Subject: RE: A Complete Unknown 2024 film, Dylan & Newport
From:
Desert Dancer
Date: 08 Jan 25 - 10:06 AM
Elijah Wald, Facebook, 2 Jan 2025
Continuing to correct the Dylan narrative: I like the film, but it perpetuates the idea that Dylan arrived on a scene that was devoted to old songs, and had the revolutionary idea of writing new ones. That's not entirely false, but framing Pete Seeger among the "old songs" purists is laughably wrong.
To me, the funniest error in the movie is when the Suze character says that people need to sing songs about their own time, and can't just keep singing old songs like "Where Have All the Flowers Gone" -- which was in fact a recent song, by Pete Seeger.
Seeger had been writing songs since the 1930s, including "If I Had a Hammer," which was Peter, Paul and Mary's first big hit and also a rock 'n' roll hit for Trini Lopez. He didn't just write political songs: his co-written "Kisses Sweeter than Wine" was purely romantic, and had likewise been a top ten rock 'n' roll hit, in 1957 -- and Pete and the Weavers had followed that success by doing an electric session, though he wasn't happy with it and shortly quit the group. Later on, when the Byrds pioneered "folk rock" with "Mr. Tambourine Man," they promptly followed up with two Seeger songs, "Turn, Turn, Turn," and "The Bells of Rhymney" (both adapted from earlier poems by others, but turned into songs by Pete).
Along with writing some songs of his own, Pete had been the most assiduous sponsor of young songwriters -- his "Gazette" album in 1958 was entirely devoted to new songs, mostly by new writers, and while most were political, some were just fun or clever or pretty.
There were some hardcore folk fans who disliked all of that. Alan Lomax thought Pete was misleading people by calling those things folk songs, and Dylan's friends at the Little Sandy Review celebrated people like the New Lost City Ramblers and Jack Elliott, who sang old songs, and despised the Seeger/Weavers brand of new songery. Notably, they panned Dylan's "Freewheelin'" LP, viewing it as the kind of maudlin, socially conscious tripe they disliked in Seeger's work, unlike the powerful, authentic sound of his first album. (To be clear, they liked some of what Seeger did, but not the topical stuff.)
Dylan shared that view, to some extent -- he was writing lots of songs, always, but unlike the character in the movie, in his early New York period he was working harder on his musicianship than his songwriting, playing a lot of harmonica and deepening his immersion in old blues and the bluesier side of country music -- a live tape from that period is full of blues and country songs by other people, and was recording a second album that went deeper into blues, including electric blues and rockabilly, when Albert Grossman came on the scene, hooked his songs onto the PP&M bandwagon, and changed the narrative.
I'm not going to make a case that Dylan was more important as a musician or performer than he was as a songwriter -- I could make that argument, but it would be silly; his singing and instrumental work has been imitated around the world, but only attracted broad attention by way of his songwriting.
I'm just noting that the pre-Dylan folk scene was full of new songs, many of them from the older generation that had been close with Woody Guthrie and understood that to be part of being a folksinger. And, on the other hand, Guthrie was primarily a singer and guitarist, and as likely to play an old Carter Family hit as something he had written himself. When the Little Sandy Review people picked their favorite Guthrie LP, it had none of his own compositions on it, and Jack Elliott said that when he was traveling with Woody they mostly sang old songs.
The division between singers of old songs and singer-songwriters happened later, and Dylan's success was a big part of that story, but in his first New York years, he was less devoted to songwriting than some of his Village peers: Len Chandler, for example, and Tom Paxton were both singing more of their own compositions than Dylan was.
That's not a value judgment. Dylan's writing changed the game, and was at another level -- whether one prefers it or not, it was the style that influenced the Beatles and Stones and inspired Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell, changing the pop scene in ways that still resound today. I'm just noting that in that early New York period he was devoting as much effort to learning blues styles as he was to writing songs, and his immersion in blues led to his teaming up with the Butterfield Blues Band and becoming a rock star. And he has continued to immerse himself in old songs, and to perform them, as well as writing new ones.
That's not an either/or; it's a both. It is not wrong to put him in the same camp as Phil Ochs, Joni Mitchell, and Leonard Cohen -- but he was and is equally in the camp of Jack Elliott, Dave Van Ronk, and the New Lost City Ramblers. He never made a choice between those camps, and there is no reason we need to. When he broke with the folk scene at Newport, singing that he wasn't going to work on Maggie's Farm no more, he was playing with a blues band and singing a lyric based on a sharecropper's protest song from the 1920s -- which Pete Seeger had recorded back in 1950, the same year Seeger and the Weavers had the first huge pop-folk hits. Like Seeger, he was bridging worlds -- different worlds, in a different time, and they clashed for a moment, but one of the things I like about the film is that it honors both of them.
(To be clear, Seeger really was horrified and angry about Dylan's performance; he later claimed he was just upset about the sound system, but that was hindsight. I devoted a book to that story; it was complicated.)
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Elijah Wald, Facebook, 8 Jan 2025
I like the new Dylan film, and not just because it was based on my book... but I agree with the people who are noting it shortchanges both the humor and the political commitment of that world.
Politics was central to many of the characters' lives -- most notably Suze Rotolo, who was an activist working for the Congress on Racial Equality, but almost everyone in Dylan's milieu was engaged at least at the arguing level, and many were deeply involved in current affairs and protests. The Newport Folk Festival was dedicated first of all to traditional folk music, but also deeply committed to the Civil Rights movement and other social issues -- anyone who remembers Dylan as leading the "protest song" movement is forgetting that Black southerners produced far stronger songs, and used them directly to sustain protests that landed hundreds of them in jail and won battles across the country.
As for the humor, Dylan was often described in his early years as "Chaplinesque," constantly doing bits of physical comedy onstage, and he, Suze, Dave Van Ronk, and Joan Baez were all known for their smart and sometimes cutting humor.
Baez tends to be remembered as relentlessly serious by people who knew her only from her records, but she could be a devastating mimic (her imitations of Dylan and Van Ronk were spot-on), and she often interjected moments of silliness into her concerts, doing funny accents, making goofy remarks, or singing affectionately mocking versions of current pop hits. (She had made her performance debut in her high school cafeteria, strumming a ukulele and singing Hank Ballard's rowdily salacious R&B hit "Work with Me Annie.")
This clip from the first night of the 1965 Newport Folk Festival (the one where Dylan "went electric") shows Baez blending humor and politics -- and making one of the weekend's very few statements against the US's escalating involvement in Vietnam. President Johnson had just announced that he was almost doubling the US troop presence there and would be doubling the monthly military draft, but that issue was not yet at the front of many people's minds, and was far more controversial than supporting civil rights. When Len Chandler broke a string during his evening set and filled some of the space by saying he disagreed with Johnson's policies, the audience response mixed cheers and booing.
Baez's gesture was more subtle, and some people seem to have missed it completely -- one reporter just described her as ebulliently breaking into the Supremes' hit -- but she was staking a firm position and would spend the rest of the decade as one of the foremost voices opposing the US invasion of Southeast Asia. There would be further moments of humor -- the famous "Girls say yes to boys who say no" fundraising poster for draft resistance, featuring a rather strange photo of the three Baez sisters -- but as the horrors of the war became increasingly evident, her more solemn presence came to the fore. So this is a nice reminder of her lighter side, even when she was deadly serious.
Joan Baez - Stop in the Name of Love (Vietnam protest) on YouTube
~ Becky in Oregon, who also spent many a happy hour with the Joan Baez Songbook
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