Bob Dylan arrived in New York City in January of 1961. The city was a Mecca of folk and acoustic blues artists, and as Dylan wrote, “I was there to find singers, the ones I’d heard on record — Dave Van Ronk, Peggy Seeger, Ed McCurdy, Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry, Josh White, The New Lost City Ramblers, Reverend Gary Davis and a bunch of others—most of all to find Woody Guthrie.”
Dylan wasted no time pursuing his two main objectives: playing in NYC’s folk clubs and visiting his ailing musical hero, Woody Guthrie. He headed to Café Wha? on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village, where he paid his dues accompanying Fred Neil, who co-hosted the afternoon hootenannies, on harmonica. A week after he set foot in New York, Dylan met his idol. Woody Guthrie, who was battling Huntington’s disease, was on a brief release from Greystone Park Psychiatric hospital. On Sundays he spent the day at the apartment of Robert and Sidsel Gleason in East Orange. Dylan remembers: “I went there to sing him his songs – he always liked the songs – and he’d ask for certain ones, I knew them all. I was like a Woody Guthrie jukebox.” Guthrie knew talent when he saw it. “He’s a talented boy, gonna go far”, he said.
Song to Woody
Dylan was introduced to the music of Woody Guthrie in 1959 when a friend gave him a few 78 rpm records to listen to. The impact on Dylan was profound: “I put one on the turntable and when the needle dropped, I was stunned—didn’t know if I was stoned or straight. It was like the land parted. I was listening to his diction. He had a perfected style of singing that it seemed like no one else had ever thought about. The songs themselves, his repertoire, were really beyond category. They had the infinite sweep of humanity in them.” Woody Guthrie quickly became an obsession for Bob Dylan. He listened to all the music he could find by Guthrie and read his book Bound for Glory, about his travels as a hobo from Oklahoma during the Great Depression. He later said: “Woodie Guthrie had a particular sound, and besides that he said something. That was highly unusual to my ears. He was a radical and his songs had a radical slant. That’s what I wanted to sing. I couldn’t believe that I never heard of this man. You could listen to his songs and actually learn how to live. I identified with the Bound for Glory book more than I identified with On the Road. These songs sounded archaic to most people. To me they sounded like they were happening at the moment.”
One of the first songs Bob Dylan wrote after arriving in New York City is Song to Woody, a tribute to his idol. The melody is based on Guthrie’s famous song ‘1913 Massacre’, written about the deaths of striking copper miners and their families in Calumet, Michigan, on Christmas Eve, 1913. Over five hundred striking miners and their families gathered at a community Hall for a Christmas party. The hall could only be accessed by a steep stairway. During the course of the party, somebody shouted “Fire!”, although there was no fire. People began to panic and rushed towards the stairway. 73 people were trampled to death, 59 of which were children.
The original song manuscript includes Dylan’s note: “Written by Bob Dylan in Mills Bar on Bleecker Street in New York City on the 14th day of February, for Woody Guthrie.” Many years later Dylan summarized what Woody Guthrie’s songs meant to him: “Woody’s songs were about everything at the same time. They were about rich and poor, black and white, the highs and lows of life, the contradictions between what they were teaching in school and what was really happening. He was saying everything in his songs that I felt, but didn’t know how to express.”
Talkin’ New York
During his first few months in NYC Dylan paid his dues as a newcomer musician in the big city. He made the usual rounds at the Greenwich Village folk clubs and anywhere else that would allow him to play his music. He later said of that period: “I bummed around. I dug it all — the streets and the snows and the starving and the five-flight walk-ups and sleeping in rooms with ten people. I dug the trains and the shadows, the way I dug ore mines and coal mines. I just jumped right to the bottom of New York.” His persistence through early rejections proved fruitful and he quickly became noticed as a unique singer and interpreter of folk songs. In a letter home in April, 1961 he wrote: “Dear Everybody – I’ve finished my time at Folk City. Now I am at the Gaslight in New York, too. My union costs were $128.00. It came out of my pay at Folk City. I am now making $100.00 a week for five nights playing – that’s not bad, considering that three months ago I was unknown.”
A month later Dylan travelled home for a short visit. During his stay he recorded a number of tunes at a party with friends surrounding him. It was later released as The Minneapolis Party Tape, and consists of the songs he performed in NYC, many of them covers of Woody Guthrie songs. While travelling to Minnesota he wrote one of his early signature tunes in the style of talking blues.
The talking blues started with Christopher Allen Bouchillon, a musician from South Carolina who recorded the tune ‘Talking Blues’ for Columbia Records in Atlanta in 1926. A talking blues does not follow the typical twelve-bar blues structure. It consists of a repetitive guitar line and vocals that are sung in a rhythmic, flat tone, very near to a speaking voice. After two rhyming couplets the singer continues to talk, adding a fifth line consisting of an unrhymed, and unspecified number of bars, often with a pause in the middle of the line, before resuming the strict chordal structure.
Dylan found the talking blues an intuitive format to deliver songs in his early career. As Clinton Heylin wrote in Revolution in the Air: The Songs of Bob Dylan, 1957-1973, “Its rich comic possibilities and every verse containing a long, tapering punch line appealed to the boy’s innate sense of delivery and timing. It also required only rudimentary technique on the guitar. Its half-sung, half-spoken manner of delivery released the performing poet in him.”
Dylan’s first creation in that style was Talkin’ New York, inspired by a collection of songs from Woody Guthrie’s repertoire such as Talking Subway, New York Town and Pretty Boy Floyd. The song describes in Dylan’s unmistakable wit, his first months in New York City, including these lines:
I landed up on the North side: Greenwich Village
I walked down there and I ended up in one of them coffeehouses 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 folksingers here.
Upon his return, things started moving upward quickly in Bob Dylan’s life and career. His breakthrough came in September, 1961 when he was booked for a two-week engagement, opening for The Greenbriar Boys at Gerde’s Folk City in Greenwich Village. The first show, on September 26, was reviewed three days later in the New York Times by writer Robert Shelton. The article raved about the young performer, starting with, “A bright new face in folk music is appearing at Gerde’s Folk City. Although only 20 years old, Bob Dylan is one of the most distinctive stylists to play in a Manhattan cabaret in months. Resembling a cross between a choir boy and a beatnik, Mr. Dylan has a cherubic look and a mop of tousled hair he partly covers with a Huck Finn black corduroy cap. His clothes may need a bit of tailoring, but when he works his guitar, harmonica or piano and composes new songs faster than he can remember them, there is no doubt that he is bursting at the seams with talent.”
As luck would have it, the day the article was published Dylan was invited to a recording session for folk singer Carolyn Hester’s self-titled album on Columbia Records. This was his first commercial recording session, accompany Hester on harmonica. Producer for the album was the legendary John Hammond, one of the best talent scouts that ever was. He launched the careers of Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Pete Seeger, Aretha Franklin, and later on Bruce Springsteen and Stevie Ray Vaughan. Dylan immediately recognized the magnitude of Hammond’s importance: “John was an extraordinary man. He didn’t make schoolboy records or record schoolboy artists. He had vision and foresight.”
Hammond remembered that recording date. Years later he recalled meeting Bob Dylan for the first time on that day: “I saw this kid in the peaked hat playing not terribly good harmonica but I was taken with him. I asked him, ‘Can you sing? Do you write? Why don’t you come up to the studio? I’d like to do a demo session with you just to see how it is.’” That demo session turned into the first day of recording for Bob Dylan’s self-titled debut album. The date was November 20, 1961, the first of many recording sessions Dylan would be holding in this room for many of his 1960s albums. On that first recording day he was still inexperienced with performing his songs in that setting. Hammond remembers: “Bobby popped every p, hissed every s, and habitually wandered off mike. Even more frustrating, he refused to learn from his mistakes. It occurred to me at the time that I’d never worked with anyone so undisciplined before.” Hammond realized not only the rebellious character in Dylan, but also his unique individual performing style, and understood that it’s best to stay out of the way and let the microphone capture Dylan’s raw performance, warts and all: “I had no direction on him at all because I felt Bob was a poet, somebody who could communicate with his generation. Columbia was not known for doing that at the time. I thought, the less record producer interferes, the better results we’d get from Bob.” On that day Dylan recorded 23 takes and finished 8 complete songs.
The two songs already covered in this article were the two original songs Dylan recorded for his debut album. For the rest of the material, he had a simple plan: “When I made that first record, I used songs which I just knew. But I hadn’t really performed them a lot. I wanted just to record stuff that was off the top of my head, see what would happen.” Let us look at a few more songs recorded on that first day in the studio, all covers of older traditional songs that were often played in Greenwich Village folk clubs.
Baby, Let Me Follow You Down
Dylan introduces his cover of ‘Baby, Let Me Follow You Down’ on his debut album: “I first heard this from Ric Von Schmidt. He lives in Cambridge. Ric’s a blues guitar player. I met him one day in the green pastures of Harvard University.” Original releases of Bob Dylan’s debut indeed credit Eric Von Schmidt as the songwriter, but the song goes back much farther in time. The origins of the song can be traced to a 1930 recording of the song ‘Can I Do It For You’ by Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy, a Delta Blues singer famous for the jazz standard ‘Why Don’t You Do Right?’. It came to Von Schmidt’s attention with a recording by Blind Boy Fuller from 1936 titled ‘Mama Let Me Lay It On You, a remake of Joe McCoy’s tune. Fuller is accompanied on that record by Reverend Gary Davis, who later claimed songwriting credit for the song.
In his 1994 book ‘Baby, Let Me Follow You Down: The Illustrated Story of the Cambridge Folk Years’, Von Schmidt recalled the story of the song, talking about Bob Dylan: “He was soaking up material in those days—like a sponge and a half. Later, somebody said, ‘Hey, Bob’s put one of your songs on his album.’ They were talking about ‘Baby, Let Me Follow You Down,’ which had a spoken introduction saying he first heard it from me. The tune was the same, and the chords were real pretty, but they weren’t the same. I don’t know if he changed them or if he’d heard a different version from Van Ronk.”
When Bob Dylan’s debut was released on CD in a remastered version in 2005, the credits were modified correctly to say, “Rev. G. Davis; add. contributions E. Von Schmidt, D. Van Ronk”.
House of the Risin’ Sun
We continue with Dave Van Ronk and a classic story of another old song that made its way to Bob Dylan’s repertoire via his circle of contemporary folk and blues musicians. Books have been written about the origin of this old New Orleans gothic tale, and over the years it was adapted and readapted many times. Fast forward to the 1950s when Dave Van Ronk, one of the movers and shakers in the Greenwich Village folk scene, heard ‘House of the Risin’ Sun’ and like many others, was captivated by the haunting ballad. The version he heard was a recording by Hally Wood, a Texas singer who was influenced by an Alan Lomax field recording of a Kentucky woman named Georgia Turner. Van Ronk added something of his own to the arrangement: “I put a different spin on it by altering the chords and using a bass line that descended in half steps — a common enough progression in jazz, but unusual among folksingers.” It became one the highlights of his live show.
Always on the hunt for new material, Bob Dylan found something intriguing in Van Ronk’s arrangement of the song. He incorporated it into his set and recorded it on November 20, 1961 during that legendary session for his debut album. The album sleeve notes include this quote: “I’d always known Risin’ Sun but never really knew it until I heard Dave sing it.” That may be true, but there is more to the story. Dave Van Ronk tells the tale in an interview for the documentary No Direction Home: “One evening in 1962, I was sitting at my usual table in the back of the Kettle of Fish, and Dylan came slouching in. He had been up at the Columbia studios with John Hammond, doing his first album. He was being very mysterioso about the whole thing, and nobody I knew had been to any of the sessions except Suze, his lady. I pumped him for information, but he was vague. Everything was going fine and, ‘Hey, would it be okay for me to record your arrangement of ‘House of the Rising Sun?’
‘Jeez, Bobby, I’m going into the studio to do that myself in a few weeks. Can’t it wait until your next album?’
A long pause. ‘Uh-oh.’
I did not like the sound of that. ‘What exactly do you mean, ‘Uh-oh’?’
‘Well,’ he said sheepishly, ‘I’ve already recorded it.’”
In the best tradition of the song being recycled through generations of musicians, three years later it was Bob Dylan’s version that inspired a whole new take by The Animals, who made the song a household name and a huge hit on both sides of the Atlantic in 1964. The full story of that adaptation is told here:
To Dylan’s credit, he did put his own unique spin on House of the Rising Sun. His version is very effective, and the opening chords use a line cliché that with some minor variations is similar to future 1960s songs like ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ and ‘Babe I’m Gonna Leave You’.
Outtake: He Was a Friend of Mine
We end with one more song recorded on November 20, 1961 involving Eric Von Schmidt and Dave Van Ronk. It is my favorite song from that recording session, and surprisingly it was left unreleased until 30 years later, when it was included in Volume 1 of Columbia Records’ Dylan Bootleg Series. The quest of folk singers after old material yielded another 1930s song, this time a traditional southern prison song titled ‘Shorty George’, recorded by Leadbelly in 1935. The song is about a train that on Sundays brought wives and families to the inmates at Sugar Land prison in Texas. Eric Von Schmidt heard the song and recorded it on an album with Rolf Cahn for Folkways Records in 1961 with the title ‘He Was a Friend of Mine’. Dylan became curious about the song and connected with the sorrowful lyrics. Schmidt later said of Dylan: “He was very impressed by that concept of being able to take the black expression in that kind of song and being able to sing it. He wasn’t at that time able to handle material that related to the blues, and he was still feeling around for a way to do that.”
Dylan also discussed this aspect of his singing when he wrote in the sleeve notes of his next album ‘The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan’: “I don’t carry myself yet the way that Big Joe Williams, Woodie Guthrie, Leadbelly and Lightnin’ Hopkins have carried themselves. I hope to be able to someday.” I think that his delivery on this song is one of his most emotional on record. He may not be a proper blues singer, but he knows how to deliver one. Dave Van Ronk later recorded Dylan’s version of the song on his 1962 Prestige album Dave Van Ronk, Folksinger, where he incorrectly credited Dylan as the song’s author.
On its release Bob Dylan’s debut, which cost Columbia Records only $402 to record, was a commercial flop. It was released 4 months after the recording, in March of 1962 and did not chart. It did receive small notices on a few music trade papers. Billboard wrote, “Bob Dylan is a young man (20) from Minnesota who has already made an impact with his exciting manner with folk, blues and pop-folk tunes. He plays, sings and composes and is one of the most interesting, and most disciplined youngsters to appear on the pop-folk scene in a long time.” Cash Box praised the singer in a minor review from May 1962: “Originality is something that is rarely found in today’s sales-oriented market. Bob Dylan is such a fresh, new talent. The multi-talented youngster is an accomplished blues canter, tunesmith, guitarist and harmonica player. For this, his initial LP, the songster demonstrates a distinctive, pungent emotion-packed feelingful style.”
Sources
Chronicles: Volume One, by Bob Dylan
Revolution in the Air: The Songs of Bob Dylan, 1957-1973, by Clinton Heylin
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