Biographies & Memoirs

DYLAN AS HISTORIAN

San Francisco Focus

July 1991

Bob Dylan’s “Blind Willie McTell” moves in a circle of images—tent meetings of itinerant holiness preachers, antebellum plantations, the slave driver’s lash, chain gangs, painted women, drunken rakes—and it calls up many more. You might think of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal: the road traveled early in the film by Max von Sydow’s thirteenth-century knight, back from the Crusades to find God on his own ground. Instead he finds plague and the Angel of Death, mad monks and a line of flagellants, torturers and a child witch on a huge pile of sticks and branches, ready to be burned. The witch is convinced of her own guilt, and the knight accepts her punishment, even though he understands that it is his homeland, his realm of knowable good and evil, that’s guilty, even if it’s a guilt that his world, with curses laid on it six hundred years later by a filmmaker, will never have to pay for. But to say all of this, to say any of it, to dive straight into the world made by “Blind Willie McTell,” is to violate the sense of time that governs the tune—to go into it too fast.

The song dates to 1983. It was a discarded track from Infidels, Dylan’s first commercial step away from the born-again Christianity—the shocking apostasy of one born and raised a Jew—that had ruled his previous three records: Slow Train Coming, Saved, and Shot of Love, increasingly lifeless works that had all but destroyed a subjective, critical voice with the imposition of a received religious ideology. “How does it feel,” the Christian songs seemed to ask, “to be on your own, with no direction home, like a complete unknown,” and the songs answered: it feels like perdition. Still, despite its title, Infidels seemed secular; it was full of what Dylan had once called finger-pointing songs. War was bad; capitalism was bad; Infidels was a hit. Critics approved and the radio played it. Listening now, you can imagine why “Blind Willie McTell” was put aside. It would have dissolved the certainties and rancor of the rest of the music, upended it, given it the lie.

Still too fast. “Blind Willie McTell” begins slowly, with the hesitations, doubts, but finally irreducible willfulness that defines the blues. It is in fact just a rehearsal. An earlier, full-band recording had been dumped; this sounds like an attempt to find the song Dylan must have heard inside the song. He hits D flat on the piano, in the Dorian mode, which communicates like a minor key, somber and fearful. The mode takes him back to the old ballads and country blues that shaped his first music, and back to the invention of Christian music as it’s known, to the beginnings of Gregorian chant and the piety loaded into it. There are following steps from guitarist Mark Knopfler, but this you barely register. What you feel is absence, as if Dylan is for some reason refusing to follow his first note with whatever notes it might imply. Then he hits E flat, then D flat again, and the song gets under way.

No knowledge of musical notation or musical history is needed to catch the drama in the moment. The message is clear because it is coded in more than a millennium of musical culture, high and low, vulgar and sanctified: this is it. This is the last word.

Who was, who is, Bob Dylan? In the rush of the mid-1960s, it was obvious that he was, and performed as, someone who was always a step ahead of the times. (“I’m only about twenty minutes ahead,” Dylan told John Lennon at that time, “so I won’t get far.”) In late 1965, as the protest politics of the decade were hardening into slogans, he argued for the substitution of dada over directives on placards (“ . . . cards with pictures of the Jack of Diamonds and the Ace of Spades on them. Pictures of mules, maybe words . . . ‘camera,’ ‘microphone,’ ‘loose,’ just words—names of some famous people”). In 1968 he countered the Beatles’ super-psychedelic Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band with music that sounded as if it could have been made by a particularly literary and reflective Hank Williams in 1953, just a year before Elvis Presley cut his first singles, assuming Hank Williams wasn’t already dead. But today one has no idea who Bob Dylan is. He no longer beats the Jesus drum, but the echoes are there in any interview: his revulsion at wanton women and loose desire, his insistence on someone else’s sin. Reading the conversations, the nice career talk suddenly shaken down, you can almost see the eyes that once seemed to freeze an epoch in an image go cult blank. But this is not what happens in “Blind Willie McTell.”

It’s long been obvious that Bob Dylan can no longer be listened to as any sort of avatar; “Blind Willie McTell” makes it clear that his greatest talent is for bringing home the past, giving it flesh—proving, as the ethnologist H. L. Goodall, Jr., puts it, that “in addition to the lives we lead we also live lives we don’t lead.” Art is made partly to reveal those lives—to take their lead. And this is what happens in “Blind Willie McTell.”

Those slow first notes raise a sign: “Seen the arrow on the door-post / Saying, ‘This land is condemned / All the way from New Orleans / To Jerusalem.’” “From New Or-lee-ans to Jer-u-sa-lem,” Dylan sings, drawing out words until the line they trace seems to circle the globe. The sign sparks a quest, and the only active incident in the song: “I traveled through East Texas / Where many martyrs fell.” Everything else in “Blind Willie McTell” is passive, a witnessing: I saw, I heard. Or an imperative, a demand that the listener witness, too: see, hear, smell. As one scene after another opens and fades, the senses are alive, but only to transgression. There’s no hope of action or change; all is crime and failure, “power and greed.” In Revelation, the last book of the New Testament, the Lamb of God opens the seven seals of a book, and terrible visions burst out with every loosening; it’s only the seventh seal that can reveal God’s final resolution. In “Blind Willie McTell” the first visions are present, brought down to the ground and into the everyday, but the seventh seal is missing. There is only a plainly irreligious affirmation, which can’t be fitted to the forgiveness or even the knowledge of any sin. I’ve traveled, the singer says, I’ve seen, I’ve heard, but I know nothing. Or almost nothing. I know one thing: “I’ve traveled through East Texas / Where many martyrs fell / And no one can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell.”

As Dylan sang in 1983, Blind Willie McTell was twenty-four years dead. His work is found on archival albums; he sang sacred songs, dirty songs, story songs, rags, blues, whatever people on the street would pay him to play. Most famously he wrote and sang “Statesboro Blues,” a 1971 hit for the Allman Brothers. He played twelve-string guitar—which he first heard played, he said, by Blind Lemon Jefferson, who indeed traveled out from his birthplace in East Texas, though he fell in Chicago, according to legend freezing to death on the street. McTell had a light, romancing tone, altogether inappropriate, one might think, for a Bob Dylan song about the resistance of Judgment Day; about the way, as the believer waits for it, Judgment Day recedes.

Perhaps the most entrancing challenge in “Blind Willie McTell” is to hear in its namesake’s music what Bob Dylan heard. In Dylan’s song, revelation struggles to rise out of every scene the singer witnesses, but only the profane refrain that ends each verse—“No one can sing the blues like . . .” “But nobody can . . .” and once, startlingly, “I KNOW NO ONE . . .”—can take the witness from one place to another. As revival tents are taken down, folded, stowed, and driven off to the next town, the singer hears only an owl, perhaps imagines it himself: “The stars above / The barren trees / Were its only audience.” He sees a harlot and a dandy, “bootleg whiskey in his hand,” and for that line Dylan’s voice reaches a pitch of disgust and pain not matched for lines formally describing things far worse: “See them big plantations burning,” he sings with almost laconic nostalgia, “Hear the cracking of the whip / Smell that sweet magnolia blooming / See the ghost of slavery ships.”

But those lines need no more disgust. They take you into some immobile past-present that can never be escaped; they make you put your hands into a wound that will never be closed. One hundred and twenty-six years ago, in his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln imagined that the Civil War might “continue . . . until every drop of blood drawn by the lash, shall be paid by another drawn by the sword.” But the debt hasn’t been paid, and “Blind Willie McTell”—most of all in the old and wearied tones of Dylan’s voice—says that it can’t be. The singer can’t pay it, and neither can Jesus. That the singer has found something Jesus can’t pay for is in some way his truest testament of faith, his proof that he took his faith to its limits, and found those limits in the crimes of the world.

One phrase seems to hide silently behind all the lines of the song: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity”—Ecclesiastes 1:2. It isn’t surprising, then, that “Blind Willie McTell” quotes the same source, with “God is in his heaven,” or that Dylan changes the words that follow in the Bible from “And thou upon the earth” to “And we all want what’s his,” turns the words sour, insisting that we have cut ourselves off from God, seeing in his face only our own greed and lust for power. But Ecclesiastes is more than a reference in “Blind Willie McTell”; “Blind Willie McTell” is a version.

Both the song and the lamentations of Ecclesiastes, “son of David, king in Jerusalem,” are about the absolute rebuke the world offers every believer—every believer in anything, be it Yahweh, Jesus, earthly justice, money, love, or simply a world better than one finds when one looks, when for an instant one can glimpse not only power and greed but intimations of honor and right. “I have seen the task which God have given to the sons of men to be executed therewith,” Ecclesiastes said. “He hath made everything beautiful in its time; also he hath set the world in their heart, yet so that man cannot find out the work that God hath done from the beginning even to the end . . . And he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.” Perfection has been laid in the heart as a rebuke to all, because not even the best are worthy of it. Even the best of humankind sense perfection first and last as suffering, because it is given to them to feel “the evil work that has been done under the sun.” “There is nothing new under the sun”; but for the witness every crime is new. Against this, Dylan offers only “Nobody can sing the blues / Like Blind Willie McTell”—but in the constant renewal of the way he sings the phrase, in the infinite reserves of spectral comradeship he seems to find in it, it is for as long as the song lasts, somehow enough.

Always slowly, with Dylan’s piano keeping a tricky, unsettled time, sometimes flashing up and rattling as if the Mississippi bluesman Skip James is back from the dead to play the keys, “Blind Willie McTell” rides the bones of the melody of “St. James Infirmary,” the standard perhaps done best—certainly most delicately, and most harrowingly—by Bobby Bland. It’s a source Dylan acknowledges in his last verse, as the singer finds himself in “the St. James Hotel”—though perhaps there is a second source. Closer in spirit is an early blues recording by the obscure singer Richard “Rabbit” Brown, a man whose most notable brush with common knowledge came in 1962, when he was cited as a favorite in the notes to Bob Dylan’s debut album. Set down in 1927, the year McTell too first recorded, though Brown never recorded again, Brown’s song is called “James Alley Blues,” after the New Orleans street where he grew up.

Dylan’s recasting, or rereading, of “James Alley Blues,” if that is what “Blind Willie McTell” is, breaks down any useful genealogy of what comes from what in American music. The melody is not similar; no analogue of either Brown’s weird percussive guitar figures, or of his comedy (“’Cause I was born in the country, she thinks I’m easy to rule / She try to hitch me to her wagon, she want to drive me like a mule”), is present. But the spirit is: Brown’s preternatural, bottomless strangeness, seemingly the voice of another world, right here, where you live, the prosaic dissolved by a faraway ominousness, a sense of the uncanny, an insistence on paradox and curse.

Dylan was singing “James Alley Blues” in 1961, when he taped a poor rendition in a friend’s apartment; he may not have listened to it since, but no one who has heard “James Alley Blues” forgets it. As Brown must have with that song, the power of which has very little to do with words, Dylan saw all around his life with “Blind Willie McTell,” and as one listens one is given entry to all the lives moving in the song; one is drawn in. The song is rich enough to pull a skeptic close even to Dylan’s acceptance of Jesus Christ, for the song is undeniably the fruit of that event, and rich enough to lead one to the sort of sights the singer witnesses, with little more than the song itself as a companion—as, finally, the singer, a solitary, cut off or cut loose from God, has no more than his memories of an old blues singer.

Bob Dylan, “Blind Willie McTell,” recorded 5 May 1983 with Mark Knopfler, guitar, included on the bootleg series volumes 1-3 [rare & unreleased] 1961-1991 (Columbia, 1991).

———. “Blind Willie McTell,” recorded April or May 1983, included on The Genuine Bootleg Series (bootleg). A pressing vocal, searching for effects, with doggedly conventional backing by a full band: a producer’s record. Nice harmonica, though.

———. “Blind Willie McTell,” recorded August 1997, included on augmented editions of Time Out of Mind (Columbia, 1997/1998). A live “field recording”—as if from the crowd. Stirring, harsh, and passionate, but never on an even keel. Half of a line—“Well, I’ve traveled”—might come out deep and confident, with the next half—“Through East Texas”—pleading, beaten down. With “Jerusalem,” as it is on the Knopfler studio version, changing, as it almost always would on stage, into “New Jerusalem,” which can be anywhere; see the 15 March 2009 post on rightwingbob.com.

———. “James Alley Blues,” recorded by Tony Glover in Bonnie Beecher’s apartment in Minneapolis, May 1961; see The Minnesota Tapes, disc 1 (bootleg). Recorded 12 April 1963 in Eve and Mac MacKenzie’s apartment in New York; see I Was So Much Younger Then (Dandelion bootleg).

Richard “Rabbit” Brown, “James Alley Blues” (Victor, 1927). Included on Anthology of American Folk Music (Folkways, 1952; Smithsonian Folkways, 1997), and, with Brown’s four other recordings, on The Greatest Songsters (1927-1929) (Document, 1990). Other notable recordings of “James Alley Blues” include Jeff Tweedy, Roger McGuinn, and Jay Bennett on the anthology The Harry Smith Connection (Smithsonian Folkways, 1998), and David Johansen and the Harry Smiths, on David Johansen and the Harry Smiths (Chesky, 2000).

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