Bob Dylan's Beginning

A few years ago when Bob Dylan wrote his book of memoirs, Chronicles (Simon & Schuster, 2004), he recalled hospital visits he had made to meet with his musical role model, Woody Guthrie. He also had met Guthrie at the home of Bob Gleason, a friend with whom Woody would be on weekends before his illness had become too severe to travel. Many have spoken of these contacts as symbolic of Guthrie’s passing the torch of folk music to this young singer representing another generation, as if a mentor were conferring approval upon his protégé. Some even claim Guthrie expressed admiration for Dylan’s singing. Although, as Howard Sounes suggests in Down the Highway, his biography of Dylan, Guthrie’s health had deteriorated because of Huntington’s chorea to the point that he could not really respond with language to visitors, and some even doubted whether he recognized those who came to see him: “The truth was that the meetings were much more significant to Bob than they were to Guthrie, who was very sick indeed. He may have laughed and twinkled when Bob sang for him . . . but that did not mean he recognized the boy.”

No matter what the extent of Guthrie’s recognition or the relationship between the two may have been, in retrospect critics sometimes consider this crossing of singing careers as a grand passage in American music and culture, a transition to be treasured. However, in his description of the moments spent with Guthrie, Dylan seems to equally emphasize a blended sense of frustration and emotional exhaustion felt at the time because the most notable voice in American folk music had faded away into silence without much notice by those in the nation that had shaped his song lyrics.

Bob Dylan relates his memory: “I had tried to visit Woody regularly, but now it was getting harder to do. Woody had been confined to Greystone Hospital in Morristown, New Jersey, and I would usually take the bus there from the Port Authority terminal, make the hour-and-a-half ride and then walk the rest of the half mile up the hill to the hospital, a gloomy and threatening granite building—looked like a medieval fortress. Woody always asked me to bring him cigarettes, Raleigh cigarettes. Usually I’d play him his songs during the afternoon. Sometimes he’d ask for specific ones—‘Rangers Command,’ ‘Do Re Me,’ ‘Dust Bowl Blues,’ ‘Pretty Boy Floyd,’ ‘Tom Joad,’ the song he’d written after seeing the movie The Grapes of Wrath. I knew all those songs and many more. Woody was not celebrated at this place, and it was a strange environment to meet anybody, least of all the true voice of the American spirit.”

A bit further into his book of memoirs, Dylan confides his state of mind when he observed the depressing conditions in which Guthrie found himself confined in that psychiatric institution: “The scene was frightful, but Woody Guthrie was oblivious to all of it. A male nurse would usually bring him out to see me and then after I’d been there a while, would lead him away. The experience was sobering and psychologically draining.”

Considering this situation, one may not be surprised that Bob Dylan’s initial self-titled album, released on March 19, 1962, which consisted almost totally of covers for classic folk songs or traditional blues numbers, offers an original Dylan tune, “Song to Woody,” included as a tribute and a toast to his hero. Dylan apparently had played the song for Woody during his visits, and he believed it pleased his hero. The lyrics of this piece clearly exhibit Woody Guthrie’s influence and even echo the rhythm or distinct words from his well-known songs.

SONG TO WOODY

I’m out here a thousand miles from my home,
Walkin’ a road other men have gone down.
I'm seein’ your world of people and things,
Your paupers and peasants and princes and kings.

Hey, hey Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song
’Bout a funny ol’ world that’s a-comin’ along.
Seems sick an’ it’s hungry, it’s tired an’ it’s torn,
It looks like it’s a-dyin’ an’ it’s hardly been born.

Hey, Woody Guthrie, but I know that you know
All the things that I’m a-sayin’ an’ a-many times more.
I’m a-singin’ you the song, but I can’t sing enough,
’Cause there’s not many men that done the things that you’ve done.

Here’s to Cisco an’ Sonny an’ Leadbelly too,
An’ to all the good people that traveled with you.
Here’s to the hearts and the hands of the men
That come with the dust and are gone with the wind.

I’m a-leavin’ tomorrow, but I could leave today,
Somewhere down the road someday.
The very last thing that I’d want to do
Is to say I’ve been hittin’ some hard travelin’ too.

With his first album and this particular song Bob Dylan began traveling his own musical road, a path that has involved a number of interesting twists and turns. Along his evolving journey the past half-century, Bob Dylan has proven to be an enduring and formidable figure in American culture, perhaps the most influential singer-songwriter in the nation’s musical history. Indeed, I frequently have heard fellow poets remark upon the subtle way in which language or rhythm in Dylan’s lyrics has swayed them somewhat in their own writings.

As I have written previously, when I offered in 1999 an “Inaugural Lecture” at my university, a presentation traditionally delivered to the community upon attaining full academic rank (and later published as an article titled “Writing Poetry: Art, Artifacts, and Articles of Faith”), I commented in one excerpt: “three writers who have greatly influenced my writing of poetry are Robert Frost, Robert Penn Warren, and Robert Lowell—my literary trinity. The three ‘Bobs’ I like to call them. (My wife insists that if I were complete in my list, I would add Bob Dylan as well.)”

I remember how Bob Dylan’s presence, musically and physically, could be felt during his early years in New York City. Indeed, when in high school, a few friends and I spent much of our time in Greenwich Village, often sitting in a diner on one corner of the block where Dylan lived, watching for him on days he might walk by our window table. Later, as a graduate student and apprentice poet I would sometimes attend parties, book signings, or gallery openings where literary celebrities or visual artists and musicians could be found, at times including folks like Andy Warhol, Allen Ginsberg, and even Bob Dylan.

Certainly, Dylan regarded poets as significant reflections of the American voice and some seemed to exert influence on the texture in his voice. In fact, Allen Ginsberg occasionally accompanied Dylan on stage during touring and famously appeared in the “Subterranean Homesick Blues” music video. In Chronicles Dylan begins one of his chapters with the following observations: “I had just returned to Woodstock from the Midwest—from my father’s funeral. There was a letter from Archibald MacLeish waiting for me on the table. MacLeish, Poet Laureate of America—one of them. Carl Sandburg, poet of the prairie and the city, and Robert Frost, the poet of dark meditations were the others. MacLeish was the poet of night stones and the quick earth. These three, the Yeats, Browning and Shelley of the New World, were gigantic figures, had defined the landscape of twentieth-century America. They put everything in perspective.”

Some have suggested Bob Dylan should be regarded as a poet as well. In fact, as British Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion expressed his fondness for Dylan’s poetic language, with “Visions of Johanna” containing his favorite lyrics. Dylan is quoted as considering himself “a poet first and a musician second.” I don’t go so far as to label Dylan a poet because I consider the words in his lyrics already as valuable as any poems when regarded simply as sensational songs, each one existing just as Dylan designed it for his listeners. Moreover, since he often changes the ways he presents the songs in concert and sometimes alters the lyrics, one might contend the songs are meant to be experienced differently every time they are performed, and the static words on a page would not fully represent them. The power and the persuasion of his language can best be experienced with the rhythm and melody contributed by his music, as well as the unique cadence and phrasing placed upon the words by Dylan’s singing.

Supposedly, Bob Dylan’s first album was taped in a few hours on a cold day in November of 1961, and the recording cost less than $500 for Columbia producer John Hammond. Over the decades since that album was released on March 19, 1962, Bob Dylan has continually produced music that has transformed much of American music and had an impact on other areas of American culture, as many were reminded recently with the release of I’m Not There, the Academy Award-nominated film inspired by Dylan’s life and the various stages during his ever-developing career.

Now nearly 67, eighteen years older than the age of Woody when they first met, Dylan also has engaged in some hard traveling down the roads almost constantly in his “never-ending tour” that usually includes concerts worldwide throughout most of every year. One could not have known how appropriate, perhaps prophetic, the words in that first lyric written to Woody Guthrie by a young and enthusiastic beginning singer-songwriter named Bob Dylan would appear to be so many years later.