Bob Dylan

I Pity the Poor Immigrant

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

It occurred to me: should I try to sing a version of Bob Dylan’s “I Pity the Poor Immigrant?”  Afterall, I, without a plan, seem to be performing songs from Dylan’s 1967 LP John Wesley Harding  recently, and that song is one of the more noted ones from the album. And immigrants, and immigration, are currently a preoccupation of my country’s inept and callous administration.

Dylan might have been writing of his own family’s immigrant history in this song — being second-generation from his grandparents emigration from the Russian Empire and Turkey. Furthermore, he grew up in the iron-ore mining area of Minnesota, a place full of folks with wide-ranging immigrant backgrounds. Given Dylan’s, and folk-song’s in general concern for the underdog, one might expect this to be a song of empathy for these close-in immigrants.

Yet when Dylan sang his song in 1967, still a young man,* there’s a duality in its presentation. The immigrants within it are portrayed then as poor not only in wealth, but also in spirit. For all of Dylan’s genius, the voice that sings this song largely speaks about how the immigrants, who’d be the elders of his town and family, are stunted in their outlook. Dylan may be a genius, but this could be the disappointed vision of a young person who sees the faults and failures there. That’s what many young people, even those who aren’t geniuses, do, and it’s an important task.

His singing on this 1967 version is calm, not accusatory — at moments even sounding concerned as he decries the immigrants fallen state. If the harmonicas play the skeleton keys to the song’s interior, the passionate timbre of his playing on that instrument in the song may well be saying he feels sorrowful about the situation. The performance doesn’t lay any blame on poverty, exploitation, or the hard road of feeling the need to leave one’s homeland to find succor with strangers. Dylan, whatever he’s expressing here, likely knows these factors. Perhaps he assumes we do too.

I think Dylan’s aim was to confound the expected here — to write a great song instead of a good one, some mere piece of civic songcraft.

I’m not a young man, and I would have to go back to relatives I never knew, and who therefore can’t be blamed for imperfect mentorship or spiritual poverty. And I know from my life, and in my time, what immigrants contribute to my country. Some of course are noticeable success stories, but I think too of the many who do the hardest and least-rewarded work of the nation. I’m hesitant to pick a bone with the quality of their spiritual insight while they are trudging through unglamourous work — but even more so in 2025 when they also get slammed by disreputable politicians as criminals, scofflaws, swindlers, and parasites. I’m sure there are some immigrants who are those things, but I’m also quite sure that those slathering on those broad charges include in themselves a good measure of those failings — and are so eagerly pointing at immigrants to divert focus on that.

So, this is how I came to create this new performance of Dylan’s song, one for our time and situation. I changed only a few words, but by phrasing and refocusing my aim from Dylan’s original performance, I tried to illuminate those opposing scapegoating forces to the immigrant’s lot.** I may not even have made a (downgraded) good song of it, but I got some things off my chest I felt I had to say.

I can’t identify all the sources for the pictures used here. Alas, my stock photo library was bereft of any suitable pictures.

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*When he wrote this, Dylan had only young children, ones not yet able to judge him and his generation’s failings. Has an older Dylan, now a grandfather, revisited this song? AFAIK, no. Expert Dylanologists may have more info, but Wikipedia says it was last performed during the latter legs of the Rolling Thunder tour many decades ago, and then as a bizarre rollicking up-tempo jaunt.

As I said recently when a reader/listener pointed out that I may have completely misread Blake’s “Holy Thursday,” my theories about what was behind Dylan’s creation of this song are in no way meant to be definitive. They are just what I hear in it, and feel free to think my new recasting of the song is a sacrilege. I’ll plead that one part of Dylan’s genius is that he sees fit to approach his own work in highly different ways, and I’m just doing what I learned from the master. You should feel something to sing a song, and this is what I felt. Feel different? Sing the song yourself.

**Even fewer words in my plan than you’ll hear in the video, as some other different words slipped in by accident while singing. Here’s a link to the original lyric. Changing the song’s concluding couplet is the only indictable premeditated felony, and the video underlines my approach to make the sins that Dylan’s 1967 performance directed at only the immigrants as more of a dialectic. An accidental, unintended, change that I regret in this version: “Shatter like a  glass” is inferior to the original “Shatter like the  glass,” and looses the possible intra-album connection with the glass that has fingers pressed up against it in “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine.”

I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine, with connections

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

I’m not one to closely follow religious matters, though many poets over the ages have — the history and the weight of all that combined belief and its inconsistent practice is considerable. I did have an interval as a youthful churchman of the Protestant kind, attracted by the community bonds and social activism of the Martin Luther King era,*  but it was recent reading of those fresh drafts of history that we call the news that brought the selection of a new Catholic Pope to my attention. For a moment my country was caught up in ancient offices as a break from the depravity of our domestic head of state.

So, first the death of the serving Pope, then the mourning, then the secret conclave in its smoke-emitting room, then the new Pope and the follow-up consideration of his background and concerns — extended this time by his North American origins. My BlueSky feed of wits supplied me with humorous predictions based on Bob/now Leo’s Chicago origins, but the pedant in me snorted most heartily when I read this news service summary of Leo’s biography explaining that he was a member of the Augustinian Order, monks with a call to service and piety. The wire-service, no doubt constrained by the spread-so-thin-the-bread-tears nature of modern journalism, informed its readers that the Augustinians were founded in the 13th century by Saint Augustine.

I have no idea what the titrated level of history buffery is within my treasured readership, but they were off by near a millennium — St. Augustine being a 4th century North African early church father! The medieval founders of this order of monks were looking back to late Western Roman empire times for a guiding light.

The Parlando results of my guffaws? I thought of a song that abides with me that I found on one of the first three record albums I bought as 1967 turned into 1968: “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine”  from Bob Dylan’s slightly undervalued LP John Wesley Harding.**   Dylan was on the face of it no more accurate than our news-service scribe. His apparition of St. Augustine is a troubled man, as many spiritual people are, and he briefly charges us with his preaching in the song, but Dylan’s Augustine is also specifically a martyr who was put to death, presumably by the authorities. Unlike many saints, Augustine of Hippo was not a martyr. While Augustine’s town was under siege by Vandals (the original ones, doing business as that tribal name not as members of DOGE)***  he died an old man from natural causes.

Dylan’s song is brief, brevity being an unusual virtue Dylan exercised in all but one song on John Wesley Harding.   And yet he was bringing history into the three verses, no choruses, no bridge song structure of his song. Within his seeming historical inaccuracy was his choice of a borrowed tune. “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine”  uses the melody and the structure of a 1930s song setting by Earl Robinson of a 1920s poem by Alfred Hayes**** about a man put out to death in 1915: “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night.”   I believe Dylan clearly meant to link the two men, in the way that dreams can combine things we never see in waking hours.

This song, and Dylan’s performance of it, has always touched me — and so having the coincidence of Augustinians being in the news, and the hopes that the new Pope may preach to our current overly-gifted Kings and Queens, I went to record myself singing this song of a remarkable comparing. Since it’s a copyrighted work, I present that performance today as a YouTube video. The few-hundred views one of my videos might gather would not make even a widows mite, but it’s my understanding that any revenue gathered from those annoying YouTube ads can be claimed by the rights holders. For my video I mingle artists representations of Augustine and Hill. If you can’t tell, the photos are Joe Hill and a news photo of a memorial march for him in 1915. Our 4th century Augustine was camera-shy, and has to be represented by artists’ paintings.

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*My youth included a couple years working at a hospital still being actively managed by an order of nuns in those days.

**In search of more footnotable connections: was it coincidence that the then considered inscrutable cover of the LP has two Bengali Baals, singers in the tradition of the first songwriter to win the Nobel Prize, Rabindranath Tagore. Surely the Bob Dylan of 1967 didn’t know he’d eventually be the second. Another connection: Joe Hill was a songwriter who sang for union organizing meetings and “He who sings, prays twice” is a saying attributed to Saint Augustine.

***Augustine’s writings include thoughts on The City of God that may survive the fall of empires. Shortly after Augustine’s death, the Vandals sacked his city. Stories have it that these Vandals were impressed by Augustine’s learning, and spared the library he had established there. The current ones aren’t up to that level of civilization.

****Hayes had a long writing career. Wikipedia tells me he was an uncredited screenwriter for the famous Italian film The Bicycle Thief.   It also claims he wrote a script for The Twilight Zone, but IMDB doesn’t confirm that.

All Along the Watchtower — the Tarot Card Version

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

For more than 50 years, I’ve often thought of this Bob Dylan song.

Today I was learning how to use a feature in my recording software, and I needed a vocal take to use as an example. I’ve been much concerned this winter with events that seem (as Thomas Hardy once wrote) to be “in the breaking of nations.” I guess I thought that busying myself with learning might let me take a break from that dread, and when I opened up a mic to sing, this was the song that came out of my mouth. I think it asked to be here today.

Songs and poems can do that. They aren’t necessarily mystic fortune-telling omens — they’re more at waves in the air or memory that come in to rattle your bones and vibrate your vocal cords or synapses.

The story in “All Along the Watchtower’s”  lyric is a repeating loop, the last verse’s approaching riders are the two foreground characters arriving to speak and open the song.  So, “All Along the Watchtower’s”  story doesn’t unfold — it refolds — and I chose to point that out in my version today. To illustrate this song for the video I dealt out some tarot cards. I don’t believe those cards are omniscient omens either, but the pictures can flip and spread for a receiving eye and mind. Perhaps all symbols, songs, fables, poems, pictures — all foolishness and wisdom — rotate around themselves like that.

Is this short post a break from Black History Month, so soon in this February? Well, maybe, but the song “All Along the Watchtower” is  best known from a monumental version performed by Jimi Hendrix.

Here’s the video of my version:

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Timothée Chalamet, A Complete Unknown, and a mid-winter song: Three Angels

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

I’m trying to decide between work on finishing a new Parlando piece combining literary poetry and original music, and seeing what I can do for a February Black History Month observance here. The first is mostly done, the latter is but ideas at this late date.

What to do? In my typical direct approach, I did something else today. This weekend I watched Timothée Chalamet appear on Saturday Night Live as the musical act on the long-lived sketch comedy television show. Chalamet is fresh off an acclaimed performance as the young Bob Dylan in the film A Complete Unknown.

I mostly liked that movie. Biopics are always dodgy things to do, as most people’s biographies when told straightforwardly do not have enough dramatic concision to make a compelling two-hour film. Which means they all have fibs in them, and they will perforce leave things and people out. It’s become an apparently unavoidable cliché to remark on this element by quoting a line from another film, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: ” When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”*  This misses the point of John Ford’s great film. When that line is uttered near the very end of that movie, Ford has shown us a compelling tale of a man, played by Jimmy Stewart, who had many great things about him, a man who at the end of the film had risen to become an honored Senator, a plausible Vice President even — but Ford also told us of another man, played by John Wayne, who may have been less interesting as a biography, but whose acts are critical to the movie, and who gave up more than legendary fame when making his choices. Ford isn’t praising that “print the legend” eventuality. Ford’s film prints “the fact.” He thinks that’s more interesting.

A Complete Unknown  tries within conventional running time to tell a complex story: of a young man who’s forming himself — not so much finding himself — as he wants to be unfindable. Instead of doing a “great man” tale, it wants us to see the other folks around him, lovers attracted to and understandably frustrated by Dylan; and a pair of men: one a businessman, the other a saint of citizenship (Albert Grossman and Pete Seeger). In between these, Johnny Cash plays an imp of the perverse. That complex tale is told at a brisk pace. I was able to forgive that. Yes, there are characters undervalued, incidents re-arranged in the timeline — but in the movie’s defense I’d say it couldn’t be otherwise, there were just so many  talented and interesting people in that time and place.

And then we got to the final incident, the film’s climax. Here time is suddenly allowed to expand and we are given more detail about something that lasted maybe 48 hours in real time. Some of that detail is accurate, much of it is not. Most of the inaccuracies are aimed not to expand the complexities of the relationships and times, but to simplify them and underline a simplistic point. Finally, the movie has introduced all these characters, and this is the place where the earlier parts of the film are exposition, and you can get them to fully spark and rub with their differing viewpoints. Instead, that doesn’t happen, you get instead a rock’n’roll pantomime, with caricatures shouting and everything but a pie-in-the face fight.**

This is not the fault of the performers though. The cast does a fine job, and before his actual work could be seen, Chalamet’s ability to pull off his performance as Dylan was generally doubted in online forums of musicians and music fans. He did fine, and as the movie publicity has informed us, he “did his own stunts” by learning to play guitar and harmonica and to sing live, and this led to this past weekend’s choice for him to appear as a musical act.***

Again, Chalamet exceeded expectations. His opening Dylan song, “Outlaw Blues,”  (done as a rap-chant with Jack White/Black Keys-like elements in the ensemble) was fresh and effective, including that Minnesota call-out to being “9 below zero at 3 o’clock in the afternoon.”  Even more surprising was Chalamet immediately going down-tempo with a real rarity that would have stumped all but the deepest of the deep-cut Dylan fans: “Three Angels.”   It’s a brief song from a now little regarded Dylan album New Morning.  It seemed a throw-away even in that less-celebrated collection, an off-hand narration of an urban winter scene post-Christmas. From my Parlando focus, it attracts me though. It’s got some elements of one of poet Frank O’Hara’s “walking around poems,” that paying attention to what we are not usually paying attention to mixed with a casual surrealism. Everyone in the song seems a non-sequitur somehow, and why does the truck have no wheels, why is the cop skipping? Three fellas are “crawling back to work” under the same number of angels playing silent fanfares in snow, and we may not know if those three are wise men or not, as nobody stops to ask why they are going to work. Here a link to his set of performances.

So, I admire Chalamet’s taste in Dylan songs there. Perhaps if he lives to my age he’ll also be good enough looking to play me in my biopic. But watching his performance my ego remembered that decades ago I did a cover of “Three Angels”  myself, one done early in my ability to overdub parts creating a one-man-band on a recording. Today I found the recording and made this short video to present it.

I think I did this recording on a “portastudio” cassette, or on my first computer-based recording system.

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*Here’s a good run-down of that “print the legend” trope, which takes care to get the details right.

**If you really want to know the complexities, I recommend the book which the movie bought the rights to: Elijah Wald’s Dylan Goes Electric.   I thought I knew all the details of the film’s famous climactic Newport Folk Festival scene, but I learned stuff from Wald’s reporting and extensive context on the “folk scare” American folk revival. Sure, 99.5% of the folks who watched the movie will not benefit from getting this book, but the .5% who would, need to read it.

***In the post WWII era, there were a lot of poets who in their dreams wanted to also be musical performers. Easy to see why too: poetry was a small cultural sideline, but for much of this era it was possible to become highly popular and well-paid as a “rock star.” It’s less acknowledged, but the same could be said of some actors — despite the fame, adoration, and income levels achievable in commercially successful acting being roughly equal to popular musicians. In 2025, I believe this is less often true — more and more professional musicians these days have meager incomes. But there may still be some desire to play Orpheus in real life among a sub-set of actors.

What do I think? I think poetry and music are kin, and if my thought-dreams could be seen they’d probably put my head in a guillotine. And despite the fame level of Bob Dylan, Chalamet is helping Dylan’s art by illuminating it. Good on him.

Reading Carl Sandburg’s American Songbag

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

I spent much of today reading through Carl Sandburg’s landmark 1927 folk song collection American Songbag,  all 500-plus-pages of it. It’s not the first time I’ve looked into the book, and indeed I’ve paged through it or jumped to songs I was interested in before. But next month I’m planning a trip to Sandburg’s boyhood home in Illinois and to Iowa City where I will be taking a look at some papers relating to early 20th century poet and professor Edwin Ford Piper who was one of the sources of folk song material used in Sanburg’s anthology.*  So, looking at the book in full seemed a good grounding for this trip.

I’ve made the case before here, such as this post from a year ago, that besides being a somewhat deemphasized Modernist poet these days, Sandburg is a primary model for the American Folk Music Revival, which eventually produced in the second half of the 20th century several genres of popular and semi-popular music.**  Here’s the matrix that Sandburg built in the 1920s, a hundred years ago:

  • American folk music can be appreciated like art music
  • It will be associated with literary poetry
  • It expresses, or can be adapted to express or accompany, progressive/left-wing causes
  • It’s multi-ethnic, and the contribution of Afro-Americans will be substantially acknowledged
  • Humor and funny stories will be part of its presentation

Sandburg was including segments of folk music performance as part of poetry readings before American Songbag.  AFAIK we don’t have any transcripts or recordings from that era, but all these things are demonstrated for the record in the 1927 book. Sandburg is not the only American doing any of these things a hundred years ago, but he’s doing all of them at once,  and he’s doing it with a degree of fame and cultural acclaim that was significant.

I was aided in my rapid march through American Songbag  by already knowing many of the songs it contains, and as I encountered them I remembered hearing them in my half of the 20th century performed by Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan and many of those other “folk singers” that surrounded them.***  The Sing Out magazine and Jerry Silverman folk songbooks of the Sixties that are my foundation, are successors to Sandburg’s work, right down to the touch of  using vintage B&W line drawings as interspersed decorations.

Sandburg often includes little stories about the collector (Piper was one of a group who collected the songs “in the field” for Songbag)  and for those he collected himself he says a few words about how, where, and with whom he first heard the song. Here’s one of the most engaging of those stories I came upon today in the book:

Once when the night was wild without and the wintry winds piled snowdrifts around the traffic signals on Cottage Grove Avenue, Chicago, we sat with Robert Frost and Padraic Colum. The Gael had favored with Irish ballads of murder, robbery, passion. And Frost offered a sailorman song he learned as a boy on the wharves of San Francisco.

The song Frost sang for Colum and Sandburg? A subtle wry ballad of farming? A nuanced lyric of nature cooly observed? No, it was this one. Some will know it from its latter association with the Assassin’s Creed video game franchise:

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*Besides the folks songs Piper contributes, Sandburg even quotes a part of a poem from his contemporary Piper’s Barb Wire  poetry collection in Songbag.

**Besides the Folk Scare of the 50s and 60s, the American “Rock Music” that extended Rock’n’Roll to FM radio, college campuses, and rock critics was generally formed from folks who had connections with the just preceding folk revival. Modern Americana and roots music links to the same strains and connections that Sandburg was personifying 100 years ago.

***Guthrie composed music for Sanburg poems later. Ruth Crawford Seeger (Pete’s step-mom, Mike and Peggy Seeger’s birth mother) was one of the composers who created harmonized music for the folk songs in Songbag,  and she also set Sandburg’s page poems to music. When the young Bob Dylan started to expand the poeticism of his song lyrics, he decided to pay a visit to Sandburg, briefly meeting him unannounced in North Carolina at Sandburg’s farm. Other folk luminaries connected? At least a couple songs collected from Leadbelly by John Lomax are included in Songbag.  Lomax is credited, but Leadbelly isn’t, though Leadbelly’s more general public career hadn’t yet started. Let me just say that Lomax’s relationship with Leadbelly is complicated. Just this month I was reading a recollection of a performance by Spider John Koerner (who first performed in the mid-century Minneapolis folk music scene along with Dylan) where he told a humorous story about a farmer who fed his pig by lifting him up to the branches of an apple tree. That’s a story Sandburg also told. I’ll also note that when I came upon several songs in Songbag,  the rendition I recalled from the Folk Scare of the mid-century was by Dave Van Ronk, a wonderful performer and a mentor to Dylan when he arrived in New York.

Sam and the Ghosts

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Our Halloween series continues with the voice, music, and words of Dave Moore today as I present his piece “Sam and the Ghosts.”  And as bonus autumn content, this one takes place in a garden just past harvest time.

I haven’t kept a garden in decades, but Dave and long-time friend of this blog Paul Deaton do. They remind me that at about this latitude north, October is the time to have removed the final products and to prepare the bed for the interval until spring planting time returns.

I may not have done this for decades, but this process goes back — way back. Folks were planting crops in the Midwest long before colonization. The mound builders here, like the earthworks and standing-stone raisers in the British Isles, fed themselves on the invention of agriculture. So in that way, every garden — that small geographical gesture — is a memorial. William Blake said the rebellious angels of art must need to drive their plows over the bones of the dead. I don’t think he was speaking of colonization or commerce when making that point, but his maxim is true reportage anyway. Whether we are speaking of poetry or music or tomatoes, were we plant has likely been tilled before by dead people. Isn’t it proper then that we should honor them before we make our gestures in the soil?

Sam and the Ghosts

The song sheet Dave handed me the day we recorded this song a few years back.

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In Dave’s poem which he made song, Sam* has forgotten this. Some ghosts remind him. In his poem they are ghosts of settlers. Outside of the poem, they are people created by Bob Dylan.**  Those definite levels in history are not the beginning, not the end. Who knows who ran the land from where the settlers’ family left to come to America? Then we do know who lived the land, and were so harshly displaced before the settlers’ opportunity. Who knows, maybe Hollis Brown’s farm is no longer farmland now after some other money has changed hands. How many songwriters are tilling Bob Dylan’s land?

Every seed you plant came from somewhere before you plant it. Every land has ancestors. Every garden is, or should be, a memorial. Winter will bury our gardens, turn our blank pages to blank pages again, and we wait and expect for spring.

The ancestors expect for spring too. We are that spring. The gaps of expecting are where the ghosts live.

To hear the LYL Band perform with Dave Moore singing his song “Sam and the Ghosts”  you can use the graphical player below if you see it. No player? This highlighted link is your alternative.

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*Neither Dave nor I can resist a pun. For extra Halloween-relevance points, Dave has named his gardener “Sam Hane.”

**”The Ballad of Hollis Brown”  is an exceptionally stark early Bob Dylan song set in an indeterminate time in rural South Dakota. In Dylan’s song, the seven-member Hollis farm family are starving. Here’s how it sounded when the first recording of it was released in 1964.

Went to See the Gypsy

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

In discussing last May how much fun it is to perform Bob Dylan songs I mentioned that when Dave Moore and I get together to play we often throw in a Bob Dylan song along with our own music. Last month* we finally got together after a long break due to Covid-19 and other infirmities, and as per that tradition the next to last song we played was a Dylan number.

Dave has been extraordinarily prolific with songs over the past few years, so it’s most often I who bring the Dylan to the table. Hipster-wannabe that I am, I often like to cast a wide net for the less-covered or celebrated Dylan songs. This time it was “Went to See the Gypsy”  off of Dylan’s little-remembered New Morning  LP of 1970.

At the time it came out New Morning  seemed important, as Dylan had stumbled badly with his previous record Self-Portrait.  Self-Portrait  seemed to many a lackadaisical record about being lackadaisical, and those many weren’t having that in the turbulent and searching summer of 1970. Think about this: that LP was released almost exactly a month after nine college students were shot and four died on a Midwest college campus. Of those four dead, two were protesting what seemed a widening war in Southeast Asia and two were somewhat distant onlookers between classes. A few days later two more students were killed at Jackson State in the South. The average youthful Dylan fan was less likely to be interested in tunes about all the tired horses in the sun at that moment.

So, less than six months later this other Dylan album, New Morning,  came out. In retrospect it wasn’t really a return of the fiery prophet of Sixties Dylan, but a lot of rock critics had made their bones considering that earlier Dylan style and made the best of what they had in it. One song, and one song only, could be parsed as if it was in that style “Day of the Locusts,”  a protest tune about getting an (honorary) degree from an Ivy League university while that year’s crop of “17 Year Cicadas” chirped their Dada chorus. Maybe some college students dug that one.

With the passage of time, New Morning’s necessity to rehabilitate the great songwriter’s reputation has lost its utility. Dylan has had at least two greater “return to greatness” moments since then, easily supplanting the importance of New Morning.  And of course the measure of the artist over such a long and important career makes bumps in the road disappear in the trailing dust. Though little thought of now, New Morning  is what it may have been intended to be, a much better record of relaxing with the mundane and interrogating it.

“Went to See the Gypsy”  is about nothing happening, a topic that many of the fraught students of 1970 would eventually need to come to grips with, and maybe it fits this second summer of Covid-19 too. The singer goes to meet the undefined titular “gypsy,” who maybe only figuratively that (the word derives from a now considered pejorative term for the Romany ethnic group). I think that character title is used to convey someone exotic and transitory. There may also be a suggestion that the gypsy could be a fortune teller, as many songs that Dylan would have known would have made explicit. The meeting is a big nothing. The two have a nighttime greeting in a hotel room (transitory housing), and then the singer has to go to the hotel’s lobby to make a call. Modern people, sit down in a circle around the fire, and let the old ones speak of this: in those days you couldn’t text anyone if you were running late or you had to get some info or agreement, you were required to go to a place where there where iron-clad telephones chained to a wall that took coins to accomplish that.

In the lobby an attractive girl (“dancing,” intimation of transient movement) begins to do a hype man spiel about the gypsy. How much time passes? We don’t know. Does the singer try to make time with the girl or vice-versa? The song doesn’t say. It only says that dawn is approaching (often the signal to end a song or poem) and the singer returns to the gypsy’s door, which is open and the “gypsy is gone.” The door being open is a telling detail, as it indicates that this wasn’t some planned leaving. The gypsy rushed out or was rushed out by someone. The singer returns to the lobby, the dancing girl is gone. Was she part of some planned distraction? We don’t know. The song ends with the singer instead “watching that sun come rising from that little Minnesota town.”

Now this song all could have happened in a little Minnesota town. One thing that many non-Minnesotans think about Dylan’s home in the Iron Range was that it must’ve been some ethnic Northern European monoculture, which it wasn’t in the least. Personally, I’ve always thought this final scene is a poetic jump cut, and that Dylan’s final sunrise is times and miles away from the events before in the song, but that’s just me.

In summary, a song about things just happening that keep things from happening. Your fortune won’t get told, nor will the mysterious guru tell you what to do, you won’t get to go through the mirror, and a pretty girl may have her own agenda.

Here’s today cover version of Bob Dylan’s “Went to See the Gypsy” Alas, there’s a couple of typos in the captions that flash by. I blame working too late.

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Musically this is me on electric guitar with Dave playing some soft reed organ sounds at first. After those tracks were laid down live, I decided it’d been too long since I had done a full orchestral arrangement, and so after the fact I did just that and had the orchestra instruments come in partway in the song to represent the potential big something that hovers out of reach over this non-event story. I know dawns in little Midwestern towns, far from the chance of Las Vegas, gurus, or those who can tell one’s fortune. There you make your songs and self, yourself.

I should be back shortly with the song we did right after this one, a Dave Moore original.

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*This same session produced “The Poem, ‘The Wild Iris,” “The Dragonfly,”  and “I Am Laughing in the Dark Underground”  that have already been presented here.

Why Singing Bob Dylan Songs is Enjoyable

~ Frank Hudson ~ 4 Comments

This weekend will see a peak of pieces about Bob Dylan as we approach his 80th birthday. Would the young-person version of myself who first encountered his work as a teenager have expected that?

I think probably I would. He was widely written about back then, as in since, though from different viewpoints and judgements. The Nobel Prize a few years back allowed most of the reductionist and disparaging commentators ample opportunity to remind us of his limits, the ways he demonstrates the rule that you must hear me repeat here again: that All Artists Fail. The current moment has not brought those detractors forward, though I’m sure those thoughts are still with them should they be stirred up.

I do not write this for those who have, with whatever wisdom they’ve accumulated, found those limitations defining. I write instead for the much greater mass of people, those who know nothing substantial of Dylan’s work, even if that’s from the framework of having other things that are important in their paths.

Because he’s still living, because he’s still artistically active, those who care to debate the subject of Bob Dylan will often focus on the performer. I will ignore that, as eventually history’s focus will, even though we have film and recordings which we presume will be preserved. So, no talk here today regarding the charges that he’s a terrible singer or indifferent musician or undemonstrative stage presence. All those charges have evidence — and are wrong.

I’m here instead to say that singing and performing Bob Dylan songs is rewarding, enjoyable, illuminating. I won’t go into great length, because I might not convince you of my case. My case must be proven by your experience, if you take it upon yourself to do that.

(Original Caption) File poses of Bob Dylan in 1968-1969. Eat the document, an anti documentary remembrance of Bob Dylan's 1966 concert tour of Europe, has its American television premiere on WNET/THIRTEEN Friday, August 17, 11:30 p.m. Shot by D.A. Pennebaker and Howard Alk, this film conveys the sense of a private diary, a journey with endless train travel, hotel room rehearsals, and late-night post mortems.

In this one photo, Dylan is trying to convince you in a number of ways not to think of him as a performer. He’s almost exactly in the null point of the mic where it’ll hear nothing. Awkwardly, he’s trying to finger an F5 chord on an instrument he was never known to play, and he’s nearly the only Fender Jazz Bass player to ever keep those two chrome covers over the strings and bridge, indicating a straight-out-of-the-box “Here, endorse this!” photo ambush.

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The songs written by singers of extraordinary technical talents, or by composers with a great deal of musical matter to express can often daunt the general singer. This is not a bad thing, only another kind of limit. Sometime in this century for example, Joni Mitchell has become recognized (yes, tardily) as a songwriter of extraordinary talents. One can enjoy singing her songs; but for some of them, expressing them requires more skills than many of us humans can bring to the task. How well do some of her songs survive a singer of insufficient range, melodic memory, pitch accuracy, and rhythmic sophistication? Or closer to my home, Prince is the most extraordinary performer and pop musician anyone living can recall, but some of his songs are built around superlative vocal effects, and the original arrangements may call for a musical versatility that would daunt most professional musicians. I’m not damming those exemplary songwriters with faint praise. Their achievements are great, and those that want to extend those artists songs by performing them are to be praised.

But to a large degree those merely musical technique challenges are not a problem for those who want to perform Bob Dylan songs. There are a few. Dylan’s most underestimated talent as a singer is his phrasing. With his wordier songs, it can be hard to fit all those word-beats into a regularized musical phrase without successfully playing a game of h.o.r.s.e with his own idiosyncratic phrasing.

What instead does a modestly talented or untrained singer encounter in a representative Bob Dylan song? Two things I think: characters, and a charged, yet ambiguous, emotional environment.

Taking the last first. Many Dylan songs present, as great poetry often does, emotionally intense moments, sometimes several of those strung together. In fewer cases than one might expect, these are not cut and dried here’s-what-we-must-feel presentations. The few times when Dylan does do that —tell us what to feel — those songs in context may gain power for his appreciators because he generally doesn’t. I said I wouldn’t talk about Dylan’s own performances, but over his career he eventually demonstrated different emotional environments that his songs may live in. This design means that we, as individual performers — even those who sing in the shower, while cooking, or going to or from work — are given leeway to impose our own moods and learned outlooks.

Dylan has increasingly peopled his songs with characters over his long career, people who speak from their own varied experience. Actors speak of the enticing challenge of playing Lear or Hamlet and the reams of lines they must master to do that. But in Dylan songs, one may be given a verse or even just a line to embody a character, a challenge of a contrasting sort. I can’t say that the practice of portraying characters not oneself is a sure-fire path to wisdom. If it was, there’d be no foolish actors, and that is not the case. Yet, there is value in that to be found if you want there to be, and it’s fun to not be yourself for the course of a song or a verse! Every child dresses up, plays imaginary games. Adults could need an excuse to do the same, and a Bob Dylan song can be that.

One need not engage with either of those things present in so many Dylan songs in a way that would succeed with an outer audience, that would convey your experience in the songs to some of them. If one can do that, as many professional performers have over the years, that’s great — but it’s not required for enjoyment or reward.

In this project I perform words, mostly other people’s, mostly poetry, because that’s a more intense and intimate way to connect with the text. How successfully it might illuminate something for you, patient listener, I can’t say. As with all art, it will fail some/to most/to all of the time, but if you read other things this month about Bob Dylan, take from this post one thing I wish to suggest to you today: all that commentary and weighing of significance may have some value, but what the man did was write songs, things which do not live or exist other than when some human breath vibrates in a throat. Perhaps some poetry — certainly some writing — exists largely as worthwhile thoughts or impressive inventions. But songs truly exist that way, that way alone: inside us. Why take the hard way to try to generate that experience out of only silent thoughts about Bob Dylan, or even listening to Bob Dylan, when you can put a song of his inside you?

Oh, and not to leave you with the idea that singing Dylan is all heavy going capitol S seriousity. here’s The LYL Band taping up the basement with a set of unused Dylan lyrics a few years ago. Player gadget visible for some, or this highlighted hyperlink for others to play the performance.

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Parlando Summer 2020 Top Ten, numbers 4-2

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

4. A Mien to Move a Queen by Emily Dickinson. My teenager, who suspects my musical output as being less than relevant, taunted me gently by asking as I started writing this post if I was presenting Winnie the Pooh. By “Pooh” we may decode: something simultaneously old and immature.

“No I said. I’ve never done any A. A. Milne.”

“Who’s A. A. Milne?”

“He wrote Winnie the Pooh—oh wait, I have  put Milne in a post. I was comparing an Emily Dickinson poem to Sixties psychedelic rock lyrics. I compared a poem of hers to a Milne/Pooh poem that was used by Jefferson Airplane in a song: ‘If I was a bird and flew very high…”

“Bored already.” He playfully rejoindered.

I can’t quite give you the flavor of this, but there’s a quicker wit in my house than mine even when my wife is out of town.

Well that post just happens to be the one that introduced the 4th most liked and listened to piece here this summer: Dickinson’s “A Mien to move a Queen.”  And yes, it is a strange poem, though it draws me in none-the-less. It may be one of Dickinson’s riddle poems, like “May-Flower”   though I can’t solve its riddle. Dickenson may be looking at another flower, or a bird or insect.

Well sometimes one can just let the mystery be.

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3. Long Island Sound by Emma Lazarus. One of the least-famous poets with one of the most-famous poems ever presented here, Lazarus is the author of a sonnet associated with the Statue of Liberty: the “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses…” one. That was a poem of hope, and I’d say to, so is this one that she also wrote. Therefore, I made “Long Island Sound”  into a happy little summer song.

Did a carefree song seem out of place in our 2020 summer? Or was it something we wanted to visit, if only for the minute and 46 seconds the performance lasts? Well, in any season there is happiness. Seething anger, somber reflection, these may seem to be the noble emotions this summer, but joy is not an ignoble emotion.

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Black Joy Lives Here crop

The American Midwest loves lawn signs. I ride by many each morning in my neighborhood: election candidates, Justice for George Floyd, roofing contractors, high-school sports teams, and a couple of these too.

2. The Poet’s Voice from speeches by William Faulkner and Bob Dylan.  Our current American age is suffering much from insufficiency of empathy. What kills or mutes empathy? Fear is one thing. One sentence in William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech struck me so strongly when I read it this year. Not the one I was quoted so often by teachers then my age now, back when I was nearly 20, the one that went: “Man will not merely endure: he will prevail”—this, somehow, they seemed to be saying would come from literature, of all things, stuff written largely by dead men. Thanks pops. Now let me return to being worried about which of us is going to run out of tuition money or the will to continue this hidebound education, and get drafted. No, that one was Faulkner’s hopeful future, a future we haven’t yet made obsolete. Instead, it was this sentence, earlier in the speech, the one that should make you sit up and take notice:

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it.”

Old man Faulkner, though he may be as imperfect as the brightest and most perceptive person today, is really saying something there. In the context of his entire speech he appears to be referring to the particular fear of a nuclear war, but then how strange that he calls this “so long sustained” when nuclear arms were around the age of our current Presidency’s term when he gave this speech in 1949.

So, if fear mutes empathy, let us acknowledge that carrying someone else’s song in your ear, your mind, your mouth, is the pathway through which it can infect your heart with empathy.

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I’ll return soon with the post revealing the most popular piece here this past summer. That’s going to be a somewhat complicated story.

The Poet’s Voice

~ Frank Hudson ~ 3 Comments

Stick with me here valued audience. I know awards speeches are not a popular genre. First off, everyone watching has just lost except for the speaker—not just the tuxedos in the hall, but anyone watching at home who aren’t important enough to be invited to the event. So maybe it’s safest to thank others effusively until your time is up and the music plays you off. A choice to make other points can be ineffective.

Yet, this isn’t the first time I’ve used an awards speech as the text for a piece, though the other two times they were speeches by actors, David Harbour and Viola Davis. Both of those speeches made claims about the value of dramatic art: Harbour making the claim that we may use make-believe heroes to inspire us to do necessary things, and Davis testifying that art, because it includes the illuminated communication of intense human experience, is the only complete way to explore humanity.

The Nobel Prize award requests an acceptance “lecture,” which sounds more high-falutin and boring than an acceptance speech. The literature winners often take the bait and tell us something about the value of their art—but it just so happens that I’m listening for that right now, because I’m not sure about the value of the arts of poetry or music, the things this project is made of, in the midst of this year’s multiple crises: a pandemic, an economic downturn that I fear we haven’t sounded the bottom of, a king of misrule, and a tragic occasion to consider remedies to racial oppression. When I talked about these things this week with friends, they reminded me, “And we haven’t even talked about global warming lately.”

The first section of today’s piece is taken from William Faulkner’s 1949 Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Even a couple of decades later his statement was much loved in liberal arts departments as I was getting in touch with them in “The Sixties,” because we still hadn’t gotten over the fear we talk even less about: global atomic warfare destruction. Faulkner was a wordsmith to reckon with, even if he couldn’t figure out the plot of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep.*  When I looked back at his speech this month, the line I open up with today grabbed me in 2020 as much or more than it would have back in the mid-20th century:

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it.”

Don’t misread the end of that sentence. He is saying we can bear that fear (his contemporary fears, and ours) and go on writing. One may raise their hand before the Nobel-Dynamite-Prize winner Faulkner and ask: “Well, yes I suppose we could. But shouldn’t we be doing something else instead? A lot of people’s survival is at stake.”

The next section I quote from Faulkner’s speech tries to answer that. It’s a fine piece of writing too. If one abstracts the thought from the rhetoric, he’s saying that we have jobs in relationship to those that will be doing something else instead. This is akin to Viola Davis’ argument about art: no position paper, resolution, or negotiating point can fully connect one heart with another, and no struggle can see its way without full illumination of the human experience.

Is Faulkner right about that? I don’t know. It may not be right for you, but it’s a plausible idea for an old man like myself, one who lacks the social cohesion to build a barricade and the bravery to mount and advance over it.

Faulkner Stamp

An example of writers not being much good at other jobs, Faulkner was bad when given a job as a postmaster. His resignation letter read: “As long as I live under the capitalistic system, I expect to have my life influenced by the demands of moneyed people. But I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp.” The Postal Service had its revenge in 1987. Faulkner’s price had risen by 20 cents.

 

The concluding statement in today’s piece is from another American Nobel Literature prize winner’s “lecture,” Bob Dylan’s. The inspiration for this came from a gift Dave Moore gave me this month, a small, handsome book containing Dylan’s lecture. When Dylan won the Literature prize there was a great deal of consternation that what he did wasn’t literature, possibly also not very good, but for sure not literature. Some commentators seemed to feel that poetry might not even qualify, wondering what novels he had written.** But never mind, song lyrics can’t be poetry can they?

In the concluding part of his speech Dylan cleverly concedes that point, and then collapses his wings around those objecting that performed oral poetry is not literature. That’s books, stuff written and read on paper. Suddenly they are surrounded with no retreat. Shakespeare*** wrote for voices and audiences in common. We only know his plays in page form from bootleg tapers. Songs, music, are like that too. They are alive, they live on the currents of breath. Literature is an artifact—a voice is the art, a song is the immediate fact of an experience. I, you, anyone, can doubt art in its absence, in silence—while fear likes that space just fine. But while a song is sounding in your breath and ear, doubt is beside the point. “Songs are alive in the land of the living” Dylan proclaims.

My performance mashing up these quotes from the two Nobel Prize speeches accompanied by my own music can be heard with the player below. If you’d like to read the entirety of these two speeches, Faulkner’s text is here, and Dylan’s is here (with a link to his own audio reading).

 

 

 

*A Hollywood anecdote had Faulkner, who was working as screenwriter for hire in the 1940s, getting stumped about the famously convoluted plot of Chandler’s detective novel he was adapting for a classic 1946 movie. A point about an early murder that deepens the plot was unclear. “Yes, but who killed General Sternwood’s chauffeur?” he queried. Chandler replied: “Dammit, I don’t know either.”

**I found it interesting that novelist Faulkner more than once refers to poets as he speaks about the writer’s task in his speech.

***And Dylan closes with Homer, the blind one in the silence of sight, who didn’t ask the muses for paper but the music to tell the story.