Early Influences and the first album

The roots of his adoption of a persona can be traced to his childhood. It was a childhood spent in the relative isolation of Hibbing, Minnesota, an Iron Range town that had once flourished due to its vast open iron-ore mine, but which had since slipped into decline. Growing up in such a place, a boy with Dylan’s imagination needed an outlet, and that came in several forms. First, there was the attraction of outlaw figures, like the rebels played by Marlon Brando and James Dean in movies like The Wild One and Rebel Without a Cause, and his later identification with rootless drifters can be seen as an extension of this early fascination with these romantic individuals. Then there was outlaw music – the music of angst and rebellion, the early rock and roll of Elvis Presley and Little Richard, which had such a liberating effect on a whole generation of American teenagers. These were the formative years of post-war youth, and rock and roll allowed the young to forge an identity through rebellion against the staid values of the ‘50s. Dylan was just one dreamer amongst many. While still in high school, he played in rock and roll bands and made pilgrimages to Minneapolis and St.Paul, sometimes posing as a recording star and laying claim to recordings he and friend John Bucklen heard on the radio. In his high school yearbook, he gave his ambition as wanting to join Little Richard.

Dylan’s identification with romantic outsiders was not remarkable in the youth of his generation. So too, he was not alone in adopting an image or pseudonym (rock and rollers and blues singers before him had done so). What is intriguing, however, is the extent to which he immersed himself into the character of Bob Dylan, cultivating an image and identity that fooled even some veterans of the folk community. When he established himself as a folk singer, he invented experiences, allowing him to speak with authority in both his own songs and his performances of folk material. He wanted to sing in the voice of an older man, invariably rootless and facing death. Clearly he fell in love with the romance of hard travelling, and wanted to be that sort of performer (though stopping short of living the life). Such image cultivation was only the beginning. In the years since, Dylan has continued to evolve from persona to persona, adopting a series of masks that individually or collectively give us our conception of who Bob Dylan is.

In the early ‘60s, folk music was undergoing a major revival. Dylan had first encountered the folk music cultural scene as a freshman in the coffee houses of Dinkytown, the bohemian quarter near the University of Minnesota. The coffee houses were the meeting places of the old and new Left, the hipsters and beatniks, the places where students gravitated to listen to folk performers. This was new, underground music, the alternative to the slick pop of the day, and it was growing in popularity.

The founding father of this music, at least in its modern American form, was Woody Guthrie. Woody Guthrie was a dust bowl balladeer, a Depression-era drifter who had set down the lives of working-class people in song. His songs documented the plight of those marginalized by mainstream culture: the migrant farmers who had populated John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, the immigrant workers who crossed the Mexican border, the outlaws and the impoverished. Through friends, Dylan discovered Guthrie’s music and, perhaps equally importantly, his autobiography, Bound for Glory, an evocative account of his rambling days that had fast become the bible of the folk set. His interest in academia waning, Dylan began to mould himself into a folk singer, eschewing the polished professionalism of the handful of crossover acts in favour of a rough cut style that was close to Woody’s own. At the time, Bob Dylan was a persona in transition; it seems clear, from the accounts of Dinkytown friends, that he gradually cultivated his singing voice until it approximated the harsh, nasal tone and earthy quality of his idol. Furthermore, his contemporaries in Dinkytown were for the most part aware of his middle-class background, and he was not able to truly adopt the persona until they had been left behind and he had established himself in a city where he was completely anonymous.

The Dinkytown scene was a small-scale version of the one emerging in Greenwich Village at that time, and so it is perhaps natural that Dylan eventually headed east, towards the hub of a rising counterculture of which folk music was an integral part. The unpolished folk singer who arrived in New York was not just a Woody Guthrie imitator; he seemed to genuinely believe that he was a descendent of the drifters of Guthrie’s day. Clearly, he desperately wanted to partake of the rambling lifestyle, and spun tales that even the more seasoned members of the Greenwich Village community generously accepted. A concert programme from his first professional concert (later published in Lyrics 1962-1985 and entitled “My Life in a Stolen Moment”) is a kind of compendium of the stories he told back then, ranging from the claim that he had repeatedly run away from home, worked in a circus (an experience narrated in the unreleased song “Dusty Old Fairgrounds”) and travelled the length and breadth of the country like Guthrie’s contemporaries and heirs. So many tall tales did Dylan spin that, even as late as the early ‘90s, Dylan scholars were shocked to discover that he really had played piano in Bobby Vee’s band, a story previously dismissed as one of his more outrageous claims.

The embryonic folk revival that was underway in the coffee houses of Greenwich Village nurtured many talents, but above all it was an egalitarian environment. The commercial, competitive, individualistic world of rock and roll was anathema to its sense of community spirit. The fact that Dylan was imitating Guthrie was not sneered upon, since folk music was built upon sharing and embracing a tradition. As a rule, songs were not jealously guarded, and neither were singing styles and musical techniques. Thus, when he first wrote “Blowin’ in the Wind,” Gil Turner was able to play the song for the Gerde’s Folk City crowd as soon as he’d heard Dylan sing it.[i] There was simply no question of storing up songs, with a view to selling them to artists, in the manner of commercial pop songwriters, or of the writers recording them themselves. The fate of any new song, once it had passed the popularity test in the coffee houses, was to become part of the repertoire of just about every performer in the Village circuit. It was also a perfectly natural thing to adapt melodies from older folk songs, as Dylan did when he began to write his own material. More than anything, the stance towards authorship on display in the folk community approximated pre-Romantic attitudes; the adulation of genius and an emphasis on originality were out: everyone was a link in the chain.

Some of the first Dylan songs recount, in deadpan style, his arrival in New York; others romanticize the hard travelling lifestyle; a few more express social issues, early attempts at topical songs. These latter stemmed from Dylan’s contact with people more informed about current issues than himself, individuals like Suze Rotolo, his then girlfriend, a civil rights activist and member of CORE (the Congress for Racial Equality). Dylan got noticed, but more importantly, making him the exception to the rule among the coffee house crowd, he got a record contract.

Dylan’s Columbia contract came about primarily because of John Hammond’s patronage. Legendarily, Hammond signed him without hearing him sing, and without the assurance that he had any original material to offer. Dylan’s self-confidence and charisma might have convinced Hammond of his latent talent, but still his confidence is hard to explain. Robert Shelton, a music critic who held a position of esteem among the folk community, also recognized something remarkable in Dylan that is not really perceptible in the recordings of his early performances. Shelton was known to be a figure of integrity who could not be bought, and therefore his New York Times article about Dylan (“Bob Dylan: A Distinctive Stylist”), giving an unprecedented amount of coverage to an unknown who also happened to be performing in a support slot, was an important publicity coup for the young performer.

What can be detected in the early performances is that he had an edge, a raw, natural quality, even if there are few indications of the sort of talent that Hammond and Shelton perceived. In his coffee house performances, he also cultivated a Chaplin-like stage manner, shifting between comedy and seriousness in a way that would grab the attention of patrons. It must have been a strange mixture: the sound of a rambling folk singer staring death in the face, and the youthful looks, the deadpan comic, with his poised and expertly timed awkwardness.

The first album, Bob Dylan, was performed in a style polished up from his Village routine. Rootless wandering and a sense of mortality predominate, yet the face staring out from behind the Huck Finn cap on the album’s cover is beguilingly youthful, a kid dressed up in drifter’s clothes. Dylan sings in the voice of an experienced bluesman, singing of where he has been and what he has seen. Here was a young man, barely out of his teens, sounding like he had lived a life of struggle, pretending to be dying when he’d hardly been born. While Dylan cannot convince us that he truly is old, we are nevertheless convinced by the feeling behind the songs. What we respond to is not so much the verisimilitude of the performance but the integrity and degree of identification in the young singer. He convincingly projects himself into the position of a dying drifter; he believes, and therefore we believe also.

The songs are preoccupied with rambling and the approach of death. Although the roots of some of them are older, they often evoke the precariousness of the dust bowl days. Among the most engaging performances are a delightful, playful “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down,” which Dylan would transform so completely on the 1966 tour, a yearning “Man of Constant Sorrow,” and “House of the Rising Sun,” the arrangement of which was later lifted by The Animals and turned into a mega hit. 

There was a five-month delay between Dylan’s recording of the songs and the release of the finished album, leaving him frustrated, but also, given his rapid growth, persuading him that the album was out-of-date by the time it finally appeared. But while the protest songs that emerged slightly later dealt with more contemporary social concerns, some of the chief themes that have sustained Dylan’s writing are here. Long after his interest in protest ideology had died, Dylan would continue to drift through an unfriendly world, expressing his sense of aloneness, haunted by an awareness of mortality.

There are just two original compositions on the debut. One, “Song to Woody,” sees Dylan putting himself into Guthrie’s shoes, and paying sincere homage to his idol (who by then was in the advanced stages of Huntington’s Correa, a hereditary illness that would claim him at about the time Dylan was retreating into the backwoods of Woodstock). “Song to Woody” is Dylan’s pledge to follow Woody’s lifestyle of hard travelling. Woody had travelled with the Midwest farmers (or “Okies”) who became the subject of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. He had spent time in the migrant camps and had an intimate knowledge of the Oklahoma farmers who had travelled more than a thousand miles in search of work. The Great Depression widened the gap between the rich and poor, demarcating society into extremes of poverty and wealth. It was a cataclysmic time, as indeed was Dylan’s own. In the song, Dylan is declaring that he too is walking the same road, and seeing the same things as Woody has seen, down to the eternal gulf between “paupers and peasants and princes and kings”.

Fittingly for a gesture of homage, the song borrows extensively from the Guthrie canon, taking its tune from “1913 Massacre” and drawing imagery from such songs as “Pastures of Plenty”. It communicates the sort of simple, heartfelt truths, gleaned through experience, espoused in Bound for Glory. Though the America of Dylan’s day is not the same as it was during the Depression, Dylan can see that little has changed. Through Dylan’s (and Guthrie’s) eyes, the world is personified as suffering, like the people who inhabit it. In one of the song’s most striking images, the world seems to embody the characteristics of one of the hungry Oklahoma families, and particularly their children: “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.”

Dylan pays tribute to Guthrie’s contemporaries too, particularly Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Leadbelly, another legendary figure of folk and blues who often shared the limelight with Guthrie when the latter’s impact came under discussion. Although he evokes the sort of lifestyle experienced by the migrants, who came out of the dust storms of the Midwest and left their farms to the winds, he is also commenting more generally on life’s transience, which the lifestyle of the rootless traveller makes more perceptible: “Here’s to the hearts and the hands of the men / That come with the dust and are gone with the wind.” These ramblers are not blind to the fact that life is fleeting; in fact, they embrace such knowledge. These are people whom Dylan defines by their “hearts” and “hands”, in other words who are notable for their sincerity and toil, and who face life without the illusion of material comforts. Dylan, declaring himself on the verge of leaving and thus beginning a lifetime habit, sees the rambler’s sudden appearance and disappearance as a metaphor for life’s transience, their extreme life a mirror of life’s extremes. Instead of rejecting difficult truths, he lays himself open to fate. His expression of humility (“The very last thing that I’d want to do / Is to say I’ve been hittin’ some hard travellin’ too”) foreshadows the expression of inadequacy in the refrain of another great homage song, “Blind Willie McTell,” in which he bemoaned his inability to carry on the tradition of the great blues singers while simultaneously delivering a performance marking him out as their heir. Similarly, “Song to Woody” finds him pleading humility while at the same time matching the music of his inspiration. Dylan did not have any direct experience of the rambling life, though he did hitchhike to New York, relying on the kindness of strangers, and yet when he wrote the song he was busy fostering the impression that he had had such experiences. He sings “Song to Woody” with all the conviction of one who really has spent a lifetime on the road, or at least who sincerely feels what Woody Guthrie felt when he wrote his dust bowl ballads.