Media, music, meaning.

You Couldn’t Take Your Eyes Off Him

In September 1961, 9 months after he hitchhiked to New York City, Bob Dylan was reviewed in The New York Times. The journalist Robert Shelton saw his set at Gerde’s Folk City and was immediately struck by the 20 year old’s intensity. He called him a “cross between a choir boy and a beatnik.” His review went on to say:

“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.”

Reflecting on the performance years later Shelton said that the reason Dylan was featured so prominently was “the enormous amount of intensity about him. He had charisma when he was performing on stage, you couldn’t take your eyes off him, and the actual content of his songs had a power of observation of acuteness.”

Shelton is now credited as the man who “discovered Bob Dylan” and the review is seen as the spark of Dylan’s initial popularity. It became clear that he stood out amongst the sea of folk singers who frequented the baskethouses of Greenwich Village. There was something different about him. He had developed what the others hadn’t, and according to Shelton, it was his style:

“He studied the masters like Woody Guthrie, the old blues man, studied them to learn their style, learn how to interpret them, afterwards he formed a style of his own, he formed several styles of his own and he became the master who the younger musicians were studying.”

In the years before he got to Greenwich Village, Dylan was listening to records, picking out the chords and melodies to the songs he liked, watching Elvis on TV, studying his heroes. Then imitation led to innovation. His girlfriend at the time, Suze Rotolo, writes about how she watched this process unfold. She writes that “during the process of assimilation the artist’s output will be an imitation of the beloved form. In the end, for the uniquely gifted, there will be innovation… Dave Van Ronk said about his unique guitar style: ‘I tried my damnedest to copy those old guys, but I just couldn’t do it, so I had to come up with something.’”

She once heard Bob Dylan say, “Hey, you gotta listen to this song I just wrote! I just wrote it, or at least I think I wrote it, but maybe I heard it somewhere.”

I Rewrote An Old Song To Make My Song​

When he was in the Air Force, Johnny Cash heard a song called Crescent City Blues by Gordon Jenkins. He had recently seen the movie Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison and wondered what it would be like to be in prison. “At the time, I really had no idea I would be a professional recording artist; I wasn’t trying to rip anybody off,” Cash told a Canadian Magazine in the mid 90s. His song Folsom Prison Blues ended up sounding very similar to the Jenkins song. Here are the first lines from the verses of each:

Crescent City Blues:
I hear the train a-comin, it’s rolling ’round the bend…
When I was just a baby my mama told me, Sue…
I see the rich folks eatin’ in that fancy dining car…

Folsom Prison Blues:
I hear the train a-comin’, it’s rolling ’round the bend…
When I was just a baby, my mama told me, “Son…
I bet there’s rich folks eatin’ in a fancy dining car…

He definitely took a lot of inspiration from the song. And ended up paying Gordon Jenkins nearly half a million dollars (in today’s money) after it became a hit. But if he “ripped it off,” why have most people never heard the name Gordon Jenkins? Why was Cash’s version of the song so much more popular? It’s because Cash had something that Jenkins didn’t. He had style. He was the man in black. He was thinking about what it would be like to be in prison, wondering about the worst reason to kill a man: ”I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.” He came from the same tradition that Dylan did. He processed what he heard and put his own spin on it. Gave it style. Cash said that “when I later went to Sun to record the song, I told Sam Phillips that I rewrote an old song to make my song, and that was that.”

In Proportion To The Greatness Of What He Loved

The artist’s job is to see the extraordinary in the seemingly mundane. To reinterpret the world around them in a way that helps others see it in a new light. Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan’s hero who he emulated, was a voice for struggling people all over the country and inspired generations of musicians. Gordon Jenkins, who inspired Johnny Cash’s iconic song, helped shape the sound of mid-20th-century pop music. Both of these men were striving to emulate and reshape material that came from great artists. They were reinterpreting greatness.

The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote that, “no one shall be forgotten who was great in this world; but everyone was great in his own way, and everyone in proportion to the greatness of what he loved.” If Bob Dylan stayed in Minnesota and never met Woody Guthrie, he wouldn’t have written The Times They Are A Changin’. If Johnny Cash hadn’t heard Crescent City Blues, he would have never written Folsom Prison Blues and made his iconic At Folsom Prison album. The devoted artist will seek out, study, and rework material that they love. The stuff that connects to their soul. Then they will create something great and the cycle will continue.

Talk to you next week,

Dawson