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.