Bob Dylan, Dave Van Ronk, and Robert Johnson |
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White] [Narcocorrido] [Global Minstrels] [Pop/Beatles book] [African Guitar] [Other writing] [Music and albums] I suppose it's not surprising that people have written to ask what I thought of the passage in Chronicles, Volume One in which Bob Dylan writes about Dave Van Ronk's reaction to Robert Johnson. Considering that I dedicated my book on Johnson to Dave, "whose ideas formed the foundation of this work," I was very interested in Dylan's story.
Now, there is something wrong with this story but a lot more right, and it provides interesting insights into all three artists. The inaccuracy is that, while Dave would not have heard most of the songs on the LP, he certainly had heard of Robert Johnson. He had been roommates with Sam Charters while Sam was finishing up his book The Country Blues, and had one of the first copies of both it and the accompanying album -- which every blues fan in the folk world bought the instant they were available. The book had a chapter on Johnson, and the LP included Johnson’s “Preachin’ Blues,” and they came out in 1959, two years before the Columbia record.
Dave got his start in the jazz world, and his idea of a great singer was Louis Armstrong. He devoted his life to applying what he had learned from Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Bing Crosby, Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington to a blues repertoire that had originally been sung by people whose styles he considered comparatively primitive and archaic. In the mid-1950s, when he first discovered rural blues, he was briefly captivated by Leadbelly’s approach, but he quickly concluded that an Irish guy from Brooklyn sounded silly imitating a black Louisiana country singer, and that in any case a lot had happened since those records were made. To him, the idea of a modern singer phrasing blues as if Armstrong, Billie Holiday, and Ray Charles had not come along was like a modern poet writing Elizabethan sonnets -- not necessarily bad, but pointless. That had already been done very well, and the world was now a different place. Dave admired Johnson’s records for what they were, but he had nothing to learn from them, so they didn’t interest him much. Non-musicians may have trouble understanding this, but musicians don’t just listen to music for pleasure -- or rather, their pleasure is generally inseparable from their work. When they listen to music (especially the sort of music they play themselves), they are looking for useful ideas, and a very good record that has nothing they can use is often dismissed not because there is anything wrong with it but just because it isn’t useful to them. Dave’s guitar style was based on the playing of Rev. Gary Davis, an approach that is completely different from Johnson’s. What is more, Dave liked a solid, full sound -- he often described his guitar charts as being like the Ellington band arrangements, over which he sang like a horn soloist -- while Johnson’s playing was all about open spaces and a rhythmic control Dave could not match. He preferred to listen to pianists like Leroy Carr and Jelly Roll Morton, and to adapt their fuller harmonic ideas to the guitar. Johnson’s singing, likewise, had little or nothing that Dave could use. Basically, Dave wanted to sing blues like Armstrong. He loved interesting harmonies and jazz phrasing. To him, heartfelt passion was something you got from inside -- on a good night, if you were lucky -- but craft was something you could study. Johnson was arguably a deeper, more soulful singer than Armstrong -- though Dave didn’t think so -- but what made Johnson’s vocals great was not something you could learn, while Armstrong’s were like a textbook on how to phrase a lyric.
Dylan was not thinking about Johnson’s lyrics as potential material either. But he was learning how to put his own lyrics together, and his approach to songwriting seems to have been revolutionized by Johnson’s example. “I copied Johnson’s words down on scraps of paper so I could more closely examine the lyrics and patterns, the construction of his old-style lines and the free association that he used, the sparkling allegories, big-ass truths wrapped in the hard shell of nonsensical abstraction . . .” It is easy to see how that description leads to “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” The point of all of this is quite simple: Art is not a contest, or any kind of test. When it came to Dylan and Dave, and their opinions of Robert Johnson, they both looked at what he had to offer and one of them found something useful and the other didn’t. That was not a judgement of Johnson’s work, nor is it a judgement of either of theirs. It was a straightforward case of “You’re right from your side and I’m right from mine.” |