Sounding Like A HillBilly: 'Moonshiner' by Robert Forryan
I’ve
been a moonshiner
For seventeen long years.
I’ve spent all my money
On whisky and beer.
I go to some hollow
And set up my still,
An’ if whisky don’t kill me
Then I don’t know what will.
I go to some bar room,
And drink with my friends,
Where the women can’t follow
And see what I spend.
God bless them pretty women
I wish they was mine,
Their breath is as sweet as
The dew on the vine.
Let me eat when I’m hungry
Let me drink when I’m dry,
Dollars when I’m hard up
Religion when I die.
The whole world’s a bottle
And life’s but a dram,
When the bottle gets empty
It sure ain’t worth a damn.
The most exquisite version possible
of the traditional song known as, among other things, “Moonshiner”:
a version in which he so fully inhabits the persona of the Old Derelict
narrator (the grace-kissed soul as well as the voice of the man) that
it is eerie…’
Michael
Gray, Song & Dance Man III
‘What’s extraordinary about this recording of “Moonshiner”
is how Dylan summons up the strength of characterisation to cram decades
of experience, disillusion and resignation into his voice, while his
subtle guitar and understated harmonica work perfectly to support the
edge-of-the-grave moonshiner’s vocals. It’s ironic that
this recording was made when some traditionalists were complaining that
the 22-year-old Dylan couldn’t even sing properly (remember the
jibe of the coffeehouse owner recounted in “Talkin’ New
York”: “come back some other day – you sound like
a hillbilly. We want folk singers here”).’
John
Bauldie, The Bootleg Series booklet.
The thoughts which follow come about as a result of e-mail correspondence
between myself and Andrew Muir in which we had both expressed admiration
for the performance of ‘Moonshiner’ which appears on The
Bootleg Series set. It was then that I decided that I wanted to write
about the song, though I had no idea what I wanted to say. It is easy
to like a Dylan performance (easier than hating one), much harder to
say anything of interest about it. For there are few things as dull
as a eulogy. So much Dylan writing, and I do not exempt myself from
this criticism, drifts into endless adjectives, similes and metaphors
leading nowhere. The only point of writing for a magazine is to communicate
– and to communicate you must have something to say which, in
turn, means having thoughts to convey. So often it seems that adjectives,
similes and metaphors become excuses not to think. They are so often
meaningless. What I mean is that I come not to praise ‘Moonshiner’
but to talk about it and to see what happens.
This is always referred to as a traditional song, so we don’t
know how or where this song originated, or if it was once the creation
of one individual. I’m not convinced that it meets the Woody Guthrie
criterion: ‘You can’t write a good song about a whore house
unless you’ve been in one’. I’m not sure I agree with
Guthrie’s unimaginative views and I doubt that the author of ‘Moonshiner’
ever distilled moonshine. Whether he or she ever did or did not, I can
well understand why this song reached out to the coffeehouse generation
on the cusp of the Sixties. Moonshining was foreign to their experience,
as foreign as Woody’s dustbowl ballads and talking blues. But
there was something about the old, mythic America that appealed to that
generation; my generation. We had been brought up on Western films and
TV cowboy series. We bought into the concept of rugged authenticity
and its natural superiority to sophisticated urban culture (even though
the latter was our inevitable destination).
We learned our liberal values and our sympathy for the outsider from
so many Westerns where the lone stranger stood up for truth and justice
against the baying mob. I am convinced that the Hippie movement owed
some of its attraction to the fact that it echoed our assumptions about
Native American Indian culture. For those movies had taught us to admire
the 'noble savage' and to believe that his values were superior to those
of our parents. In Westerns the bad guys were the bigots. You never
heard the hero say: ‘The only good injun is a dead injun’.
So, as we slid into late adolescence, the authenticity and ethnicity
of folk music represented a natural home. And songs that spun tales
of early, rural America or that evolved out of an oral culture were
simply irresistible, if they were good songs. They still are.
All of which explains why ‘Moonshiner’ endured. It appears
to have been performed and recorded by many artists and is known under
other titles, among them ‘Moonshiner Blues’ and ‘The
Bottle Song’. It often features on albums of folk material, being
a particular favourite among those who compile collections of Irish
drinking songs. The Clancy Brothers have recorded it as ‘Moonshiner
Blues’ and their upbeat, party-style presentation - so different
from Dylan’s - is a typical performance of this song. Dylan’s
is the only slow version I have heard and it struck me as odd that Dylan
could make something so beautiful out of this subject. What could possibly
be attractive about a derelict, drunken moonshiner? As Debbie Sims wrote
in Issue 4 of Homer, the slut: ‘For
“moonshiner” read alcoholic because, although romantically
put and sweetly sung, this is a song about a man whose whole life has
been dominated by drinking and being drunk’.
As I typed those words, I realised I knew little about moonshining,
so I did some investigating. I knew that moonshine was some kind of
illegally distilled whisky, but that was about all. I know more now.
Moonshine can be traced to Ulster immigrants who settled in the Appalachian
mountains in the eighteenth century. They brought their own poteen-making
methods with them, which evolved into moonshining. They were Protestants
with a historical attachment to William of Orange. Hence they were known
as King Billy’s men which, eventually, metamorphosed into Hillbillys
– reflecting their political affiliations and their Appalachian
homes.
In his book Almost Heaven:Travels Through The Backwoods
of America, Martin Fletcher seeks out moonshiners in Rabun County,
Georgia, ‘the last real stronghold of moonshining in America’.
He meets a law officer whose father and grandfather were both moonshiners.
‘There weren’t no other jobs back then. Had it not been
for moonshining we would have starved. That’s what bought shoes
for our feet.’
Fletcher goes on: ‘There was something distinctly comic about
moonshining in Rabun County, Georgia. Everyone knew which families made
moonshine… where they got their supplies and which welding shops
made their stills. The moonshiners were mean but they were characters…
when caught in the act, moonshiners considered themselves honour-bound
to try to scarper through the woods even though most were now old men
and often inebriated by their own product’.
Moonshining goes on in the hills because they need to be near streams
so that the stills can receive the cold running water they require.
‘The supplies and equipment are considerable. You need 800
pounds of sugar plus corn, yeast, malt and water to make 1,000 gallons
of “mash”. You need several large wooden or plastic barrels
in which to ferment the ‘mash’ and turn it into “beer”.
You need the still itself – a copper or steel tank big enough
to hold all the ‘beer’. You need bricks or breeze blocks
to line a furnace beneath the still, 100-pound propane cylinders to
boil the alcohol from the ‘beer’, car radiators in which
to condense the steam and containers for the ensuing 100 gallons or
so of moonshine’ – which is generally 95% proof.
Fletcher describes moonshiners as ‘an endangered species’.
Moonshiners were making moonshine long before it was illegal. In 1794
farmers in Western Pennsylvania rioted at news of a proposed tax on
whisky. ‘There was something almost romantic about these old
rogues, and America would be a less colourful place without them’.
The first version of ‘Moonshiner’ I ever heard was by Bob
Dylan on the Gaslight Tape from October 1962. In my early days
of tape collecting names like the Gaslight and the Finjan
Club and the Minneapolis Hotel simply dripped with nostalgia
for the years of the Folk Revival. One imagines that this was not a
one-off performance, but that it was a song Dylan had learned and that
he carried with him as a usable item – a song to be pulled out
when needed or when he was sufficiently interested.
The real subject of this essay is the outstanding ‘official’
recording of 12 August 1963 which appears on The Bootleg Series.
As John Bauldie said, maybe there is a mystery attached to why it was
recorded just then, since Dylan was clearly focussed on producing albums
of original material. Nevertheless, he achieves an immaculate performance
in what seems to have been a single ‘take’. This suggests
he was very familiar with the song by this time. There is a story about
the Japanese artist, Hokusai: it is said that he painted a lion every
day in the hope of one day painting the perfect lion. I like to imagine
that Dylan had been striving to perform the perfect ‘Moonshiner’
and, having done so on 12 August 1963, he felt no need to ever perform
the song again. In my dreams.
There are, inevitably, differences between this later version and the
Gaslight recording. Most obviously, on the earlier live recording there
is no harmonica. Also, the first verse is reprised at the end, making
four verses in all. And the second and third lines of the third verse
become:
‘Moonshine when I’m dry,
Greenbacks when I’m hard up…’
In terms of the actual performance, the guitar work from the gaslight
sounds less accomplished, the voice deeper. There is less stretching
of vowels and emphasis is placed on different words, which is hardly
surprising. It’s as if he’s still wearing the song in, like
a new pair of shoes that are too tight-fitting. Everyone says of The
Bootleg Series recording of ‘Moonshiner’ that Dylan
sounds as old as the moonshiner himself. Andrew Muir once said he sounded
as ‘aged as the oldest cask whisky’. I think this
is true, and I love the performance, but if you listen carefully I think
you will find that the voice truly ages towards the end of the first
verse when it breaks on the words ‘don’t kill me’.
Until then he’s still a young man.
The language of ‘Moonshiner’ intrigues me. I wonder exactly
how old the song is and how much these lyrics are traditional and whether
they have been adapted by Dylan at all? One somehow doubts that the
lyricist ever was a moonshiner – there is something too poetic
and too self-reflectively modern about the words for that to be believable.
The sly character of the old man is cleverly drawn. Moonshining being
illegal he necessarily practises the art of deceit. This aspect of his
nature is doubly alluded to in that the still is hidden in a hollow,
and by the fact that he chooses to drink where:
‘The women can’t
follow
And see what I spend…’
Women? Surely he means wife? Don’t men habitually try to hide
their pleasure-spending from their women, be it on alcohol, books, CDs
or football? Or does this line allude to a further deceit of an adulterous
or bigamous nature? The following lines:
‘God bless the pretty women
I wish they were mine…’
seem to indicate that faithfulness is not on his agenda. In fact, it
seems that there is no area of life in which this moonshiner is to be
trusted.
The lines that I always lovingly return to when I’m away from
the CD player and playing the song in my mind are these:
‘Their breath is as sweet
As the dew on the vine…’
I think that a woman’s breath is not the feminine quality that
would most appeal to the average male nose (how many people really have
sweet breath anyway?). Debbie Sims contrasts the breath of the women
with that of the moonshiner and suggests that the contrast is a part
of their attraction to him. But surely, it is the scent of a woman that
is more alluring than her breath? And what is truly attractive about
dew is not its smell (does it have a smell?) but its visual beauty as,
say, it is caught and tinted by the sun, or its gentle dampness –
and dew, that foggy, foggy dew, has long held a sexual connotation in
folk music. But in this performance breath is sweet, for, as John Bauldie
pointed out, these are what Dylan himself called ‘exercises
in tonal breath control’. Listen to the way he extends the
‘a’ in that first line, or ‘all my’ in the third
line. The way Dylan uses his breath here is as sweet as… it’s
just sublime. Even more sublime than the lovely ‘Copper Kettle’
in which he revisited the moonshining theme in 1970.
In the end, it’s the performance that matters. He doesn’t
sound like a hillbilly, this is a folk singer we hear.
