Bob Dylan Across the Borderline

Vol.I,Vol.I,0303 by Tom Palaima “I’m an honorary Texan,” Bob Dylan said character named ‘Alias’ in “Pat Garrett and Billy recently, while discussing what gives his latest the Kid,” Dylan’s films have titles like “Masked CD “Together Through Life” its clear Texas- and Anonymous,” “Don’t Look Back,” and “I’m Mexico borderland feel. “It’s no small thing. I Not There.” Small wonder then that he is drawn take it as a high honor.” to songs that capture the lives of men, women and children whose identities and worlds Dylan has long felt a connection with our two change when they cross the borderline. Many big parts of Nueva España. His sincere shout- live namelessly or with false identities, fearfully out to Billy Joe Shaver on “Together Through and honestly outside the law. Life’s” “I Feel a Change Comin’ On” is just one sample of the Tex-Mex flavors in his lyrical Dylan was drawn to the borderland early on. and musical spice box. When he hit New York City in 1961, the ailing Woody Guthrie was his guiding spirit. Guthrie In 1972, he played with Doug Sahm and had written a poem “Deportee” or “Plane Band on their self-named album, helping to Wreck at Los Gatos (Deportees)” in 1948. On achieve what Dylan scholar Michael Gray January 28 that year, twenty-eight Mexican calls a “fusion of loose yet sinewy Tex-Mex migrant workers died in a plane crash while country-rock music.” At the end of that year, being deported to Mexico, after the working Dylan moved with his wife and five children season. Newspapers did not even list their for three months to Durango, Mexico to names. Humanly offended, Guthrie wrote: act in Sam Peckinpah’s movie “Pat Garrett “You won’t have a name / when you ride the and Billy the Kid.” Dylan and Jacques Levy’s big airplane. / All they will call you will be / 1975 “Romance in Durango” is full of images Deportee.” He called out their names as he bid that Dylan absorbed while, in his own them farewell: “Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye words, “deep in the heart of Mexico”: Aztec Rosalita; adiós, mis amigos, Jesús y María.” ruins, blistering dusty heat, “hoofbeats like castanets on stone,” and places “where our Guthrie’s words were finally set to music grandfathers stayed / When they rode with a decade later. Pete Seeger was making Villa into Torreón.” “Deportee” popular just when Dylan was using Guthrie as a role model. Dylan’s later concert David Hidalgo’s accordion now gives Dylan’s versions of “Deportee’ with Joan Baez are music what Flaco Jiménez gave Dylan and incandescent. Sahm’s twenty-seven years ago. Seven years earlier, in 1965, one song stood out from the Twenty-five years before going to Houston groundbreaking electric music on Dylan’s on “Together Through Life,” Dylan made us PHOTO BY William Claxton “Highway 61 Revisited” album. see and feel our part of the plantation south through an old bluesman’s sightless vision: On “Desolation Row” Charlie McCoy and “I traveled through east Texas / where many Dylan was drawn to the borderland early on. When Dylan intertwined what Oliver Trager calls martyrs fell / And I know no one can sing the the “stately, Spanish-tinged sound” of two blues / like Blind Willie McTell.” he hit New York City in 1961, the ailing Woody acoustic guitars. Their playing still takes us right down south of the border. In “Just Like Across three decades, beginning with a tape Guthrie was his guiding spirit. Tom Thumb’s Blues” on the same album, Bob recording in the New Jersey home of good sets the scene “in the rain in Juarez.” In 1969, friends of Woody Guthrie in 1961 to a concert Dylan wrote “Wanted Man” for Johnny Cash, at West Point in October 1990, Dylan sang Dylan sang the song many times on his tour a seat right across from Dylan. “He must have taking the Man in Black to El Paso, Juarez and his own takes on the 19th-century folk song with Tom Petty. been a hundred and fifty years old...his eyes Abilene, “wonderin’ why the hell I’m wanted / “Trail of the Buffalo.” In Dylan’s version, the were on fire and there was smoke coming at some town halfway between.” ‘young cowboy’ hero calls Jacksboro, Texas out of his nostrils. I said, ‘Well, this is the man I home. And in 1992-93 when Dylan produced And when Dylan came down to Austin to want to talk to.’” Texas and Mexico have fired Bob Dylan’s two powerful CD’s full of traditional folk and celebrate Willie Nelson’s sixtieth birthday in creative imagination again and again. His blues songs, one standout classic is a tale of a 1993, Willie and he sang together Townes Van Sit down and explore Dylan’s borderland debut album, “Bob Dylan,” recorded in cowboy who regrets riding his life away in the Zandt’s “Pancho and Lefty,” a tale of outlaw music. You’ll say, “Well, this is the man I want November 1961, struck a powerful Texas pay of a miserly, pompous, jaw-wagging herd heroism and betrayal, helped along by the to listen to.” chord. The twenty-year-old Dylan covered boss named “Diamond Joe” whose “holdings ‘kindness’ of the Federales and enriched by Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “See That My Grave are in Texas.” what myths on both sides of the border mean Is Kept Clean.” Before Dylan headed off to songwriters and singers. to New York City, Minnesota folk-music The Ry Cooder-John Hiatt-Jim Dickinson Dylan has said that his own concert standard aficionado John Pankake had tuned him into classic, “Across the Borderline,” has been “Señor” from “Street Legal” (1978) was inspired University of Texas at Austin the Texas blues legend’s stark songs and to covered distinctively by both Flaco Jiménez by what he saw going on about midnight Classics professor Tom Palaima Austin-born music folklorist Alan Lomax’s and Willie Nelson. But Dylan took to the song when he woke up from sleeping on a train in taught ‘History of Song as Social “Texas Folk Songs” album. as soon as he heard it. In 1986, a year before Monterrey, Mexico. An old man, dressed in Criticism from Homer to Bob Dylan’ Besides playing the cryptic ‘everyman’ Ry Cooder even released his own version, nothing but a blanket, got on board and sat in in Spring 2009. Bob Dylan is a master of Señor Dylan Bridging the Americas musical cultural assimilation. By Gavin Lance Garcia Whether it’s the union- Music critics widely acknowledge that Dylan’s latest the recollection of “the hills of old Duluth” bring rousing anthems of Pete CD, “Together Through Life,” finds the bard’s heart to mind, among other memories, “Danny Lopez.” in a Texas “border-town”: “Echoes of a Tex-Mex Dylan’s association of life’s early stages to a Hispanic Seeger and Woody Guthrie, roadhouse” (USA Today), “a Tex-Mex feel” (Associated companion underscores a life-long love of the Latin. the weary blues of Leadbelly Press), “a Doug Sahm-like shot of norteño R&B” (Rolling Stone), “a Tejano flavor” (New York Post), 1974 “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts”: NPR’s and Robert Johnson or “embroidered with Tex-Mex accordion” (Chicago Tim Riley calls this “an intricately evasive allegory the soul-stirring gospel of Tribune), “Tex Mex ballads” (The New York Times), about romantic façades that hide criminal motives.” “Creole-Latino accordion playing sets the mood” Big Jim spies his rival Jack in a cabaret and believes the Staples, he has taken (Los Angeles Times), “a Tex-Mex atmosphere” (The he has seen him before “down in Mexico.” the most culturally potent Observer). 1975 “Romance in Durango”: Michael Gray states music ever delivered and HERE IS A SAMPLE OF Spanish/Latin AMERICAN this song “raised the pop song onto an undreamt-of liberally borrowed its most REFERENCES FROM THE DYLAN CANON. high plane.” A tale of an outlaw and his sweetheart, Magdalena, on the run in Mexico, this is the accessible elements to color 1963 “Boots of Spanish Leather”: Two lovers are archetypal Tex-Mex tune. “No llores, mi querida and flavor his own powerful at a crossroads as one sails across the Atlantic for / Dios nos vigila / Soon the horse will take us to Spain and “the mountains of Madrid” and “coast of Durango. / Agarrame, mi vida / Soon the desert will compositions. What would Barcelona.” At the end of a dialogue, the forlorn lover be gone . .,” sings Dylan as he rides “past the Aztec “Desire” be without that left behind realizes his futility and requests a pair of ruins and the ghosts of our people.” boots to likewise go a-“roamin.’” haunting gypsy fiddle, 1975 “Abandoned Love”: Written, ostensibly, during or “Slow Train Coming” 1963 “North Country Blues”: This first person a period of marital discord, the narrator locates narrative (of a woman whose husband has lost his romance where “The Spanish moon is rising on the without the Muscle Shoals job due to industry outsourcing) includes scrutiny of hill / But my heart is a-tellin’ me I love ya still.” church organ and choir US economic exploitation in South America, where ore can be had “much cheaper” and “the miners 1978 “Señor (Tales of Yankee Power)”: Bob as Simón voices? While the choice of work almost for nothing.” Bolívar, Che, Don Quixote? However interpreted, Hidalgo’s accordion could Dylan characters find themselves south of the border 1964 “Spanish Harlem Incident”: Dylan has said he again.

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