thing, tell myself I hadn’t heard him and he didn’t exist. He was overseas in Europe, anyway, in a self-imposed exile. The U.S. hadn’t been ready for him. Good. I was hoping he’d stay gone, and I kept hunting for Guthrie songs.
A few weeks later Pankake heard me playing again and was quick to point out that I didn’t fool him, that I used to be imitating Guthrie and now I was imitating Elliott and did I think in some way that I was equivalent to him? Pankake said that maybe I should go back to playing rock and roll, that he knew I used to do that. I don’t know how he knew—maybe he was a spy, too, but in any case, I wasn’t trying to fool anybody. I was just doing what I could with what I had where I was. Pankake was right, though. You can’t take only a few dance lessons and then think you are Fred Astaire.
Jon was one of the classic traditional folk snobs. They looked down on anything that smelled of commerciality and were vocal about it: groups like The Brothers Four, Chad Mitchell Trio, Journeymen, Highwaymen—the traditional folk snobs considered them all exploiters of a sacred thing. Okay, so that stuff didn’t give me orgasms either. But they were no threat, so I didn’t care about it one way or another. Most of the folk crowd trashed the commercial folk stuff. The popular perception of folk music were things like “Waltzing Matilda,” “Little Brown Jug” and “The Banana Boat Song” and all that stuff had appealed to me a few years earlier so I didn’t feel the need to put it down. To be fair, there were snobs on the other side, too—commercial folk snobs. These kind looked down on the traditional singers as being old-fashioned and wrapped in cobwebs. Bob Gibson, a clean-cut commercial folksinger from Chicago, had a big following and some records out. If he dropped in to see you perform he’d be in the front row. After the first or second song, if you weren’t commercial enough, too raw or ragged around the edges, he might conspicuously stand up, make a fuss and walk out on you. There wasn’t any middle ground and it seemed like everybody was a snob of one kind or another. I tried to keep everything in perspective.
Whatever I heard people say was irrelevant—both good or bad—didn’t get caught up in it. I had no preconditioned audience anyway. What I had to do was keep straight ahead and I did that. The road ahead had always been encumbered with shadowy forms that had to be dealt with in one way or another. Now there was another one. I knew Jack was up there someplace and I hadn’t missed what Pankake had said about him. It was true. Jack was the King of the Folksingers.
The “Queen of the Folksingers,” that would have to be Joan Baez. Joan was born the same year as me and our futures would be linked, but at this time to even think about it would be preposterous. She had one record out on the Vanguard label called Joan Baez and I’d seen her on TV. She’d been on a folk music program broadcast nationwide on CBS out of New York. There were other performers on the show including Cisco Houston, Josh White, Lightnin’ Hopkins. Joan sang some ballads on her own and then sat side by side with Lightnin’ and sang a few things with him. I couldn’t stop looking at her, didn’t want to blink. She was wicked looking—shiny black hair that hung down over the curve of slender hips, drooping lashes, partly raised, no Raggedy Ann doll. The sight of her made me high. All that and then there was her voice. A voice that drove out bad spirits. It was like she’d come down from another planet.
She sold a lot of records and it was easy to understand why. The women singers in folk music were performers like Peggy Seeger, Jean Ritchie and Barbara Dane, and they didn’t translate well to a modern crowd. Joan was nothing like any of them. There was no one like her. It would be a few years before Judy Collins or Joni Mitchell would come on the scene. I liked the older women singers—Aunt Molly Jackson and Jeanie Robinson—but they didn’t have the piercing quality that Joan had. I’d been listening to a few of the female blues singers a lot, like Memphis Minnie and Ma Rainey, and Joan was in some kind of way more like them. There was nothing girlish about them and there was nothing girlish about Joan, either. Both Scot and Mex, she looked like a religious icon, like somebody you’d sacrifice yourself for and she sang in a voice straight to God…also was an exceptionally good instrumentalist.
The Vanguard record was no phony baloney. It was almost frightening—an impeccable repertoire of songs, all hard-core traditional. She seemed very mature, seductive, intense, magical. Nothing she did didn’t work. That she was the same age as me almost made me feel useless. However illogical it might have seemed, something told me that she was my counterpart—that she was the one that my voice could find perfect harmony with. At the time there was nothing but distance and worlds and big divides between her and me. I was still stuck in the boondocks. Yet some strange feeling told me that we would inevitably meet up. I didn’t know much about Joan Baez. I had no idea that she’d always been a true loner, kind of like me, but she’d been bounced around a lot and lived in places from Baghdad to San Jose. She had experienced a whole lot more of the world than I did. Even so, to think that she was probably more like me than me would have seemed a little excessive.
There was no clue from her records that she was interested in social change or any of that. I considered her lucky, lucky to get involved in the right kind of folk music early on, get up to her eyeballs in it—learn how to play and sing it in an expert way, beyond criticism, beyond category. There was no one in her class. She was far off and unattainable—Cleopatra living in an Italian palace. When she sang, she made your teeth drop. Like John Jacob Niles, she was mighty strange. I’d be scared to meet her. She might bury her fangs in the back of my neck. I didn’t want to meet her, but I knew I would. I was going in the same direction even though I was way in back of her at the moment. She had the fire and I felt I had the same kind of fire. I could do the songs she did, for starters…“Mary Hamilton,” “Silver Dagger,” “John Riley,” “Henry Martin.” I could make them drop into place like she did, but in a different way. Not everyone can sing these s
ongs convincingly. The singer has to make you believe what you are hearing and Joan did that. I believed that Joan’s mother would kill somebody that she loved. I believed that. I believed that she’d come from that kind of family. You have to believe. Folk music, if nothing else, makes a believer out of you. I believed Dave Guard in The Kingston Trio, too. I believed that he would kill or already did kill poor Laura Foster. I believed that he’d kill someone else, too. I didn’t think he was playing around.
As far as other singers around town, there were some but not many. There was Dave Ray, a high school kid who sang Leadbelly and Bo Diddley songs on a twelve-string guitar, probably the only twelve-string guitar in the entire Midwest—and then there was Tony Glover, a harp player who played with me and Koerner sometimes. He sang a few songs, but mostly played the harp—cupped it in his hands and played like Sonny Terry or Little Walter. I played the harp, too, but in a rack…probably the only harmonica rack at the time in the Midwest. Racks were impossible to find. I’d used a lopsided coat hanger for a while, but it only had sort of worked. The real harmonica rack that I found was in the basement of a music store on Hennipen Avenue, still in a box unopened from 1948. As far as harp playing went, I tended to keep it simple.