I have no idea where or when I learned this song, and research provides no clues, because it’s been done by everyone from Mamie Smith to Willie Nelson–including Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Cliff Bruner, and a duet version by Johnny Mercer and Bobby Darin. So this post is all going to be background, starting with “jelly roll.” I cover the subject more thoroughly in my latest book, Jelly Roll Blues, which focuses on Jelly Roll Morton but ranges fairly widely, but for the moment…

Of course, the term  refers to a baked good made by spreading jelly on a sheet of sponge cake and rolling it up into a roll. The verse of this song (which I never learned and only recently heard) explains that it’s about a greedy little boy named Willie Green from New Orleans, who has received a nice jelly roll as a present from his mother and refuses to share it with the other kids, and the cover of the original sheet music, back in 1919, portrayed that scene.

Much as it pains me to suggest an alternate meaning, an early scholar of Black folk song named Guy Johnson wrote in 1927 that “jelly roll” was “by far the most common” sexual euphemism in blues lyrics, and “stands for the vagina, or for the female genitalia in general, and sometimes for sexual intercourse.” If, for a moment, we consider that interpretation, it suggests some ambiguity in little Willie’s gender identification… but the term was to some extent polymorphous and the lyric I sing includes the gender-balanced line (assuming I’m singing about a het [though not necessarily cis] couple), “your jelly sure is fine, but you ain’t getting none of mine…” which leads to a minor mystery, because I haven’t been able to find that line in any other version. (Steve Mann’s version is somewhat similar, and I love his guitar part, so maybe I adapted his lyric, but if someone knows a closer source, please let me know.)

As for the song itself, it was and is a very popular trad jazz number,  composed by Clarence and Spencer Williams, who both were Louisianans, but not related to each other.

Spencer was the elder, most likely born in 1886 in Alabama (likely Selma, though his parents also lived in Birmingham and Montgomery), though at times he claimed to have been born in New Orleans “as long ago as 1880.” He also claimed to have been a nephew of Lulu White, the most famous Black madame in the red light district remembered as Storyville, and to have lived as a teenager in her famous Mahogany Hall — which sounds like a colorful invention, but White  does seem to have been his aunt, or at least a near relation, and he does seem to have spent time with her in New Orleans. Be that as it may, he was in Chicago by 1908 and began publishing songs shortly thereafter — hundreds of them, eventually, with over a hundred different collaborators, including “Mahogany Hall Stomp,”  “Royal Garden Blues,” “Basin Street Blues,” “I Ain’t Got Nobody,” “I’ve Found a New Baby,” “Everybody Loves My Baby,”  this one, and the similarly-themed “Nobody in Town Can Bake a Sweet Jelly Roll Like Mine.” He also made some records, including naughty double-entendre duets with the guitarists Lonnie Johnson and Teddy Bunn, backed by James P. Johnson on piano — which may be more than you needed to know, but it’s a hell of a resume.

Clarence Williams was less prolific as a songwriter, but a good deal more prosperous, since he was also a successful publisher, made hundreds of records, managed a bunch of bands and produced a bunch of blues singers — one of his bands had Louis Armstrong on trumpet and one of the singers was Bessie Smith — and, all in all, was one of the most important figures on the New York jazz and blues scene. His compositional talents are a bit hard to judge, since he also put his name on a lot of tunes he bought or “borrowed” from other people, but he and Spencer seem to have been genuine collaborators and there’s no reason to doubt he had a hand in this one. He also made a nice recording of it — maybe my favorite — in 1934, with the versatile Roy Smeck on guitar.

To my eternal regret, I never met Smeck, though I easily could have; he was giving guitar lessons in New York when I was there studying with Dave Van Ronk. I do not regret a minute spent with Dave, but if I’d suggested taking some supplementary lessons from Smeck, Dave would have heartily encouraged me… ah, well. I did get to see him live once, and he was terrific: his finale was a version of “Paddlin’ Madeline Home,” chording on a harmonica held in his mouth without a rack and playing the melody and variations on a ukulele, while moving it like a canoe paddle. Ars longa, and all that…

This is another from Bill Morrissey, written after he spent a summer working on a purse seiner out of Ketchikan, Alaska. That used to be a pretty common thing; I knew a bunch of musicians who went to Alaska to work the fishing and save some money to tide them over while they tried to get their performing careers going. When I met him back in the early 1980s, this was one of Bill’s strongest songs, introduced with stories of freezing, scuffling, and drinking during his time ashore at a place called the Shamrock Topless Bar and Laundromat.

I sang this a lot when I was touring — not as often as “Oil Money” or “My Baby and Me,” but more often than any  of Bill’s other songs. I even recorded a version for my LP, with Bill producing, but it seemed kind of silly for me to do it when it was also on Bill’s record, and one of his friends said I made it sound like a Leonard Cohen song, which I didn’t take that as a compliment. So it stayed in the can and I did “Soldier’s Pay” — which might also have sounded like Cohen, but Bill wasn’t recording it and someone had to.

This was a favorite of my friend Monte‘s, and it reminds me of him because he was from northern British Columbia, which is the closest I ever got to Alaska. That’s another story: when Bill was booked to play the Vancouver Folk Festival, I gave him Monte’s number. I thought they’d get along, but Bill came home kind of disgruntled, asking, “Who is that guy?”

Turned out that Monte had been giving him a tour of the local hang-outs and it started to rain; Monte didn’t want Bill to get wet, so insisted he wait in a bar; then Monte pulled up a few minutes later in a long black Chevrolet. He gestured for Bill to get in, but Bill knew Monte didn’t live nearby, so asked: “Where’d you get the car?”

Monte gestured again and said, “Don’t worry about it. Get in!”

Bill did worry about it, and didn’t get in.

I asked Monte about that story the next time I saw him, and he chuckled and explained, “It was raining.” He wanted to be a good host, he was going to return the car when they were done, and he hadn’t realized Bill was going to be twitchy about a little thing like “borrowing” a car, what with all the hardscrabble songs.

The only time Monte made it to the east coast was a year or so later, for our album release concert, when Bill and I had Reckless Records, producing our first albums and one from Dave Van Ronk. Monte played with Dave at the show, and he and Bill were polite to each other, but they couldn’t get over the car incident.

Bill Morrissey sounded like an old man long before he was one, which was weird, because he looked like a teenager long after he was one.  When I met him, he was about thirty years old, fresh-faced, with the semi-long hair that went with being a high school student in the 1970s — my time, ten years younger — and that craggy old man’s voice.

He aged into the voice, sooner than he should have. Too much whiskey was part of it, but there are always reasons for the whiskey, and so many of his songs express a deep loneliness. I don’t know where that came from, and at some level I can’t regret it, since it gave the songs their depth and power, but that’s a hell of a trade.

This is one of his shorter songs, and a favorite of mine, because of the deft use of language and the way it sneaks up on you. Dave Van Ronk, a mentor and influence for both of us and the person who told us about each other, used to talk about Brecht’s theory of alienation, which in Dave’s interpretation worked by pairing a bleak lyric with a cheery tune, so it caught you off guard rather than letting you relax into it.

This is one of the best examples I know of that effect, and in the right setting it’s a killer… but Bill found it didn’t work for him onstage, so he never recorded it and if I hadn’t happened to sit him down in front of a tape recorder during the brief period when he was playing it, no one would know it existed. I played it onstage a couple of times, which pleased him, but it didn’t work for me either, back then.

Maybe we were too young. It’s an older man’s song, and works fine for me now. I wish he were around to give it another try.

(Bill was a good friend, partner, and inspiration to me, and I know a lot of his songs. I’ve already posted “Small Town on the River,” “Texas Blues,” “Barstow,” “My Baby and Me,” “Oil Money,” “King Jelly’s Good Morning Irene Song,” “Candlepin Swing,” “Soldier’s Pay,” and “Night Shift,” with more to come.)

I was recently exchanging emails with a relative who is a longtime liberal but also a supporter of Israel, and I asked if she was not bothered by the horrors of the Israeli prison camps — the amputations, starvation, torture, and deaths — and she responded that she didn’t know about that…

…which immediately made me think of Tom Paxton‘s song, “We Didn’t Know.” It is an angry, satiric song — and I should add, for folks who want trigger warnings, that the second verse portrays a character who uses the n-word. I’ve known it since I was a kid, when my parents and others were caught up in the struggle to end the Vietnam War and told about the “good Germans”– an ironic cliché, meaning the Germans who didn’t like Hitler, didn’t support the extermination of the Jews, and later insisted they would have been horrified if they had known what was going on… but said they only learned about those horrors after the war… even though all their Jewish neighbors were disappearing and never returning, and the Gestapo was breaking down doors and hauling people away. Like many other people in many other situations, they managed to convince themselves that war is always terrible, and of course a nation at war will do dreadful things, but Germany was still essentially a good nation, even in these dark times, and they were essentially good people… and, in any case, what could they have done?

A lot of Americans felt that way about the Vietnam War. Some actively supported the US invasion; many more believed it was terrible but necessary, and never called it an invasion; many thought it was a mistake, but managed to ignore the brutality and horror the US was inflicting on a small, faraway nation — because, after all, we were the leaders of the free world, defending democracy, as we had when we defeated the Nazis and liberated the concentration camps, just twenty years earlier. The soldiers of WWII were only in their forties and that was their youth; they considered themselves the opposite of the Germans: the people who had fought and died to stop that horror.

Paxton wrote his song in 1965, when both major political parties and the mass of Americans were still backing the invasion, the bombing, the killing and dying to prevent the spread of Communism… and had not yet had their noses rubbed in the senseless, racist, brutality we were inflicting on people we were trained to think were not like us.

By the time Pete Seeger wrote “Last Train to Nuremberg,” it was 1970 and we knew about the My Lai massacre. If you are too young to remember, the short version is that in March, 1968, US troops under the command of the men named in the first verse of Seeger’s song — Lieutenant William Calley, Captain Ernest Medina, and Major General Samuel Koster — entered the small village of My Lai, searching for Viet Cong troops; found no soldiers or men of military age; and burned the village to the ground, while slaughtering some five hundred women, children, and old men, after raping many of the women, including girls as young as ten or twelve. Despite the testimony of a few horrified soldiers who protested and managed to save some people, those facts were suppressed, Medina was given a medal, and the story only became public a year and a half later. The army, which originally reported the massacre as a battle in which “128 Viet Cong and 22 civilians” had been killed, eventually court-martialed and convicted Calley, but not his superiors — and went from denying what had happened in My Lai to claiming it was a unique incident, despite investigations that turned up numerous similar massacres. The song, of course, is referring to the Nuremberg war crimes trials following the Nazi Holocaust.

I grew up with these songs and stories, and the lesson that in many situations, ignorance is chosen and is complicity. When I talk to people who say they don’t know about the horrors of the Israeli prison camps; choose to frame the genocidal bombing, starvation, and destruction in Gaza as defensive, or as normal horrors of war; or accept claims that the IDF is targeting only combatants, these are the songs and stories that come back to me.

We are in a dark time, growing darker. I live in a neighborhood full of immigrants from Asia and Latin America. I have no idea how many of them have green cards or citizenship, or what will happen if the local equivalent of the Gestapo starts breaking down doors on my street — or what I will do, how far I will go, to protect and help them.

I grew up on stories of the Underground Railroad — of people who risked their homes, families, and freedom to aid people escaping slavery. I grew up on stories of people who hid Jews during the Nazi holocaust and helped my mother and her relatives to escape Nazi Vienna. My mother helped a friend’s daughter who was underground in the US, hiding from the FBI. My uncle was with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers in Delano and Huey Newton’s link from prison to the outside world. I have marched, gone to meetings, gone briefly to jail, but have done far less — and sometimes felt I was doing less because the situation was less dire, because there was less that an ordinary person could do.

I fear we will soon be facing situations in which many of us “ordinary people” will have only the choice of risking our freedom, homes, and potentially our lives or being remembered as “good Germans,” who looked away and went along.  I just saw a note Pete Seeger wrote, I’m not sure when, or to whom, but it feels like something to share:
Some of the “small things” do not feel small; some can feel dangerous or difficult. Some are, in fact, dangerous — the “good Germans” were facing real pressures, real dangers to themselves and their families if they did what all of us in hindsight agree would have been the right thing. I understand why they felt they were not to blame; I understand why some people may argue they were not to blame. But I was raised on stories of my relatives who were on the cattle cars, shipped east to be exterminated while the “good Germans” pretended not to know what was happening; and the lesson was that there is nothing worse than that.

These songs are not masterpieces; I left out a couple of verses of Seeger’s, because I had forgotten one and another seemed to weaken the message. I’ve never performed them and hadn’t posted them here because they felt like minor artifacts of my distant past… but that exchange with my Israeli relative brought them back into my head, and I can’t get them out. Far from feeling like historical artifacts, they now feel like some of the most timely songs I know.

I first learned this when I was immersing myself in the guitar style of Joseph Spence, preparatory to making an instructional video on his playing — but at the time I had no idea it was more than a charming little ditty with a bunch of sections and variations. On the album I had, it was titled “Don’t Let Nobody Burn Down Burma Road,” which is testimony to the fact that the producers couldn’t understand Spence’s Bahamian accent and didn’t have the internet handy to fill them in on the song’s history… which turns out to be interesting and to give the lyric a deeper meaning than they or I understood.

The first section is a verse that was already described as an “old song” when a Virginia newspaper printed it in 1868:

A bull-frog dressed in soldier’s clothes,
Went out one day to shoot some crows,
The crows smelt powder, and all flew away,
And the bull-frog had no sport that day.¹

The paper printed that verse as a satiric commentary on a senator who had offered the assistance of the state militia to help oust President Andrew Johnson, and it resurfaced from time to time over the following decades in similarly mocking contexts, especially when white soldiers or militias were sent against Black communities — the uniformed frogs firing ineffectually on the black crows… which brings us to the Bahamas.

The first recording of this lyric in the islands seems to be from 1935, when Alan Lomax and Mary Elizabeth Barnicle recorded it on Cat Island from a man named Wilberforce Swain, and it was recorded in the 1950s as a popular record by Delbon Johnson — but Spence’s version is specifically connected to a major event in Bahamian history, the Burma Road riots.

The short version of that story is that in the summer of 1942, as the United States entered WWII, two major air bases were under construction in the Bahamas by a mix of imported workers from the US and local hands, and it turned out that the Bahamian workers were being paid only a third (or a half, or a quarter — the reports vary) of the hourly wage paid to the Americans.

The Bahamians protested, their protests were ignored, they finally marched to the government offices in Nassau, and on gaining no compromise, they rioted. At least two protestors were killed, many more were wounded, and over a hundred were arrested, some serving almost ten years in prison. The immediate result was a slight increase in pay and meals supplied by the employers. The longer-term result was the formation of the People’s Labour Party, and the riots are often cited as beginning the movement that led to Bahamian independence.

This brings us to Ronnie Butler, “the Godfather of Bahamian Music,” who recorded a song called “Burma Road” commemorating the riots, which included the old bullfrog and crows verse as one of its various sections. Another section went “Do wa Nanny, how you do?” I have no idea how that related to the theme, nor is it clear when Butler made the record — some sources say 1964, though the version I find online sounds somewhat later — or whether he or other singers were performing versions of the same medley years earlier, maybe even back to the immediate aftermath of the riots.

It’s also possible that Butler got the song from Spence: I assumed Spence was copying his record, since in the “Burma Road” section he sings “Don’t lick nobody” and his back-up singers respond “Burma Road,” as a sort of refrain, and Spence retained that pairing, though the phrases don’t follow logically in one voice — but when I talked about this in an interview for a Bahamian documentary on Spence, the interviewer said Butler was a big fan of Spence’s music and might have adapted his longer version from Spence’s, which, again, could easily be a survival of something sung back in the 1940s.

In any case, it’s a fun song to play, and a good story.

(As for Spence and his guitar style, I have already posted lots of pieces by and about him, including a Spence guitar medley, “Coming In on a Wing and a Prayer,” “Happy Meeting in Glory,” “Brownskin Girl,” “Glory of Love,” and “Sloop John B.”)

I’ve got a lot of favorite songwriters, and Billy Joe Shaver is right up there. Like most people, I got into him through Waylon Jennings, and in particular Waylon’s Honky Tonk Heroes album.I’ve already done a post about that album’s title song, and this is another from the same disc. I fell in love with it, first for the lyrics and then for the odd chord progression, which no one but a guitar player would ever come up with, following one chord shape up the neck, then shifting to another key for the chorus.

The lyric is a nice example of Shaver’s gift for turning ordinary language into surprising lyrics. I particularly like the line “ain’t no comfort in the can” — he’s writing about being in jail in Matamoros, but  “comfort in a can” was an advertising slogan for Edgeworth pipe tobacco.

I did a long interview with Shaver, which I’ve posted on my website. He said the thing that characterized his writing was its simplicity:

“I know my limitations and I write within a realm that’s simple. It’s real hard to write simple and stay simple but, when you get it down, simplicity don’t need to be greased. Anybody can understand it, if you keep it within that range and write as much as you can with as few words as you can.”

I get what he means but, like Chuck Berry, he wrote a lot of lines that aren’t flowery or self-consciously poetic but couldn’t have been written by anyone else. “I’ve been to Georgia on a fast train, honey/ I wasn’t born no yesterday.” If you think that’s a common phrase, try running “born no yesterday” through Google. And he followed it with “I got a good Christian raisin’ and an eighth-grade education/ Ain’t no need in y’all treating me this way.” That’s from his autobiographical masterpiece, “I’ve Been to Georgia on a Fast Train,” which sketches his hardscrabble youth with brilliant economy — “I just thought I’d mention, my grandma’s old age pension/ Is the reason why I’m standing here today…”

I never learned that one, because it wasn’t my life story and his recording is, to me, so definitive that it would be ridiculous for anyone else to do it. His voice fits the story perfectly, backed by a hot honky-tonk band, and it’s one of my favorite records.

I saw Shaver a bunch of times, the first time with his son Eddy, who was a hard rock guitarist and backed his father with a couple of similarly hard rocking pals. I reviewed that show for the Boston Globe:

It looks like some old drunk wandered up on stage to sing along with a young country-rock band. Billy Joe Shaver is rumpled and craggy, with a face like a beat-up barn door framed by stringy, shoulder-length gray hair. He stands stiffly at the mike in a sweat-soaked black t-shirt, making broad, clumsy gestures to punch home the words of his songs. His voice is strong, tagging favorite lines with a hard, Texas yodel, but sometimes he has to fight a little to find the pitch.

“I’m just an old chunk of coal,” he sings, and you believe him. “But I’m gonna be a diamond some day,” he adds, and the conviction is unmistakeable.

I’d forgotten the closer to that piece:

Meanwhile, rock star John Entwistle sits obliviously in the back room, chatting with his entourage. During the break, the Shavers are introduced to him, and the house photographer gathers everyone on the balcony for a group shot. Afterwards, father takes son aside for a whispered conference.

“Who’s John Entwistle?” Billy Joe asks Eddy.

“He’s the bass player for the Who,” Eddy whispers back.

“Oh,” says Billy Joe, nodding. “I guess that’s good.”

I saw him and Eddy again a couple of years later, doing an acoustic show, just the two of them, and it was magical. Then Eddy died of a heroin overdose and Billy Joe mostly stopped touring. I saw him once or twice more in Austin, sounding as craggy and heartfelt as ever. He often gets lumped together with Waylon and Willie Nelson, and he was good friends with both of them, but there was nobody like him.

I have no idea when or where I learned “Cold, Cold Heart” — it must have been sometime after the 1970s, because I didn’t grow up with classic country, aside from a couple of Johnny Cash records and the cheapo anthology where I learned “Lonesome 7-7203.” That changed in the 1980s, in a large part due to Bill Morrissey, who turned me on to Merle Haggard, George Jones, and the depth of classic country songwriting — which is to say, Hank Williams and his myriad followers.

I’ve already posted a few of Hank’s songs (“You Win Again,” “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” and “Lovesick Blues“) and I know a bunch more (“Jambalaya” and “Hey, Good Lookin'” were staples of my Antwerp busking years), but they are so familiar and frequently done that I feel a bit ridiculous doing yet another version…

…and that’s particularly true of “Cold, Cold Heart,” which is not only one of the biggest country hits of all time, but was also the first huge pop hit for Tony Bennett, and an R&B hit for Dinah Washington, and really doesn’t need to be done again, ever, by anybody…

…or at least, that was how I always felt about it and why I never performed it…

…until a few weeks ago, when I started fooling around with it and actually paid attention to the lyrics. As it happens, that was also what persuaded Bennett — when Mitch Miller sent him Hank’s demo of the song, he initially rejected it because he didn’t like or want to sing country music, but Miller told him to forget it was a country song and listen to the lyrics, and he fell in love with it, recorded it, got a huge hit, and later recalled with pride that he had heard Hank would punch up his version whenever it was on a jukebox.

I vastly prefer Hank’s version to Bennett’s, or even Washington’s, and in any case it’s the one in my head. But I’m not sure why I learned it, because, as I said, it is so, so overdone…

…and that was that, until I started fooling around with it a few weeks ago and it suddenly hit me in a different way. Because, years ago, I had a relationship with a woman whom I loved, and she seemed to love me, but there was something in what Hank called her “lonesome past” — I don’t know exactly what had happened, but the result was that she couldn’t trust anyone who seemed to love her. I wouldn’t have said her heart was cold, at all, and that’s something I misunderstood about this song; I took it as a criticism of the woman, accusing her of being coldhearted. But that isn’t what it says. I don’t know how Hank meant it, but I now hear it as being about someone who was hurt badly in the past and can’t get over it, so feels as if something inside her was frozen, and when I hear that way, it feels painfully familiar. Which, of course, is what made Williams such a great songwriter; his songs hit people in deeply personal ways.

So, overdone or not, here’s my take on a classic — one of many, and I’m sure there will be many more, and that’s why it’s a classic.

I was so out of touch with popular culture in 1977 that when a young woman requested “Margaritaville” I didn’t know what she was talking about. I was busking in Harvard Square with my friend Rob Forbes playing washboard, and she was there with a much older man, who I assumed was her father. Rob dismissed that notion as typically naive, but as it turned out, it was her father, and somehow we ended up at her place a few days later, and she played us the Buffett record, and I think Rob may have dated her for a while. Her name was Heidi.

That was that, for the time being, since we went off to Europe at the end of the summer and Buffett hadn’t hit over there. I probably got my next taste in the mid-1980s, when I hitchhiked down the East Coast and along the Gulf Coast to Mexico — which meant I was mostly traveling through Buffett country, and disappointed a lot of people by not having a repertoire of his songs.

I may have learned this during that trip, or maybe when I got back home. In any case, I picked up two or three of his albums and liked them, and learned a half-dozen of his songs. I’ve already posted “The Peanut Butter Conspiracy,” and will definitely be posting “He Went to Paris,” and maybe “Miss You So Badly,” which I played for a while but am not sure I remember all the way through…

…and I’ve never performed “Margaritaville,” because it was so overdone, but when I got into Congolese guitar I found that this fell really nicely under my fingers; Buffett’s mix of Caribbean rhythms and country-western was exactly the sort of thing the Congolese acoustic players liked, and I’ve enjoyed picking this for more than forty years. The lyric is admittedly pretty silly, especially the pop-top/flip-flop verse, but in a relaxed, lazy, Buffett way, and it’s fun to sing. Apparently he wrote it in Austin, Texas, feeling homesick for Key West, and sounds like it.

Which brings me to Steve James, my buddy in Austin — later in Seattle, and now gone, but I stayed with him a bunch of times in Austin and almost blew up his house once by leaving one of the gas burners slightly on, which feels like the kind of thing the singer of this song would do. Steve always liked my pseudo-Congolese guitar arrangements — we first bonded over my version of “Iko Iko” — and was particularly amused by this one. He was always annoyed by folkies and blues fans who self-righteously avoided the Top Forty, and was charmed that I’d demonstrate the adaptability of what I’d learned from Jean-Bosco Mwenda with a megahit Buffett song. (For some reason, I’ve found this style matched several major hits: previous posts with fingerpicked rumba accompaniment include “He’ll Have to Go” and “Under the Boardwalk.”) So, this one’s for Steve, and the shirt I’m wearing in the video was one of his; I’ve never worn guayaberas, but he liked them and I inherited this one, and it fits the song.

When Dylan hit the stage on Sunday evening at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, carrying an electric guitar and backed by Al Kooper and members of the Butterfield Blues Band, and crashed into “Maggie’s Farm,” he unleashed a wave of controversy, myths, and adulation that has only gained power in the succeeding decades. I wrote about all of this at length in Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night that Split the Sixties, now the basis of a major Hollywood movie called A Complete Unknown, which recreates that moment with some added dramatic details. I’m not going to rehash all that history here, but it brought me back to the song.

As with a lot of the Dylan songs in my repertoire, I don’t remember when or where I learned this; surely in my teens, and although I might not have sung it for decades, it’s engraved indelibly in my memory. I don’t remember how I used to play it, and by now I’ve listened to the Newport version so many times that my take on it is influenced as much by Michael Bloomfield’s ferocious guitar playing as by Dylan’s voice — not that I’m attempting any semblance of Bloomfield’s virtuosity, but I would play this very differently if I hadn’t heard that version.

Due to that performance and its repercussions, this song is often positioned as Dylan’s rejection of the folk scene — that’s how it works in the movie, very effectively, and he was certainly declaring his independence from the people who had anointed him as their spokesman and prophet, and who expected him to keep writing songs for them to sing at their gatherings, and to take part in those gatherings…

…but if Dylan was breaking with the folk scene, he was by no means breaking with folk music, and if you dig a little deeper, this song was also a declaration of fidelity to the folk tradition. Specifically, it is an imaginative reworking of a song called “Down on Penny’s Farm,” recorded in 1929 by a group listed on the record label as The Bentley Boys, who remain largely obscure (though Tony Russell recently unearthed some background on them in his book Rural Rhythm). That song was about the miseries of working as a sharecropper, and made a perfect template for Dylan’s plaint:

Pete Seeger and the other Almanac Singers were presumably familiar with this song back to the 1930s, since they reworked that last line in “Get Thee Behind Me, Satan,” and Seeger recorded it on his first solo album, Darling Corey. That album is often overlooked, but was massively influential; it was the first time a middle class, urban musician attempted to record rural music authentically, in the style of the original performers, to the point of recreating their banjo arrangements, rather than treating rural performances as raw material that needed to be smoothed out and gussied up for sophisticated urban listeners. It would be a few years before Pete’s half-brother Mike teamed up with Tom Paley and John Cohen to form the New Lost City Ramblers, the foundational group of the old-time music revival and the wave of artists Dave Van Ronk dubbed “neo-ethnics” — and Paley specifically cited Seeger’s album as inspiring him to painstakingly learn and recreate older guitar and banjo styles.

A couple of years after Seeger’s LP, Folkways Records released the Bentley Boys original recording on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, which some later writers have cited as the roots of Dylan, the Band, and the whole “Americana” thing — but, much as I love the Anthology, that’s a misunderstanding of the world Dylan was living in. As he has pointed out, he was moving from couch to couch, and didn’t have anything like a record collection. He undoubtedly heard “Penny’s Farm” on Seeger’s album and the Anthology, but also from lots of friends and acquaintances at picking parties in Minneapolis, New York, Cambridge, and wherever else young folksingers gathered. Unlike rock fans and critics, who take pride in knowing who recorded the “original version” of a song, the whole point of folk songs, as understood by Dylan’s friends, mentors, and models, was that they were done by no particular person or band and had no original—they were floating in the ether and any recording just captured a moment when someone with a machine happened to preserve one of the infinite versions and performances of songs that continued to change and grow.

Shake it up, Bobby!
Twist and shout!

The early 1960s brought a spate of songs based on the chord pattern of “La Bamba,” which had hit big for Ritchie Valens in 1958. The Isley Brothers produced the most obvious reworking with “Twist and Shout,” which was shortly covered by the Beatles — and which I have occasionally played as a medley with “La Bamba” — but there were a bunch of more complex and extended songs that used other chord patterns for the verse, then fell back on the repeated,  Latin-flavored I-IV-V for the chorus, including the Rolling Stones’ “Get Off My Cloud,” the Rascals’ “Good Lovin’,” and “Like a Rolling Stone.”

The latter was Dylan’s first major hit, and the title has an obvious double meaning: it fits the lyric and also his choice to go head to head with the Stones and the new generation of rock bands that shared his immersion in deep US roots styles. He’d been playing Muddy Waters songs since his first days in New York — his live tapes include a version of “Two Trains Running” and the Freewheelin’ sessions include his reworking of “Louisiana Blues” — so when the Stones hit the US playing covers of Waters and Howling Wolf, and the Animals hit playing songs copped from his first LP, it was natural for him to team up with Mike Bloomfield and bring it all back home. Columbia Records framed the title of his first electric album in exactly those terms, presenting him as the native answer to the British invasion, and although some deaf or unthinking critics called his electric music “folk rock,” it had none of the soft folkiness of the Byrds or Sonny and Cher; it was blues rock, as loud and tough as anything the Stones were doing — especially by 1965, when they were adapting their style to fit his lyrical innovations.

There’s a funny story about that, which Mick Jagger told in an interview: I’m quoting from memory, but the gist was that Dylan had apparently met Keith Richards in New York and said, “I could have written ‘Satisfaction,’ but you couldn’t have written ‘Mr. Tambourine Man.'”

The interviewer, taken aback, asked “What did he mean? Was it a put-down?”

Jagger responded, “Well, of course. He’s like that. It’s funny. And it’s true.”

Moving on to “Like a Rolling Stone,” it was obviously Dylan getting into their territory, and also a classic example of his lyrical put-down mode. The usual gloss is that it was one of the multiple nasty songs he wrote after breaking up with Joan Baez; “She Belongs to Me” was the most obvious, but my uncle, who knew everybody, insisted that “Desolation Row” was about her circle in Carmel, and when I spent a few days there and met Ephraim “Don” Doner, a brilliant ceramic artist and ping-pong hustler with voluminous gray hair, I instantly identified him as “Einstein disguised as Robin Hood…”

Be that as it may, a lot of this song’s lyrics feel like Dylan putting down the lonely princess who went to the finest schools, from the point of view of a genuine denizen of the lower depths. Which was, as his own uncles might have said, pretty chutzpadik, since he was a middle class kid who had only visited the lower depths as a Guthrie-dazzled romantic, much as I did a few years later, and was already a millionaire and in the process of becoming a rock star.

Which said, he was a new kind of rock star, and when he sang this at Newport it was the knock-out punch of the combination that began with “Maggie’s Farm” — he wasn’t going to be part of their club anymore, was going his own way, alone, refusing to lead a new generation of committed idealists and sneering, “How does it feel, to be on your own?”

To a lot of the people listening, it felt miserable, and some of them had the energy to boo him — and the booing just added to the power of his new persona, proving that rather than following a trend he was fearlessly going his own way.

In fact, he was doing both: he had wanted to be a rock star since high school and was jumping on the latest trend, but insisted on doing it his own way, and he’s been doing it his own way ever since. If you go to see the Rolling Stones today, they’re still recycling their greatest hits of the sixties, playing the riffs the fans want to hear, while Dylan keeps adopting new personas, making new music, and constantly changing his setlists and arrangements. If he’s no longer a complete unknown, he remains resolutely unpredictable and always interesting.

I learned “Like a Rolling Stone” in my early teens — maybe even pre-teens. I never performed it because the world didn’t need another version, but like a bunch of Dylan’s early songs it is inextricably part of my musical life. As I wrote about “Mr. Tambourine Man,” I don’t even know if I like it; it is so deeply ingrained in my memory that it just is.