| The Sixties | |
|
|
One
of the earliest, great songwriters to seize on the folk tradition as a creative
source of material was Tom Paxton. His greatest songs sound like they could
have been written a century ago, or with Woody during the Great Depression:
"Bottle of Wine," "Ramblin Boy," and "The
Last Thing On My Mind (listen)." He also wrote classic children's songs
like "The Marvelous Toy." On the other hand he wrote wickedly funny
topical songs protesting the Vietnam War, racism, and later on, Watergate. Paxton
was creating the kind body of work that Seeger was quilting together from many
sources. And Paxton was 20.
Dylan, of course, was the greatest synthesizer of folk music traditions - combining the outright thievery of Woody Guthrie with a poetic sensibility formed by Beat writers like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Take a look at the old Child Ballad, "Lord Randall," which Joan Baez probably introduced him to:
Oh where have you been Lord Randall my son
Oh where have you been my sweet pretty oneI've been to see my sweetheart's, mother make my bed soon
For I am weary to death and fain would lie down.
As the mother questions him more, (What did you eat there? Eels. What did you do with the leftovers? Fed them to the dogs. What happened to your dogs? They keeled over and died....) it turns out that the young man has been poisoned by his fiancee's mother - sometimes by the fiancee herself (and sometimes by his own mother!). In the end, he dies (of course), but not before willing away his worldly goods and cursing his murderess. Curiously, none of the versions provides a motive for the killing. Now compare the question and answer in Dylan's visionary classic, "A Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall":
Oh where have you been my blue-eyed son
Oh where have you been my darling young one?I've stumbled on the side of on twelve misty mountains
I walked and I've crawled down six crooked highways
I've stepped in the middle of seven sad forests
I've stood out in front of a dozen dead oceans
I've been 10,000 miles in the mouth of a graveyard.
And it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, it's hard
It's a hard rain's a gonna fall (listen)
"A
Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall," from The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963),
is a musical watershed and a high point of the folk revival. Instead of just
re-presenting old folksongs, Dylan is able to extract their power and resonance
and use them for his own creative ends. And in 1963, that end was protest -
against war, against poverty, against racism, against nuclear insanity. The
poisoning of Lord Randall inspired a vision of the poisoning of the world, and
a young man who decides not to take it lying down. This one song had startling
and wide ranging effects. It challenged young writers to be more creative in
their use of the tradition and in the couching of their political protests.
You can hear it in Paul Simon's transformations of "Scarborough Fair"
- another Child Ballad - and "Silent Night." On the other hand, both
Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell have both traced their decisions to become songwriters
to first hearing Dylan's song, thus inspiring the decade's chief confessional
songwriters too.
A final thought. It seems that we're just entering another renaissance of interest in traditional folk music. There is a flurry of reissues of classic recordings - but even more telling is the emergence of a wealth of unreleased tracks and basement tapes - source material that comes closer to the feel of true folk songs. The question is, how will the next generation of folksingers not only embrace their tradition but transform it?
-Hugh Blumenfeld
| • Sixties.com • bobdylan.com • Traditional Songs |
Next in the series: Songs of Protest: Civil Rights & the Vietnam War
Hugh Blumenfeld, Editor
hugh@balladtree.com
|
||||||||||||||||||
