UGS 302 Bob Dylan and Social-Historical Imagination 62495 PALAIMA, Thomas G. Short Title: Bob Dylan History Imagination Wr and CD flags Professor Tom Palaima Department: Classics WAG 123 Campus Mail Code: C3400 Office: Waggener 14AA Office Hours: T TH 11-12:30 and by appointment [email protected] Campus Phone: 471-8837 fax: 471-4111 Dept. 471-5742 Description: Human cultures and societies desire stability and generally aim to perpetuate their existing power structures and values. For this reason critical commentary is often suppressed, marginalized or co-opted. Yet social criticism can also be tolerated in frankly surprising ways within songs and poetic traditions, especially when written by geniuses within epic, lyric, folk and blues traditions. In this course, we will look at the songs written and performed by Bob Dylan and the songs of others that he has chosen to perform in concert for nearly six decades in their social and historical contexts. We will investigate how Dylan makes what is real felt. Dylan from the start omnivorously consumed and assimilated songs, poems, novels, histories, and newspapers, contemporary and past. He has tapped into the songs of traditions as diverse as British, Scottish, Irish, Appalachian, Piedmont and Ozark folk traditions and been influenced by artists as wide-ranging as the Mississippi Sheiks, Huddie William Ledbetter, Martin Carthy, the Stanley Brothers, Blind Willie McTell, Hank Williams, Frank Sinatra, Warren Zevon, Johnny Cash and Woody Guthrie. Critic Sean Willentz observes, “Dylan's writing a different kind of art. He...had th[e] ability to...enter into lots of different people's brains and souls and see them in collision.” Absorbing Dylan's songs and what inspired them expands our humanity and develops our capacities for sympathy, empathy and compassion for others. Disciplines: Classical, English and American literature, poetry, journalism, music and musicology; history and social history; public intellectual engagement in social problems and issues; ethics and leadership; war and poverty and their effects on human beings and their societies. Content: We grow up listening to songs. They affect the ways we look at and feel about the world in which we live and how we live our own lives. They give us insight into how others behave and how we feel and think and act. Poems and songs contain deeply personal takes on how events, circumstances and social, economic and political forces affect human beings. By studying Dylan and his sources and artistic process we can develop an awareness of the important issues human societies face and the creativity needed to 'give voice' to observations, laments, criticisms and expressions of exuberant joy, crushing sorrow, existential bewilderment, and the meaning of being alive. Core Objectives: The songs we will be studying relate to deep human concerns and feelings. Dylan as an artist has sought out sources of inspiration that would reach down into the soul. He has an uncanny knack for what we might call empathetic imagination. By studying his music, we as students will understand what it is like to be dirt poor and working in a mining encampment, black during the civil rights era, a poor army volunteer in many times and circumstances, a migrant worker, a young man or woman in love, an old man reflecting on the joys and pains of life, an Old Testament prophet, a follower of Jesus, a mafia mobster, a confused academic, a World War II veteran in love, requited or unrequited. Empathy and sympathy are keys to social responsibility and personal responsibility. We cannot live properly in the world without knowing it. Dylan's music in its times and with its sources are educational tools in and of themselves for knowing our world. Classes will be mixtures of lecture and discussion. Assignments: Substantial Writing Projects: 1. Students will each have to research and inhabit the time period and the outlook of characters of individual songs or groups of songs studied in the course. 2. Students will also study the social and historical 'triggers' that brought Dylan's songs and the songs of his sources into being. Students may choose to write their own poems, short stories, or, if musically inclined, songs about incidents that affect or have affected their own lives. Writing Feedback: All assignments will be reviewed in draft by the instructor and then the final version will be written with that feedback. This course carries the Wr Substantial Writing component flag AND the Cultural Diversity in the US flag. This requires serious explanation and attention. The purpose of this flag is to look at (traditionally) underrepresented groups in American culture. There is an issue, as with any definition, with what groups get accepted as officially marginalized groups per se. In this course we see as among such groups the rural poor as identified by Steinbeck, Faulkner, Woody Guthrie, and in Dylan's nightmarish “Hollis Brown.” We also think of the poor miners as described by Michael Lesy in Wisconsin in Death Trip or in the folk song “Down in the Mines. And we think of the poor blacks rousted by southern police, sentenced by southern judges, and sent into the equivalent of an indentured slavery in mining operations where they owed their bodies and souls to the company store until they died and were dumped anonymously into worse than pauper's fields (Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name). Songs like Dylan's youthful masterpiece "I Was Young When I Left Home" awaken us to how such groups live within out culture and what they go through in living. There are also migrant workers identified in Woody Guthrie's "Pastures of Plenty" and "Deportees" as covered by Dylan. We shall be looking at how Dylan's own songs and those of the folk and blues traditions that he covers give us insight and open pathways into the African-American experience in the United States, all the more powerfully because they reach audiences that would not care about this experience at all except by being guided to it even by songs that Dylan himself appropriates: e.g., “Delia” and “Stagolee” and “Hard Times”. I was once a young working class white boy, grandchild of illiterate immigrants, in a northern industrial city which did not need Jim Crow laws because de facto apartheid was so well set in place and stayed in place well into the 1970’s. My avenue into learning about civil rights issues was paved by “Only a Pawn in Their Game” (Murder of Medgar Evers) and “Death of Emmett Till” and “Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.” Later “George Jackson” (Killing of a Black Panther); “Hurricane” (Trial of Rubin Hurricane Carter) and “Blind Willie McTell” (a panorama of the plantation south). See: Robert Chapman, “African American Culture and Bob Dylan: Why He Matters.” http://www.edlis.org/twice/threads/why_he_matters.html And see The Root Dayo Olopade: “Bob Dylan’s Black History How a skinny white man from Minnesota earned the right to headline the president’s (Obama's) civil rights concert.” http://www.theroot.com/articles/politics/2010/02/the_white_house_civil_rights_concert_bob_dy lan_morgan_freeman_yolanda_adams_smokey_robinson/ In all cases the songs, by Dylan or covered, are the catalysts for historical study and discussion of issues. We will be concentrating on the songs written and performed (drawn from a long tradition of folk music singing the sorrows and difficulties and joys of marginalized people) by Bob Dylan 1959- present. We will be studying the traditions that lie behind the songs. A good example is the Stagger Lee tradition where we will read from Cecil Brown's classic study *Stagolee Shot Billy*, but also mine the archives of ethnomusicologists and historians. Ditto with Dylan's singing of Stephen Foster's “Hard Times.” Listen to the Foster song and you will understand with what limited sympathy the dominant white class viewed the plight of impoverished whites and blacks. Listen to Dylan sing it and a haunting poignancy hits you, as he writes elsewhere, "like a freight / train moving down." The issue of appropriation of other songs and traditions will be a standing concern. Typical readings will be articles concerned with the songs themselves and the issues surrounding the songs. See the sample assignment in next section. Here are examples: 1. Stagolee songs and lyrics and violence on the dark side of town. Turning away from the big questions, here we will look at sample alternative versions of the Stagolee tradition. Focus here on the Stagolee material, including Lomax's transcription of an early version and Brown's capsule survey of its powerful influence from the 1890-‘s into the third millennium. Reading: Cecil Brown, “Godfather of Gangsta.” Haymes and Stagger Lee lyrics.pdf. CBrown_Godfather_of_Gangsta.pdf (96.03 Kb) Dylan to Cave Stack A Lee.doc (67.5 Kb) Staggerlee Lyrics 1927 onward.pdf (73.043 Kb) Archibald_1950_Stack-A-Lee Part 1.mp3 (2.124 Mb) Cave Stagger Lee (Munich explicit).mp3 (13.761 Mb) F Lewis 1927 Billy Lyons And Stack O'Lee.m4a (2.032 Mb) Lloyd_Price_Stagger_Lee.mp3 (2.639 Mb) Lomax Stagolee.pdf (529.563 Kb) Mississippi John Hurt 1928 Stack O' Lee Blues.m4a (2.465 Mb) The_Down_Home_Boys_Original_Stack_O_Lee_Blues_1927.mp3 (2.461 Mb) 2. The Lonesome Death and Afterlife of Hattie Carroll and William Zantzinger. "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" is a Dylan masterpiece and so connected with him that it is not covered by other artists often. British folksinger Martin Carthy, who influenced Dylan in the early 60's, did a version of it. So did Judy Collns early on (1964) and Joe McDonald (of Country Joe and the Fish). And later still we have a bootleg version by Roky Erickson (1994). We will look at the sad and lonesome death of Hattie Carroll and the true life and eventual death of William Zantzinger, the genesis of Dylan's song and its influence upon listeners and upon the man who is featured as the villain in it.