Nonetheless, it makes sense
to me to begin my discussion with this song, which has always struck
me as the ‘howling beast’ (to borrow one of its tropes)
whose savage spirit shadows the anguished civilities and visionary escapades
of the other songs on Blood on the Tracks. I believe it is
one of Dylan’s greatest songs, but I could also make a good argument
that Dylan has never written anything as bad as this. It’s that
kind of song: ‘What’s good is bad, what’s bad is good.’
The song’s rhetoric is not just over the top; it is outrageously,
ridiculously, childishly over the top. It is an embarrassment.
You could – and his early critics often did – say the same
thing of Faulkner’s fiction. ‘Idiot Wind’ could easily
be imagined as a poetic revision of a subplot Faulkner never got around
to including in Light in August. Like Faulkner’s idiots and innocents,
Dylan’s singer is at once outraged, outrageous, and distressingly
sublime. Like Faulkner’s major characters, Dylan’s singer
(from the evidence of Chronicles, like Dylan himself) is a
stranger in a strange land driven by the simple yet severely exacting
desire for human recognition. The song’s (indeed, the entire album’s)
emotional centre is the quatrain that erupts in the third of the song’s
four two-verse sections:
I noticed at the ceremony, your corrupt ways had finally made you
blind
I can’t remember your face anymore, your mouth has changed, your
eyes don’t look into mine
The tone of this is utterly humourless, yet it is as hilarious as it
is terrifying. It’s both insane and insanely funny. We cannot
yield to its intensity without losing all grip upon our sanity, yet
its intensity resonates deeply within us. Yes, we all want your eyes
to meet mine with a look of recognition, and we want it now. And of
course, we all have it now, somewhere in our lives, more or less, to
a degree, sort of. But only an idiot would believe that every taint
of estrangement could be banished from his life.
Exactly: Just such an idiot sings this song. He believes he’s
married to a woman who understands him implicitly, affording him complete
asylum from an idiot world that just can’t understand him at all.
As the song opens, the singer is beset by assaults upon his reputation
and his privacy, and his wife isn’t always by his side when he
needs her. The first section ends with him rebuking his ‘Sweet
Lady’ for the taint of otherness that occasionally (or, since
she is married to the most mercurial man on the planet, routinely) requires
that she ask him ‘where it was at.’ On the other hand, the
song gives the impression that she is a co-conspirator in their mutual
estrangement, so she probably asked her question in the same spirit
of outraged intimacy with which he throws it back in her face. The sharpness
of the singer’s rebuke – ‘even you, yesterday’
– reverberates with implications of unspoken and perhaps unacknowledged
grievances, and we sense that the singer might be beginning to lose
his naive faith in his marriage as an earthly paradise immune to the
psychic divisions and cross-purposes of ordinary human experience.
The lyric enacts the singer’s ensuing upheaval with an extraordinary
immediacy that beggars its own ironies. The singer may not understand
the full import of what he is saying, but he doesn’t have to.
From the beginning of the second two-verse section until his mind comes
finally to rest with the last verse, the force of his realizations carry
along his consciousness as if in a chain reaction. The truth seizes
him viscerally.
This chain reaction also takes the listener on an extremely wild ride.
The song’s narrative is extremely elliptical, and the psychology
shaping its jump cuts and rhetorical mutations is often obscure or self-contradictory
and always surprising. An interpretation of such a lyric will have to
be extreme as well, so before I discuss the details of this wild ride,
let me summarize its course.
Songs From, But
Not Out Of, History Bob Dylan’s official releases also began with
the old Scottish heritage present. His eponymously titled debut album
reflected the milieu he was immersed in at that time. The album had
only two songs with lyrics by Dylan, the rest consisting of a collection
of folk and blues standards. Scottish traditional music was well represented,
not least in ‘Pretty Peggy-O’.
The exact origins of this song are unknown, but it is usually thought
of as Scottish in origin and, however it began, it has for centuries
been accepted as such and has long featured as a core part of the Scottish
tradition. I originally hailed from the ancient Scottish Kingdom of
Fife, so I first heard the song in a version entitled ‘Bonnie
Lass of Fife-i-o’. This was merely a local play on the words of
a long established Scottish standard, as I discovered later, called
‘Bonnie Lass of Fyvie-O’. Fyvie being the name of a small
town in Aberdeenshire, further north on the same east Scottish coast
as Fife.
Whether this is the town the Irish Dragoons mentioned in the song were
‘marching thru’ cannot be said for certain, but after a
journey of hundreds of years and thousands of miles, the song, ‘Bonnie
Lass of Fyvie’, turned up on Bob Dylan’s debut album in
a version well known in America, called ‘Pretty Peggy-O’.
Bonnie Lass of Fyvie
There once was a troop of Irish dragoons
Come marching down thru Fyvie, O.
And the captain fell in love with a very bonnie lass
And the name she was called was Pretty Peggy-o.
What would your mother think if she heard the guineas clink
And saw the haut-boys marching all before you O?
O little would she think gin she heard the guineas clink,
If I followed a soldier laddie-o.
Pretty Peggy-O
As we rode out to Fennario, as we rode on to Fennario
Our captain fell in love with a lady like a dove
And called her by a name, pretty Peggy-O.
What would your mama think pretty Peggy-O,
What would your mama think pretty Peggy-O,
What would your mama think if she heard my guineas clink
Saw me marching at the head of my soldiers-O
The version Dylan sings was widely played on the folk revival circuit
at the time. Joan Baez naturally was a leading light amongst those who
sang it. However, Dylan’s take is somewhat more rambunctious than
the standard renditions of the time; engagingly playing around with
a song treated as ‘sacrosanct’ by everyone else. Martin
Carthy, who certainly should know, heard Dylan’s performance of
the song as a full out lampooning of the strict folk interpretations
of the time, especially in the way Dylan fooled around with the hierarchical
military terms usually featured in the song.
He used to improvise ‘Pretty Peggy-O.’ I heard him do
it three or four times, and eventually he added another verse. Basically,
he was going through all the ranks in the army. ‘The captain he
is gone, he’s long gone / He’s riding down to Texas with
the rodeo.’ His last verse, which is not on the record, went:
‘The sergeant – or whatever it was – he is gone, he’s
long gone / He’s fighting with the wild man down in Borneo.’
He sang that because he was in the studio, and one guy kept saying to
him – ‘If you’re a folk singer, sing a folk song.’
‘I’m a folk singer’ he said ‘Of course I’m
a folk singer.’ ‘Cos he was always taking the piss about
being a folk singer. So, the man said: ‘Why don’t you sing
a folk song?’ ‘What do you call a folk song?’ Bob
asked and the man said ‘Pretty Peggy-0’. ‘Of course
I know “Pretty Peggy-O”,’ he said, and he went and
sang: ‘The sergeant he is gone, he’s long gone / He’s
fighting with the wild man down in Borneo.’ He used to crease
the audience up when he sang it. He’s a very funny man, wicked.
Dylan’s irreverent send-up here though is but an early sign of
his attitude towards the phoney purism of those self-appointed guardians
of the folk tradition, rather than the tradition itself.
As he wryly comments in one of his own two songs on the same debut album:
I walked down there and ended up
In one of them coffee-houses on the block.
Got on the stage to sing and play,
Man there said, ‘Come back some other day,
You sound like a hillbilly;
We want folk singers here.’
A journey that will be repeated throughout this article is one of Dylan
reclaiming the standard folk songs he sang at the outset of his career
with a beauty and power in later years. This is not to say that Dylan
was ever unaware of the true power of these ancient Scottish songs,
as numerous quotations, and even more importantly, performances, discussed
below prove. In addition, many of his earliest renditions of them were
similarly charged with transcendent power.
His Gaslight Tapes version of ‘Barbara Allen’ is, on its
own, eloquent testimony to this. This was recorded at The Gaslight Café
in New York’s MacDougal Street in October 1962, and indications
are that this set, long legendary amongst collectors, is being prepared
for a possible official release in the not too distant future. That
would certainly not be before time, everyone should have access to the
spine-tingling beauty of Dylan singing this jewel from the gemstone-laden
crown of traditional Scottish music.
Philosophical Reflections
The first part of the song describes the pride of a mother in her soldier
son, John Brown, who is going off to war. With some exaggeration we
might call this the Sartrean part of the song. Although the mother is
proud of her son, it is not ‘a person’ she is proud of.
The son is a thing or object since he is no more than a possessor of
certain attributes: a uniform, a gun, the prospect of being able to
hang medals on the wall. If we adopt the perspective of John Brown,
we feel the Sartrean shame that his mother’s behaviour elicits
in him (which is accentuated by the fact that he is not active in this
part of the song: he is only playing the role of standing ‘straight
and tall in his uniform and all’).
In the second part of the song John Brown returns home. He is severely
wounded and his mother barely recognizes him. She is deeply shocked
by his condition but her shock is not out of love for or compassion
with her son, but from her shattered hopes. He still is an object to
her, and if we recall Levinas’s use of the term ‘face’
we might say that this is epitomized by the line in the song that tells
us that she could not even recognize his face. Her son then explains
how he was injured on the battlefield. It was, we could say, the result
of a ‘Sartrean encounter’: ‘but the thing that scared
me most was when my enemy came close / And I saw that his face looked
just like mine’. In realizing that he had thus far seen the other
as an object, he also realizes that he himself can be seen as an object:
‘And I couldn’t help but think, through the thunder rolling
and stink / That I was just a puppet in a play’. At the very moment
of that realization, the unknown other ceased to be an object but became
a person towards whom one has ‘Levinasean’ obligations.
Seeing the face of the other created an ethical moment; John Brown was
no longer able to kill the other person. In this he revealed his own
dignity as a human being - he himself ceased to be an object: ‘the
string it finally broke’.
