Welcome to my column, The Dylan Commentaries. In this column I hope to share – in an entertaining fashion - the knowledge that I’ve gained in my thirty-plus years of Bob fandom.

I am writing this with the goal of being a Carl Sagan of Dylan studies. I’m not trying to add a great deal of new information of my own. Instead, I am bringing together information from a wide variety of sources – numerous books, magazine articles, and the Internet – condensing it down into the essentials and presenting it in an easy-to-digest format.

In this first column I plan to discuss Dylan’s earliest record, Bob Dylan. Who knows, maybe I’ll just continue discussing his recordings until I get to "Love And Theft". We’ll just have to wait and see. I found the information that I discovered while researching this first recording absolutely fascinating. It changed my understanding and appreciation of it forever. I hope it does the same for you.

Bob Dylan
Release Date: March 19, 1962

None other than John Hammond signed the 20-year-old Dylan to Columbia Records and produced this first recording. Hammond was a legend at Columbia, having signed and produced many celebrated artists, including Billy Holiday. Columbia spent a grand total of $402 on the sessions.

Unlike most Dylan recordings, there is nothing extraordinarily great or shockingly terrible about this first effort. The album shows Dylan as a very young man who had obviously studied his music history and had a knack for imitating his elders. There are only two original songs, and while the covers are performed more than competently - and not without flair and originality - they are vastly inferior to his later masterwork in this vein, World Gone Wrong (and the classic bootleg of folk and blues covers, Golden Vanity).

Dylan expressed his displeasure with it not long after it was released. Dylan himself knew that he couldn’t quite pull these songs off at his young age. In the liner notes of Freewheelin' in 1963 he wrote, “I don’t carry myself yet the way that Big Joe Williams, Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, and Lightnin’ Hopkins have carried themselves. I hope to be able to someday, but they’re older people.” He was right. He couldn’t quite carry it off.

Yet, the recording has many distinguishing qualities. First, Dylan’s vocal style is compelling. Its power and urgency grabs the listener’s attention immediately. Also, his guitar and harmonica playing are commanding, propelling the songs along with an almost rock ’n’ roll beat. In retrospect, Dylan controversial move to electric instruments is not at all surprising.

The immense influence of the blues on this record is also interesting, a facet that is under appreciated even by many rabid Dylan fans. Much has been made of the influence of Woody Guthrie, but even the folk-based songs on this record, such as 'Peggy-O' and 'Man of Constant Sorrow', sound like blues songs. Certainly Guthrie was a great influence, but the blues masters were more so.

Another salient point that I came away with from this research is that Dylan and Hammond seemed to give little forethought to the recording. According to Dylan, Hammond suggested songs for him to record for the album right in the studio. Dylan researcher Clinton Heylin notes that there is no record of his having played several of the songs before the recording, which also lends credence to how much Hammond may have influenced the song selection. Dylan’s off-handed approach to recording started from this first record.

The amount of originality that Dylan exhibits is another aspect of this recording that I didn’t fully understand. Dylan didn’t simply mimic the performance of his elders. He creatively modified both the music and lyrics of several of the songs to suit his purposes. I used to think that this recording was just Dylan playing a folk revivalist. It is clear to me now that even at his young age Dylan was a different animal than his contemporaries on the folk scene, such as David Van Ronk and Eric Von Schmidt. He was a budding original. They were just excellent folk revivalists.

Robert Shelton, much to his credit, perfectly described the Dylan who recorded this first album in his September 29, 1961 New York Times review of Dylan’s performance at Gerde’s.

Your No Good
'Your No Good' is generally attributed to Jesse Fuller. Fuller was an acoustic blues singer who Dylan claims to have met in Denver, Colorado in 1959. Fuller, born in 1896 in Jonesboro, Georgia, spent the majority of his life working at a variety of blue-collar jobs and playing music on the side. He benefited from the folk and blues revival that swept the US in the sixties, and eventually played at the Monterey Jazz Festival, the Newport Folk Festival, as well as gigs with the Animals and the Rolling Stones. He is best know for his song 'San Francisco Blues' which was covered by Peter, Paul and Mary, Hot Tuna and many others, and which also appears on the well-known Dylan East Orange and Minnesota Party Tape bootlegs recorded in 1961.

Dylan has acknowledged his debt to Fuller in several interviews. Many researchers believe it is possible that Dylan got the idea of using a harmonica rack from Fuller. According to Todd Harvey, author of The Formative Dylan, Jesse Fuller did not actually record 'Your No Good' until 18 months after Dylan’s recording. Harvey argues that Dylan most likely learned it from Rambling Jack Elliot, who was intimately familiar with Fuller’s work.

Talking New York
'Talking New York' is a 'talking blues' song. The talking blues goes back at least to the old Negro minstrel shows that enjoyed great popularly in the US in the early 20th century. Some researchers believe a white singer from South Carolina, Chris Bouchillon, invented the form in the early 1920s out of necessity: he simply couldn’t sing worth a damn.

Given Dylan’s intense affection for Guthrie’s work – he calls himself a 'Woody Guthrie jukebox' in the Guthrie/Leadbelly documentary Folkways: A Vision Shared – it is not surprising that Guthrie helped popularize the form among folk revivalist.

Dylan has always been a liberal borrower from other people’s work. As you may remember, there was recently quite a fervor concerning Dylan’s borrowing from Junichi Saga’s novel Confessions of a Yakuza: A Life in Japan’s Underworld for his "Love And Theft" recording. This borrowing from other people’s work has always been an acceptable and very common practice in folk music. The term 'folk process' is frequently used to describe it. Dylan borrowed quite a bit on this first original. According to Manfred Helfert (www.bobdylanroots.com) the lyrics of 'Talking New York' are derived from Woody Guthrie’s 'Subway Blues'. 'Talking New York' does follow the same general narrative structure: arriving in New York, traveling through the town, finding a job, and generally having a tough time.

But while Guthrie’s song is a simple pro-union tale, Dylan, even in this very first recorded original, takes it a step further. His song is smarter. Dylan takes this song beyond the traditional folk-lyric with these stark, haunting lines:

          A lot of people don't have much food on their table,
          But they got a lot of forks n' knives,
          And they gotta cut somethin'.

Dylan cleverly acknowledges his source, Guthrie, not once but twice.

          Now, a very great man once said
          That some people rob you with a fountain pen.

These lines are an obvious reference to Guthrie’s 'Pretty Boy Floyd' (which Dylan later covered), which contains the lyric:

          Now as through this world I ramble,
          I see lots of funny men;
          Some will rob you with a six gun,
          Andsome with a fountain pen.

The 'East Orange' line that ends the song is another obvious reference to Guthrie. During his long decline from Hodgkin’s disease, Woody’s friends Sid and Nancy Gleason brought him to their house located in East Orange, New Jersey on the weekends to visit with friends and relatives. The line is meant to convey the narrators need to escape rough and tumble NYC for the friendlier atmosphere in New Jersey. Dylan must have included the line for his folk buddies, since nobody outside of his folk circle would get this reference. Ironically, years later Dylan writes of his longing to return to New York in 'Just Like Tom Thumbs Blues'. Guess the place grows on you.

Paul Williams, in his the first volume of his Performing Artist series, points out an interesting quirk of Dylan’s songwriting, a feature that he uses many times in the future. Notice how Dylan switches the order of the verbs, from the more logical grabbed/swung to swung/grabbed:

          I swung on to my old guitar,
          Grabbed hold of a subway car,

'Talking New York' is Guthrie knock-off, but it’s an interesting one, and foreshadows the genius that would become evident later.

In My Time of Dying
In his Dylan biography, No Direction Home, Robert Shelton writes that 'In My Time of Dying' is possibly the most compelling track on the recording. I completely agree with that assessment. Dylan’s version is powerful and driven. His plaintive singing and rough guitar playing grabs the listener attention and never lets go. Many artists have covered this song, but Dylan’s version is the most compelling I’ve heard. Its power is even more remarkable considering that he was only twenty when he sang this song of death and decay. It’s interesting that several hard-rock groups have also covered the song, such the Animals, Led Zeppelin, and even Metallica. They seem to have heard the same thing Dylan heard in the song.

Harvey writes that 'In My Time of Dying' pre-dates the 20th century. Many writers have claimed that Dylan learned the song from a Josh White recording, although many other performers, including Blind Willie Johnson and Dylan favorite Charley Patton also recorded it. Harvey hears some of Johnson’s influence in White’s guitar playing, and hears White’s style in Dylan’s playing. Dylan’s singing is much more akin to Johnson, however, so it’s likely that he was influenced by both men.

No record exists of Dylan every playing this song again after the recording for the album. This fact again gives credence that Dylan and Hammond did not give a lot of thought to which songs were included on the album.

Man of Constant Sorrow
'Man of Constant Sorrow' is an old fold song that some researchers believe can be traced back to an old hymn 'I am a Pilgrim of Constant Sorrow'. The song was very popular among Dylan’s folk revivalist contemporaries. The most popular version was done by Ralph Stanley and the Stanley Brothers during the sixties, and Stanley sang it again to great acclaim in the recent film Coming Down the Mountain. The lyrics of the tune are haunting and worth a careful listening. Dylan gives the song a strong blues feeling. According to Harvey, Dylan’s version is unique: Dylan’s switches the order of the stanzas, changes the words, and alters the melody. Harvey also points out that Dylan changes the lyrics so that the focus of the song is the end of a relationship instead of an old man’s rumination about death.

I find Dylan's version uninspiring. Dylan sings it competently but doesn’t approach the gravity that his elders afford the song. Better versions of this song are available on recent Dylan bootlegs.

Fixing to Die
'Fixing to Die' was written by Bukka White, who was born in Mississippi in 1909. Bukka had an interesting name and an interesting life as well. The son of a railroad man, Bukka was not only a Delta blues musician but also a pitcher in the Negro Leagues and a professional boxer. He also spent several years in jail for allegedly shooting someone in the thigh. Bukka’s childhood hero was blues legend Charlie Patton, who also greatly influenced Dylan (he dedicates 'Highwate'r on his "Love And Theft" recording to him).

Several authors note that Dylan was influenced by not only White’s version but also by Dave Van Ronk’s version of the song, once again highlighting the enormous impact Ronk had on the revivalist scence in the 1960s. Harvey also points out that Dylan did not simply copy his elders. He notes that although the lyrics borrow from White, many of the lines are unique. He also notes that Dylan’s melody line is significantly different.

Pretty Peggy-O
'Pretty Peggy-O' is an ancient folk song with roots that go back hundreds of years. Stephen Scobie, the author of Alias: Bob Dylan, posted to the newsgroup rec.music.dylan his take on the song’s history and also sheds some light on the rather cryptic lyrics:

The song [originated] in Scotland, as a fairly standard trooper-and-maid story: that is, soldier passes through town, soldier seduces girl, soldier is ordered to leave, girl says hey I'm pregnant, soldier says tough luck and marches away. In some versions the girl follows him, though only for a little while, but in most versions she ends up abandoned.

"Pretty Peggy" (or "The Bonnie Lass of Fyvie") is a variation on this theme, in two ways: (1) that the girl actually says No; and (2) that the trooper then dies of a broken heart when he is forced to leave:

In the Scottish versions that I know of, there is no explicit political content, though it is certainly possible that the soldier is English and the girl is Scottish, so there may be some nationalist overtones, but they're fairly subdued.

It's only when the song crosses the Atlantic, and becomes "Fennario," that the "All your cities I will burn" line comes in. I that once the place names had been transposed to the American South ("Fyvie-o" becoming "Fennario," and "Aberdeen" becoming "Louisiana"), it may have picked up echoes of the Civil War, and especially the burning of Atlanta.

What results, in the American version, is a rather drastically divided version of the soldier's character. On the one hand, he is cynical and cold-hearted enough to use the threat of broad-scale military action as sexual blackmail for purely personal ends (sleep with me or else I'll burn down your whole city); on the other hand, he is tender and sensitive enough to die of a broken heart when she rejects him. As for the girl, she is faced with a classic moral problem: is the preservation of her personal purity worth the death and destruction of her whole city? If she can save her city from being burned by sleeping with one soldier, isn't it her moral duty to do so? How do you balance one woman's virginity against the death of hundreds of her fellow-citizens?

The Scottish version was much simpler. All he offers her are some guineas, a carriage, and petticoats with "flootsies to the knee" – his appeal is simply to material greed, and it's easy to admire her for turning him down. The American version ups the stakes, and both characters become much more complex.

Dylan is going for laughs in the performance of this song. I find that it grows very thin after awhile and was not a great choice for the record.

Highway 51 Blues
This song has an interesting history. Highway 51 is an actual road that runs from New Orleans to Wisconsin and was a primary route for southern blacks migrating north.

On the album label the song is credited to Curtis Jones, a blues piano player, but a closer ancestor is probably blues guitar player Tommy McClennan’s 'New Highway 51'. The Everly Brothers did a rockabilly version of the song. They also seem to have used the same chord structure in their hit 'Wake Up Little Suzie'. If you listen closely you can hear 'Little Suzie' in Dylan’s version on the song. Harvey notes that Dylan borrows the same chord structure years later for 'It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)'.

Dylan performs the song with a rock’n’roll passion that is heartfelt and convincing. 'Highway 51' is one of the highlights of the album.

Gospel Plow
'Gospel Plow', sometimes referred to as 'Keep Your Hand On The Plow', is a very old traditional hymn Dylan sings this one as a hard driving blues tune, similar to some of his other performances on the album such as 'Highway 51' and 'Your No Good'. He sounds almost like Little Richard gone acoustic, but it doesn’t really work well with a spiritual. Shelton calls it the least successful track on the album. I agree.

On one hand, it is interesting that Dylan would include a spiritual song on this album, and at first blush it would seem that its inclusion foreshadows Dylan later intensely Christian recordings that appeared in the 1970s. However, Harvey notes that it was transformed as far back as the 1940s into a political song, and later was used as the basis for the famous 'Keep Your eyes on the Prize' song that was often sung during the 60s civil rights movement. Yet, Dylan and other folk revivalists such as Odetta, Van Ronk, and others generally sang it as it was performed as a spiritual. Perhaps the song had dual meanings for the young Dylan.

Baby Let Me Follow You Down
How this song ended up in Dylan repertoire is a complicated and convoluted story that has no definitive answer. It’s a great example of the 'folk process', the termed used to describe how a song can evolve over time and become the basis for a series of 'new' songs.

Here’s the condensed version of the story. During the spoken introduction of the song, Dylan says that the first version of the song he heard was by his friend 'Ric Von Schmidt'. Von Schmidt, however, has said that the version Dylan played is not his version (SongTalk: The Songwriter’s Newspaper 3(2): 13 (1993). Von Schmidt says he was copying a contemporary folksinger named Geno Foreman, who had found it on a Blind Willy Fuller album, and also said that Dave Van Ronk’s version of the song had possibly influenced Dylan. All of these versions were title 'Baby, Let Me Lay It on You'.

However, the influential blues musician Reverend Gary Davis later claimed that he wrote it and that Blind Willie Fuller, who also recorded a popular and influential version of the song, had learned it from him. Indeed, the composition is credited to Davis on the Last Waltz, the live recording of the Band’s final concert, where Dylan played the song with the Band.

To further complicate matters, Mance Lipscomb claims that he learned the song in 1926 and that he taught the song to Dylan in the early sixties. "Bob Dylan? M-hm. Rascal was a good friend a mine. But he got too much money offa one a my songs, an he won’t say nothin about it." (from "I Say Me For a Parable: The Oral Autobiography of Mance Lipscomb.")

We will probably never know exactly who Dylan got the song from and whose version he used. Dylan performs the song very well on this record, although the raucous version that he and the Band do on the Last Waltz is the definitive version and an absolute must hear for any Dylan fan.

House of the Rising Sun
This song has an incredibly long and fascinating history. (Folklorist Alan Lomax tracked it’s origins back to a ancient Child Ballad.) The website The Straight Dope (their motto is 'Fighting Ignorance Since 1973 (it’s taking longer than we thought)' provides an excellent summary:

According to folklorist Alan Lomax in his book Our Singing Country (1941), the melody of "The House of the Rising Run" is a traditional English ballad and the lyrics were written by Georgia Turner and Bert Martin (both from Kentucky). The song was first recorded in the 1920s by black bluesman Texas Alexander and later covered by Leadbelly, Charlie Byrd, Roy Acuff, Woody Guthrie, the Weavers, Peter, Paul & Mary, Henry Mancini, Dolly Parton, David Allan Coe, John Fahey, Waylon Jennings, Tim Hardin, Buster Poindexter, Marianne Faithful, Tracy Chapman and Bob Dylan . . . just to name a few.

Here from Lomax's book are the traditional lyrics:

There is a house in New Orleans
They call the Rising Sun.
It's been the ruin of many a poor girl,
and me, O God, for one.

If I had listened what Mamma said,
I'd 'a' been at home today.
Being so young and foolish, poor boy,
let a rambler lead me astray.

Go tell my baby sister
never do like I have done
to shun that house in New Orleans
they call the Rising Sun.

My mother she's a tailor;
she sold those new blue jeans.
My sweetheart, he's a drunkard, Lord, Lord,
drinks down in New Orleans.

The only thing a drunkard needs
is a suitcase and a trunk.
The only time he's satisfied
is when he's on a drunk.

Fills his glasses to the brim,
passes them around
only pleasure he gets out of life
is hoboin' from town to town.

One foot is on the platform
and the other one on the train.
I'm going back to New Orleans
to wear that ball and chain.

Going back to New Orleans,
my race is almost run.
Going back to spend the rest of my days
beneath that Rising Sun.

Did the House of the Rising Sun ever really exist? A guidebook called Offbeat
New Orleans asserts that the real House of the Rising Sun was at 826-830 St.
Louis St. between 1862 and 1874 and was purportedly named for its madam,
Marianne LeSoleil Levant, whose surname translates to "The Rising Sun."

But no one knows for certain.

Bob Dylan seems to have learned the song from Dave Van Ronk. Shelton quotes Dylan as saying, 'I always knew this song, but never really knew it until Dave Van Ronk sang it.' Dylan also cut a version of the song during the recording of his 1974 Planet Waves album and during the making of the film Renaldo and Clara.

Freight Train Blues
Stacey William’s liner notes say that Dylan learned this song from an old Roy Acuff record. (Williams was a pen name for New York Times critic and Dylan biographer Robert Shelton, who was making a little money on the side by writing liner notes.) Acuff was a very popular country singer and was well known as a regular performer on the Grand Old Opry. Another of Dylan’s early heroes, Hank Williams, also did the song. Dylan performs the song at a faster tempo and with greater exuberance than Acuff. He also shows-off his yodeling talents and his falsetto voice, and at one point holds one note – according to rec.music.dylan poster George Spanos – for 14 seconds.

Song to Woody
The second original on this album and also the second tribute to Woody Guthrie. Again it is obvious that Dylan is a music history buff, invoking the names of his ancestors, Woody, Sonny Boy Williamson, and Leadbelly. As the astute Robert Shelton wrote back in 1961, and many have noted afterwards, Dylan 'sopped up influences like a sponge.' It’s interesting to see that Dylan, even at this very young age, saw himself as a link in a long historical chain of individuals that had followed the same calling. The famous Dylan arrogance is also on display. Dylan has the audacity, at twenty years of age and with absolutely no recognition outside a small circle of people tuned into the NYC folk scene, to mention himself as walking in the same path as these giants.

Some of the mechanics of the song are borrowed from Guthrie. The tune itself is a copied from Guthrie’s 1913 'Massacre'. The 'Hey, Hey Woody Guthrie' phrase may have been borrowed from his 'I Just Want to Sing Your Name', which contains the verse:

          Hey, hey, Bart Vanzetti,
          Hey, hey, Bart Vanzetti,
          You made speeches for the workers, workers,
          Well, I just want to sing your name.

As is usually the case with Dylan, he manages to one up his teacher in a poetic sense, with such verses as:

          Hey, hey Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song
          'Bout a funny ol' world that's a-comin' along.
          Seems sick an' it's hungry, it's tired an' it's torn,
          It looks like it's a-dyin' an' it's hardly been born.

See That My Grave is Kept Clean
The album ends with this cover of a Blind Lemon Jefferson song. Like many songs on the recording, this it was a standard among the 1960s folk revivalists. It also appeared on the Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music that was so influential for Dylan and his contemporaries. Dylan’s version doesn’t hold a candle to Jefferson sorrowful lament. Dylan also recorded the song during the Basement Tapes period, which can be heard on the bootleg The Genuine Basement Tapes.

I hope that you have found this article as interesting and enlightening I did while researching it. The information contained in this article only touches on the historical influences and Dylan’s particular personal history that went into its creation. Further information can be found in Robert Shelton’s biography, No Direction Home, the Anthony Scaduto’s biography, and Manfred Helfert’s “Roots of Bob” website (www.bobdylanroots.com). Todd Harvey’s The Formative Bob Dylan also contains an enormous amount of detail on the history and musicality of each song that appears on this record. His book is of particular value for those that wish to study the history of these songs in detail or desire to learn more about the specific musical techniques Dylan employed during the recordings.