Help: Missing Dylan song about John Henry Faulk

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Help: Missing Dylan song about John Henry Faulk

28 Dec 00 - 10:56 PM (#364966)
Subject: Missing Dylan song on John Henry Faulk
From: Mark Clark

At McGrath's suggestion, I've started this thread in the hope that Mudcatters can help uncover a mysteriously missing song by Bob Dylan. I was stumbling around the Internet looking for more information about John Henry Faulk when I discovered reference to a song called "Gates Of Hate" written in 1962 by Bob Dylan.

Tom Rush wrote a song about JHF but it would be great to have one by Dylan as well. Has anyone ever heard the song or talked to anyone who might have heard it performed?

Thanks,

- Mark

28 Dec 00 - 11:02 PM (#364968)
Subject: RE: Help: Missing Dylan song on John Henry Faulk
From: Sorcha

By the info in your clickie, looks like you've got it all....no public perf, no recording, etc. but good luck.

29 Dec 00 - 07:29 AM (#365034)
Subject: RE: Help: Missing Dylan song on John Henry Faulk
From: McGrath of Harlow

Yeah, but there's public performances and public performances and recordings and recordings.

I've got tapes up in my attic I haven't listened to in thirty years. None of them with Dylan in them, but if I'd been living in New York or North Dakota or wherever back in the early 60s there easily could have been.

29 Dec 00 - 09:44 AM (#365065)
Subject: RE: Help: Missing Dylan song on John Henry Faulk
From: Amergin

I know that this has nothing to do with the Dylan song....but Phil Ochs recorded a song about John Henry Faulks.....it can be found on his Broadside Ballads 1, I believe...

Amergin

29 Dec 00 - 04:08 PM (#365257)
Subject: RE: Help: Missing Dylan song on John Henry Faulk
From: Mark Clark

Amergin, Oh yeah!!! It wasn't Tom Rush, it was Phil Ochs. (Picture me doing dope slap.)

Thanks,

- Mark

29 Dec 00 - 10:26 PM (#365438)
Subject: RE: Help: Missing Dylan song on John Henry Faulk
From: Ebbie

Where's Little Hawk? He'll know...

Ebbie

31 Dec 00 - 08:37 AM (#366162)
Subject: RE: Help: Missing Dylan song on John Henry Faulk
From: McGrath of Harlow

So was he Faulk or Faulks?

While we wait for people to hunt through their attics maybe, how about someone posting the Phil Ochs song?

31 Dec 00 - 12:10 PM (#366242)
Subject: Lyr Add: THE BALLAD OF JOHN HENRY FAULK (Phil Ochs
From: Amergin

The Ballad Of John Henry Faulk
By Phil Ochs

I'll tell you the story of John Henry Faulk.
I'll tell you of his trials and the troubled trail he walked,
And I'll tell of the tyrants, the ones you never see:
Murder is the role they play and hatred is their fee.

On the TV and the radio John Henry Faulk was known.
He talked to many thousands with a mind that was his own,
But he could not close his eyes when the lists were passed around,
So he tried to move the Union to tear the blacklist down.

His friends they tried to warn him he was headin' for a fall.
If he spoke against the blacklist he had no chance at all,
But he laughed away their warnings and he laughed away their fears:
For how could lies destroy the work of many honest years?

Then slowly, oh so slowly, his life began to change.
People would avoid his eyes, his friends were actin' strange,
And he finally saw the power of the hidden poison pen
When they told him that his job was through, he'd never work again.

And he could not believe what his sad eyes had found.
He stared in disbelief as his world came tumblin' down,
And as the noose grew tighter, at last the trap was clear:
For every place he turned to go, that list would soon be there

-- Oh, that list.

And is there any bottom to the fears that grow inside?
Is there any bottom to the hate that you must hide?
And is there any end to your long road of despair?
Is there any end to the pain that you must bear?

His wife and children trembled, the time was runnin' short,
When a man of law got on their side and took them into court,
And there upon the stand they could not hide behind their eyes,
And the cancer of the fascist was displayed before our eyes.

Hey, you blacklist, you blacklist, I've seen what you have done.
I've seen the men you've ruined and the lives you've tried to run,
But the one thing that I've found is, the only ones you spare
Are those that do not have a brain, or those that do not care.

And you men who point your fingers and spread your lies around,
You men who left your souls behind and drag us to the ground,
You can put my name right down there, I will not try to hide --
For if there's one man on the blacklist, I'll be right there by his side.

For I'd rather go hungry to beg upon the streets
Than earn my bread on dead men's souls and crawl beneath your feet.
And I will not play your hater's game and hate you in return,
for it's only through the love of man the blacklist can be burned.

31 Dec 00 - 12:15 PM (#366245)
Subject: RE: Help: Missing Dylan song on John Henry Faulk
From: Little Hawk

Yep. Phil Ochs. Definitely not a Dylan song. No one tried to follow in Dylan's protest footsteps more fervently than Phil Ochs, trouble was he sort of got stuck in them...

Dylan once waspishly remarked "You're not a folksinger, Ochs, you're a journalist!" He (Dylan) was being nasty, but he had a point at the same time.

Ochs, for his part, never stopped lauding Dylan's creativity, even when they weren't speaking to one another, which certainly speaks well for Phil's basic fairness and sense of integrity.

- LH

01 Jan 01 - 12:23 PM (#366738)
Subject: RE: Help: Missing Dylan song on John Henry Faulk
From: McGrath of Harlow

Well, there's some justice anyway, albeit belatedly:

John Henry Faulk storytelling award

John Henry Faulk Library

Maybe the song will turn up someday...

12 Nov 09 - 06:43 PM (#2765119)
Subject: RE: Help: Missing Dylan song on John Henry Faulk
From: Jim Dixon

From Revolution in the Air: The Songs of Bob Dylan, 1957-1973 by Clinton Heylin (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2009), page 92:

{65} GATES OF HATE
{66} THAT CALIFORNIA SIDE
Both songs have survived only on paper and each only as a single verse, but they appear to date from the summer of 1962.
#65 published in Sing Out! Oct./Nov. 1962.
#66 published in Isis #28.

Here are two more lost songs written within weeks of a WBAI radio interview with Pete Seeger, in which Dylan claimed he wrote songs before breakfast. "Gates of Hate" is mentioned (and quoted) in Gil Turner's Sing Out! profile, whereas "That California Side" was written on a scrap of paper—the other side of a shop receipt dated June 22, 1962. "That California Side" contrasts the joys of California with the East Coast, a subject he would tackle again on "California" (cut at the first Bringing It...session in January 1965 and frequently bootlegged). Dylan's repeated crossings-out suggest a general dissatisfaction with where a song is going, and it probably died there and then, as he sat in a café scribbling to his heart's content.

On the other hand, "Gates of Hate" probably was finished, though all that is known of it derives from Gil Turner's Sing Out! feature. According to Turner the song was about John Henry Faulk, who was then married to folksinger Hedy West. On June 28, 1962, Faulk had been awarded $3.5 million in damages in a libel suit against AWARE, a "clearance" service that vetted people in the entertainment industry for any left-wing inclinations or Communist affiliations. The chorus of the song, quoted in Turner's piece, suggests Dylan was closing in on "Masters of War":

It also suggests a likely source for any tune: Ewan MacColl's "Go Down You Murderers"—a favorite as far back as his student days in St. Paul.

12 Nov 09 - 10:16 PM (#2765189)
Subject: RE: Help: Missing Dylan song about John Henry Faul
From: M.Ted

Neither Mr. Ochs nor Mr. Dylan did justice to the man. He was wonderful and complex,--how else can you explain a man who challenged HUAC and also starred on Hee Haw. The Christmas season is fotuitously on us, and there is no better way way to understand the man than by listening to John Henry Faulk's Christmas Story Click one of the buttons on the right side of the box.

13 Nov 09 - 06:28 AM (#2765324)
Subject: RE: Help: Missing Dylan song about John Henry Faulk
From: Dead Horse

So Dylan was not a Faulk singer, then? :-)

(Someone had to say it)