Chronicles - Bob Dylan [96]
Koerner said that I had to meet a guy named Harry Webber and through him, I did. Webber was an English literary professor, a tweed wearing, old fashioned intellectual. And he did know plenty of songs, mostly roving ballads — stern ballads, ones that meant cruel business. I learned one called “Old Greybeard,” about a young girl whose mother tells her to go kiss a man who has been arranged for her to marry and the daughter tells the mother to go kiss him herself…that the old greybeard is now clean shaven. The song is sung in first, second and third person. I loved all these ballads right away. They were romantic as all hell and high above all the popular love songs I’d ever heard. You could exhaust all the combinations of your vocabulary without having to learn any vocabulary. Lyrically they worked on some kind of supernatural level and they made their own sense. You didn’t have to make your own sense out of it. I used to sing another one, too, called “When a Man’s in Love,” where a boy in love feels no cold — he’ll go through frosted snow to meet his girl, get her and take her to some silent place. I was beginning to feel like a character from within these songs, even beginning to think like one. “Roger Esquire,” another song learned from Webber, was about money and beauty tickling the fancy and dazzling the eyes.
I could rattle off all these songs without comment as if all the wise and poetic words were mine and mine alone. The songs had beautiful melodies and were filled with everyday leading players like barbers and servants, mistresses and soldiers, sailors, farmhands and factory girls — their comings and goings — when they spoke in the songs they entered your life. But there was more to it than that…a lot more. Beneath it I was into the rural blues as well; it was a counterpart of myself. It was connected to early rock and roll and I liked it because it was older than Muddy and Wolf. Highway 61, the main thoroughfare of the country blues, begins about where I came from…Duluth to be exact. I always felt like I’d started on it, always had been on it and could go anywhere from it, even down into the deep Delta country. It was the same road, full of the same contradictions, the same one-horse towns, the same spiritual ancestors. The Mississippi River, the bloodstream of the blues, also starts up from my neck of the woods. I was never too far away from any of it. It was my place in the universe, always felt like it was in my blood.
Folklorist singers came through the Twin Cities also and you could learn songs from them, too — old-time performers like Joe Hickerson, Roger Abrams, Ellen Stekert or Rolf Kahn. Authentic folk records were as scarce as hens’ teeth. You had to know people who had them. Koerner and some others had them, but the group was very small. Record stores didn’t carry many of them, as there was very little demand. Performers like Koerner and myself would go anywhere to hear one by anybody we thought we hadn’t heard. We once went over to St. Paul to somebody’s house who supposedly had a 78 record of Blind Andy Jenkins singing “Death of Floyd Collins.” The person wasn’t at home and we never got to hear it. I did hear Tom Darby and Jimmy Tarleton, though, at the house of somebody’s father who had owned an old copy of one of their records. I always thought that “A-wop-bop-a-loo-lop a-lop-bam-boo” had said it all until I heard Darby and Tarlton doing “Way Down in Florida on a Hog.” Darby and Tarlton, too, were out of this world.
Koerner and I were playing and singing a lot together as a duo, but we each did our own thing separately. As for myself, I played morning, noon and night. That’s all I did, usually fell asleep with the guitar in my hands. I went through the entire summer this way. In the fall, I was sitting at the lunch counter at Gray’s drugstore. Gray’s drugstore was in the heart of Dinkytown.