Folk Music by Greil Marcus

Author:Greil Marcus
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2022-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGIN’

* * *

1964

“I sang a lot of ‘come all you’ songs,” Bob Dylan said in 2015 in his MusiCares address, telling the tale of his whole musical life. “There’s plenty of them. There’s way too many to be counted. ‘Come along boys and listen to my tale / Tell you of my troubles on the old Chisholm Trail.’ Or, ‘Come all ye good people, listen while I tell / The fate of Floyd Collins, a lad we all know well.’ ”

“Come all ye fair and tender ladies / Take warning how you court your men / They’re like a star on a summer morning / They first appear and then they’re gone again.” And then there’s this one, “Gather ’round, people / A story I will tell / ’Bout Pretty Boy Floyd, the outlaw / Oklahoma knew him well.”

If you sung all these “come all ye” songs all the time like I did, you’d be writing, “Come gather ’round people where ever you roam, admit that the waters around you have grown / Accept that soon you’ll be drenched to the bone / If your time to you is worth saving / And you better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone / The times they are a-changin’.”

You’d have written that too. There’s nothing secret about it. You just do it subliminally and unconsciously, because that’s all enough, and that’s all you know. That was all that was dear to me.

“Come senators, congressmen, please heed the call / Don’t stand in the doorway, don’t block up the hall / For he who gets hurt will be he who has stalled / The battle outside ragin’ / Will soon shake your windows and rattle your walls / For the times they are a-changin’ ”—as with “Blowin’ in the Wind” the year before, in 1964 it seemed obvious. Obvious who was who, what was up and what was down, who was trying to make history and who was trying to stop it. The song was so programmatic it could have been written by a committee. The come-all-ye tradition tipped right over into the finger-pointing tradition, the right side calling out the wrong side in a big, righteous march to shout down the walls of Jericho. “The pep rally, the Sousa march, the football cheer”—it could have been written as an illustration for Little Sandy Review’s “P-FOR-PROTEST.” “It was ironic that Bob Dylan’s picture should have been placed next to Jerry Lewis’s on the recent ESQUIRE cover awarding the dubious achievements for 1964,” Paul Nelson and Jon Pankake wrote in the last number of Little Sandy Review, in early 1965.

Those sad, sensitive eyes are a kind of counterpart of Lewis’s grimace. Both of them have serious strivings beyond their actual abilities; both are victims of the show biz syndrome; both are clownish entertainers to a popular audience incapable of understanding anything but their very broadest effects; both are idolized by a cult of pseudo-intellectuals who rationalize their shortcomings

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