Chronicles - Bob Dylan [99]
Now that I crossed the divide, I was head over heels in singing nothing but Guthrie songs — at house parties, in the coffeehouses, street singing, with Koerner, not with Koerner — if I had a shower I would have sung them in there, too. There were a lot of them and outside of the main ones, not easily to be found. There were no reissues of his older records, there were only the original ones, but I would move heaven and earth to find them, even went to the Minneapolis public library to the Folkways section. (Public libraries were the one place for some reason that had most of the Folkways records.) I’d always be checking the repertoires of every out of town performer who came through to see what Guthrie songs they knew that I didn’t, and I was beginning to feel the phenomenal scope of Woody’s songs — the Sacco and Vanzetti ballads, Dust Bowl and children songs, Grand Coulee Dam songs, venereal disease songs, union and workingman ballads, even his rugged heartbreak love ballads. Each one seemed like a towering tall building with a variety of scenarios all appropriate for different situations. Woody made each word count. He painted with words. That along with his stylized type singing, the way he phrased, the dusty cowpoke deadpan but amazingly serious and melodic sense of delivery, was like a buzzsaw in my brain and I tried to emulate it any way I could. A lot of folks might have thought of Woody’s songs as backdated, but not me. I felt they were totally in the moment, current and even forecasted things to come. I felt anything but like the young punk folksinger who had just begun out of nowhere six months previously. It felt more like I had instantly risen up from a noncommissioned volunteer to an honorable knight — stripes and gold stars.
Woody’s songs were having that big an effect on me, an influence on every move I made, what I ate and how I dressed, who I wanted to know, who I didn’t. In the late ’50s and early ’60s, teenage rebellion was beginning to make noise, but that scene hadn’t appealed to me, not in a wholehearted way. It had no organized shape. The rebel-without-a-cause thing wasn’t hands-on enough — even a lost cause, I thought, would be better than no cause. To the Beats, the devil was bourgeois conventionality, social artificiality and the man in the gray flannel suit.
Folk songs automatically went up against the grain of all these things and Woody’s songs even went against that. In comparison, everything else seemed one-dimensional. The folk and blues tunes had already given me my proper concept of culture, and now with Guthrie’s songs my heart and mind had been sent into another cosmological place of that culture entirely. All the other cultures of the world were fine, but as far as I was concerned, mine, the one I was born into, did the work of them all and Guthrie’s songs even went further.
The sun had swung my way. I felt like I’d crossed the threshold and there was nothing in sight. Singing Woody’s songs, I could keep everything else at a safe distance. This fantasy was short-lived, however. Thinking that I was wearing the sharpest looking uniform and the shiniest boots around, all of a sudden I felt a jolt and was stopped short in my tracks. It felt like someone had taken a chunk out of me. Jon Pankake, a folk music purist enthusiast and sometime literary teacher and film wiseman, who’d been watching me for a while on the scene, made it his business to tell me that what I was doing hadn’t escaped him. “What do you think you’re doing? You’re singing nothing but Guthrie songs,” he said, jabbing his finger into my chest like he was talking to a poor fool. Pankake was authoritative and a hard guy to get past. It was known around that Pankake had a vast collection of the real folk records and could go on and on about them. He was part of the folk police, if not the chief commissioner, wasn’t impressed with any of the new talent. To him nobody possessed any great mastery — no one could succeed in laying a hand