As I said, I don't have a Facebook account and I don't intend to get one. An out-of-town friend talked my wife into getting one, but she found it a bit of a hassle and there was nothing she wanted to do on Facebook that she couldn't do with e-mail or on the telephone, so she dumped it.

Apparently a lot of musicians use MySpace. I'm going to have to ask my upstairs neighbor, Misty Weaver, about the details of setting up a MySpace site. She's a singer/songwriter and has recently issued a CD of her songs; she thinks of them as "folk songs," but—well—they are interesting, and a bit different. Misty's page. I bought a copy of her CD in the spirit of "support your local musician."

As much as Dylan doesn't ring my chimes, I have to give him credit for being one helluva songwriter, and, indeed, he didn't really turn into a mush-mouth until a bit later in his career (unfortunately, Emmylou Harris seems to be suffering from the same condition; as lovely as her voice is, she swallows her consonants and you can't understand half of the lyrics she sings). I think what turned me off about Dylan was that—

Well, let's put it this way:   When I first began learning and singing folk songs, my mentors and examples (both live and on records) never tried to sound like anything they were not. And a few years after I got started, even the Brothers Four didn't try to sound like anything other than four college boys. Joan Baez has a very nice, clear soprano, and she uses it. Richard Dyer-Bennet was cultured, well-educated, and an offspring of the English peerage and he sounded like it. Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly sounded the most "folky," but they came by it honestly.

Then—along came Bob Dylan (real name, Zimmerman). People who went to high school with him said that before folk, he was singing rock, and he had a nice, clear singing voice that sounded, naturally, a bit like Buddy Holly's. A few years later, when they heard his first folk records, his voice was entirely different, sounding as if he had just been dug out of a potato patch and was about eighty years old. That much of a natural change was simply not possible unless he had taken to gargling with Drano. And in interviews, he came up with a completely bogus history, often contradictory, about how he was a migrant worker following the crops, had spent years hopping freights (remember, he wasn't even twenty yet), and who, in general, seemed to be deluded into thinking that he was Woody Guthrie.

My "Phony Meter" pegged out.

After Dylan came along, suddenly, I kept running into people (lots of college drop-outs) showing up in coffeehouses and folk festivals with expensive guitars, but wearing bib overalls, interweaving straw in their hair, at least one tooth blacked out, and a singing voice carefully cultivated to be raspy, slightly off-key, and with an impenetrable phony Southern or "Okie" accent they apparently got by studying re-runs of "Hee Haw" and "The Beverly Hillbillies." By the way, it's not as if they were trying to play a part (like The New Lost City Ramblers, who did it well and with great humor), they were trying to convince the not-all-that-impressed audiences (and, perhaps, themselves) that that's what they really were, even when they had rarely been outside the city limits.

Also, read what Dave Van Ronk says about Dylan in "The Mayor of McDougal Street." Van Ronk doesn't particularly bad-mouth him, he just tells what happened. Everything Van Ronk says about Dylan I've also heard from other sources. Dylan "borrowed" from everyone, which is perfectly okay. Everybody learns most of the songs they sing from other singers, either in person or on record, and they often copy arrangements, but Dylan started claiming that some of the songs he learned from others (including Van Ronk) he had written and/or arranged himself!

So, on that basis, I don't have a very good impression of Dylan. I am, however, waiting for Suze Rotolo's "A Freewheelin' Time," which I have on hold at the Seattle Public Library. Maybe she tells a different story or takes a different slant on it.

I hope you can get your stuff up on YouTube, Little Hawk. I'm most interested in hearing you at work. Maybe you are what Dylan could have been if he'd been a bit more real.

Don Firth