Three Songs, Three Singers, Three Nations

Greil Marcus

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780674915336
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

Greil Marcus has been one of the most distinctive voices in American music criticism for over forty years. His books, including Mystery Train and The Shape of Things to Come, traverse soundscapes of folk and blues, rock and punk, attuning readers to the surprising, often hidden affinities between the music and broader streams of American politics and culture.Drawn from Marcus's 2013 Massey Lectures at Harvard, his new work delves into three episodes in the history of American commonplace song: Bascom Lamar Lunsford's 1928 "I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground, " Geeshie Wiley's 1930 "Last Kind Words Blues, " and Bob Dylan's 1964 "Ballad of Hollis Brown." How each of these songs manages to convey the uncanny sense that it was written by no one illuminates different aspects of the commonplace song tradition. Some songs truly did come together over time without an identifiable author. Others draw melodies and motifs from obscure sources but, in the hands of a particular artist, take a final, indelible shape. And, as in the case of Dylan's "Hollis Brown, " there are songs that were written by a single author but that communicate as anonymous productions, as if they were folk songs passed down over many generations.In three songs that seem to be written by no one, Marcus shows, we discover not only three different ways of talking about the United States but three different nations within its formal boundaries.

Inflection

“Ballad of Hollis Brown,” Bob Dylan

It’s May 1963, and John Henry Faulk is back on the air. It’s been six years. He was born in Austin, Texas, in 1913; entranced by African-American sermons, he came out of the University of Texas with a degree in folklore—with a name like John Henry, he almost had to become a folklorist, or a character in his own folk song.

Against his will, he did become that character. As the host of Johnny’s Front Porch on CBS radio in the early 1950s, he was the latest version of Will Rogers, telling southern stories and passing on homilies. In New York he appeared on TV game shows, and crossed paths with Alan Lomax and others in the leftist milieu of professional folk music. The blacklist was everywhere, in every field, promulgated by the White House, Congress, the FBI, in entertainment by movie studios, television and radio networks, and especially by watchdog groups like Counterattack, with its constantly updated guide Red Channels. In 1955, Faulk, the CBS newsman Charles Collingwood, and dozens more formed an anti-blacklist slate and ran for seats on the board of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists; in a bitterly fought campaign, they swept the election.

The next year Faulk was himself blacklisted as a Communist by a group calling itself Aware. His sponsor dropped him. CBS cancelled his show. But Faulk, unlike the blacklisted folk singer Pete Seeger, had never joined the Communist Party or followed its line. With Louis Nizer as his attorney, Faulk sued Aware for libel; when after six years the case finally came to trial, Faulk won. He more than won: the jury’s award of $3.5 million—more than $25 million today—was a break in the wall the blacklist had built around the entertainment industry. Faulk published his memoir Fear on Trial in 1964, and went on to a featured role on the CBS country-music vaudeville show Hee Haw; he lectured at colleges on the Constitution. On television, he played, among other characters, Strom Thurmond; in the movies he played the Storyteller in the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Pat Neff, the Texas governor who in 1925 pardoned Lead Belly, after the great folk singer and convicted murderer sang Neff a song pleading for release, and not without a sting: “If I had you, Govnor Neff / Like you got me / I’d wake up in the morning / And I’d set you free.” Faulk died in 1990; in 1995 the Austin Central Library was renamed in his honor. But in 1963, Faulk played a role that, at least in the moment, might have given him the most pleasure of all. He was hosting a show for the Westinghouse Broadcasting Company: Folk Songs and More Folk Songs!

It’s the height of the folk revival. The collegiate faces of the Kingston Trio have erased the old, automatic identification of folk music with the Communist Party and the Popular Front. “Communism,” went the official 1930s party slogan, “is twentieth-century Americanism.” Party cadres, among them the classical composer Charles Seeger, the father of Pete Seeger, and later of the folk singers Mike Seeger and Peggy Seeger, under his Daily Worker name Carl Sands—as if he were fronting for Carl Sandburg himself—made folk music the fanfare of the common man. It was a story that continued without any real interruption through 1950, when the Weavers, led by Pete Seeger, had a number-one hit with a cleaned-up version of Lead Belly’s “Goodnight, Irene”—before they too were blacklisted and their career was destroyed.

Some people threw their Weavers albums away; some hid them. But now, in 1963, there are folk music clubs all over the country, and folk music albums all over the charts: by the end of the year Peter, Paul & Mary’s In the Wind, closing with their version of Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” will be number one, and Dylan’s original, as carried on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, will crack the Top 40. For tribes of young people all over the country, the Newport Folk Festival is the center of the universe. Joan Baez has been on the cover of Time. Hootenanny has just made its debut on CBS, notably without John Henry Faulk, its natural host. It will be a huge hit—instantly reviled for its ban on Pete Seeger, which would lead to a boycott by Baez and many others, it will be cancelled before the end of 1964.

Faulk’s show—taped a month before Hootenanny first aired—could have been meant as a counter in advance. It opens with a cartoon of a train running through a landscape of desert and mountains. The whistle toots. “This train goes flyin’ by,” sings a cheery, accentless chorus for the WBC version of Woody Guthrie’s “This Train Is Bound for Glory”—his train didn’t carry “no big shot ramblers,” but there’s no need to bring up the anti-capitalist catcalls here. We see the windows of the train filled with the happy faces of people holding guitars and throwing their heads back in song. “Folk music!” says an unseen announcer with a typically confident, colorless TV voice. “It’s in the air, everywhere!” We see folk singers perched on the tops of skyscrapers. “The voice of freedom—the cry of despair. The shout”—we see a farmer with a banjo surrounded by a cow, a pig, and a duck—“of the land.” A guitar-and-banjo-picking family of six drives through a tunnel cut into a giant redwood. “The sound,” we hear, “of a growing country. The good”—a singing sailor on a skiff—“the cheerful”—a wailing two-guitar couple singing on a couch while their dog looks up from the floor—“the sad”—there’s a close-up in the cartoon of the dog looking sad. “The sound—of America.”

We see the singers we’ve been hearing: the Brothers Four, who had a number-two hit in 1960 with “Greenfields”—it will be on the radio for years—smiling, clean-cut strummers posed against the desert backdrop and earnestly singing Lead Belly’s “Rock Island Line.” We hear the train pulling to a stop; steam from the brakes washes over the screen. “The Brothers Four!” says the announcer, as they grin even more widely than before. “Bob Dylan!” A year earlier, he’d lined out an unrecorded song about Faulk, “Gates of Hate,” a surviving fragment of which—“Go down, go down you gates of hate / You gates that keep men in chains / Go down and die the lowest death / And never rise again”—sounds like fifteen-year-old Nathan Zuckerman’s skin-crawlingly self-righteous radio play “The Stooge of Torquemada” in Philip Roth’s I Married a Communist; now he strolls across the set, tipping an invisible hat. “Barbara Dane!” and the deep-voiced singer follows. “The Staple Singers!” and twenty-three-year-old Mavis Staples leads her two sisters, her brother, and her father across the stage.¹ “And Carolyn Hester!” the announcer says finally—in 1961 Dylan had backed the Texas folksinger on harmonica for a Columbia session that led to his own contract with the most prestigious record company in the country. “And your narrator, John Henry Faulk!”—and as the Brothers Four pack up their instruments, a man in a suit with a pipe in his mouth ambles into view.

He’s carrying what looks like a salesman’s sample case, which he sets down on a table, right there out in the desert of the set. “Well, glad to be back again this way, folks”—it’s not a casual thing to say, not with six years of oblivion behind him, but his heavy drawl smothers any trouble. Immediately he’s a circuit-riding country judge, down-home, plain-folks in a patently phony way that no one we’ve glimpsed before has been. Yes, he’s glad to be back again this way, folks, and, he goes on, “back with one of America’s finest products”—and you think he’s going to open the case and demonstrate a Westinghouse broiler, or maybe a fan. “Freedom!” he says: that’s the product. Faulk pounds the case three times with his pipe hand. “Of course,” he says, “freedom isn’t really in the bag.” What’s going on here? Is he saying that freedom is in jeopardy? That it’s not a done deal? Because of the kind of people who came after him? Yes, he won the case, but he’s not back on CBS yet, the Hootenanny Pete Seeger ban is in the news—isn’t Faulk pushing his luck? “Not exactly,” Faulk says, his hand over his heart. “It’s in our hearts, and our minds”—and in 1963, on television, for a show about a subject as happily populist but lingeringly suspect as folk music, even the word mind can translate as critical thinking, dissent, disloyalty, pointy-headed intellectualism, communism. “But I thought,” Faulk says, his drawl broader than ever, “maybe today, we’d show you a few pictures here”—he gestures at his case—“have our friends sing you a few songs. Maybe your hearts and minds can do the rest, get us caught up in that great American dream.” He opens the case. There’s a cartoon of a Yankee-doodle-dandy fife and drum trio.

After a commercial, we see Faulk leaning back, his pipe now a tool of contemplation. “I been poking around this land of ours for quite a spell now, takin’ some long looks at it—well, some short ones, too. And I’ll say this: that as a nation, we might have our shortcomin’s, we’ve done some mighty fine things. Mighty fine ones. And I reckon that’s because we got off to a great start, with the—declaration about freedom, and rights of man. That’s the thing that’s guided us through all these years.” He gazes into the distance; off camera, there’s a sprightly harmonica. We might not have recognized Bob Dylan’s sound in 1963, but we do if we’re looking at the old tapes now. “Hear that?” Faulk says as his ear catches the instrument, his face nearly tearful with satisfaction: “Ahhhhhh!” He looks even more deeply into the big sky of the western set. He’s at once unbearably and irresistibly corny. “Whatever we’ve done as a people,” he says, his voice now that of the country sage, the old man who’s been all around this land, “it’s always been turnin’ up in song. Folk songs, we call ’em,” Faulk says, both including and excluding the viewer, gazing higher still into the studio sky—these songs are about you, but you’re not part of this we yet, you don’t really know what I’m talking about, but maybe what I’m going to show you will give you a clue—and as the harmonica turns plaintive, distant, Faulk pushes the point: “I don’t guess there’s a better way in the world to get to know about a country, and its people, than to listen to its songs.” He nods his head thoughtfully; there’s a fade to Bob Dylan, singing “Blowin’ in the Wind.” He sings it modestly; he turns and walks off against a background of clouds.

It’s the setup to an extraordinarily ambitious show: it means to trace the whole sweep of American history, and it does. As the cartoon unrolls, the Civil War is fought, and the West is won; wagon trains cross the continent. There are farmers and cowboys; the Brothers Four do “Rodeo.” There are shoot-outs straight from the opening of Gunsmoke. We see factories and railroads from coast to coast—and two cowboys, one holding a torch, looking up at the feet of a black man, dangling in the air. “The Negro was tantalized with just a taste of freedom. He still sang his songs about the joys of heaven, rather than the songs about the joys of”—Faulk nods his head—“this earth.” The Staple Singers appear, the women in prayer gowns, Mavis leading the group through “Little David” with a deep, burred voice, Pop Staples ringing his electric guitar, tipping them into “I Just Got to Heaven.” Cartoons show class war, bosses and unions. Against a mountain backdrop, Carolyn Hester sings “Payday at Coal Creek,” followed by Dylan, an oil derrick behind him, with “Man of Constant Sorrow,” an old folk song he’d recorded for his first album, Bob Dylan, released the year before. The story charges on: immigrants remake the country. The First World War (“Shoulda been the last,” Faulk says) breaks into the Roaring Twenties, with cars, jazz, blues—with Barbara Dane singing “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out” and Bessie Smith’s “Backwater Blues”—and then the crash.

Now we see whole populations of homeless people, and a truck emblazoned “California or Bust.” The Brothers Four start up Woody Guthrie’s “Pastures of Plenty”—and despite how little they can bring to it, it works. It’s too good not to. And then straight into Bob Dylan, off camera, singing “Hollis Brown, he lived, on the outside of town / Hollis Brown, he lived, on the outside of town,” as the camera pans oddly to the left over a cartoon tableau of forbidding, snow-topped mountains jutting up from alkaline sands. The camera eye is brought down to the studio desert floor, where you see the white, weathered skull of a cow, an image taken from an iconic Marion Post Wolcott Farm Security Administration photo, shot in Lame Deer, Montana, in 1941.

Still trained on the ground, the camera moves to the right, until it rests on the shadowed boots and jeans-covered lower legs of an otherwise unseen figure, holding for a full ten seconds before it even begins to pan up to Dylan’s face, which it takes more than twenty more seconds to reach—and when you see his face, it betrays no sign that anything this melodramatic has been going on. He is concentrating on putting the song across. He doesn’t look at the camera. He is not signaling with his eyes or his mouth. There is no expressive body language. He is not emphasizing anything. “Your baby’s eyes are crazy, they’re a-tuggin’ at your sleeve / Your baby’s eyes are crazy, they’re a-tuggin’ at your sleeve” is presented flatly. The melody, formed on Dylan’s strummed guitar, backed by an offscreen banjo—familiar but out of place, out of reach—is insistent, pushing forward as a kind of moral monotone. The monotone says that when one speaks of things such as these, this is how one must speak, without affect, so that the truth can speak for itself. The insistence is a denial that life was ever any different, or ever will be.

The song moves on, and as the cartoon landscape disappears into a black backdrop, you are brought into the story: a failing farm, a starving family, a father who ends the story, his and that of everyone else. It sounds as much like Dylan’s own song as “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and, without its arty self-consciousness, as much like a commonplace, handed-down folk song as “Man of Constant Sorrow.” The small, everyday details dig into your mind as they pass, the contours of the song are primal, epic, and the singer stands behind the song, to the side of it—whether he is seen facing the c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Inflection: “Ballad of Hollis Brown,” Bob Dylan
• Disappearance and Forgetting: “Last Kind Words Blues,” Geeshie Wiley
• World Upside Down: “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground,” Bascom Lamar Lunsford
• Acknowledgments
• Credits
• Index