>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington, DC.
>> Anne McLean: Good
evening, I'm Anne McLean
from the Library's Music Division.
I'd like to welcome you to tonight's
lecture by the culture critic
and journalist, Greil Marcus,
titled Sam McGee's Railroad Blues
and Other Versions of the Republic.
This event is cosponsored
by the Music Division
and the American Folklife Center
and we'd like to thank Peggy Bulger,
Nancy Gross and Todd
Harvey particularly.
We're delighted to be partnering
tonight in presenting Mr. Marcus,
a distinguished scholar
of American popular music.
He's admired for creative
examinations
and poetic associations
linking rock 'n roll
to political and social theory.
Today the city paper described him
as a unique cultural
academic rock critic
and Dylan scholar who's
taught at Princeton, Berkeley
and currently New York's new school.
Many of you are probably
familiar with his books,
including When That Rough God
Goes Riding on Van Morrison,
The Old Weird America, The Shape
of Things to Come, Mystery Train,
Dead Elvis, and Lipstick Traces
and a remarkable Dylan book you
might know Like a Rolling Stone.
I'm very glad to say that
tonight he'll be signing copies
of his newest book on Bob Dylan,
which officially won't be released
until Monday, so that's kind of
nice, following tonight's lecture.
Please welcome Greil Marcus.
[ Applause ]
>> Greil Marcus: Thank you Anne
and I thank Anne and Todd Harvey,
Nancy Gross for inviting me here,
it's a great honor to be here
and thank you all for coming.
In 1964, a man named Sam
McGee made a new version
of a tune he'd first recorded
in 1934, Railroad Blues.
And in the way that McGee's
guitar seemed to have 20 strings
and McGee himself four hands,
he was a whole orchestra.
And the way that he shouted wahoo
as his notes rushed past and the way
that he aimed his voice at the sky
he was standing by himself on top
of a mountain, alone in
the world, not another sign
of human presence as
far as he could see.
But whatever image came to mind
as McGee's Railroad Blues played
you couldn't imagine the man
who was singing standing still.
As the tune played the singer
went from one place to another
and he was no longer
merely Sam McGee.
From the first move into the tune
and almost unbearably
delicious downward swoop
on a fact-based note making it feel
as if you were being
lifted off your feet
from that first gesture
whoever was singing
and playing the song was somebody
bigger, something more various
than could ever be
contained in an ordinary name.
He was Daniel Boone
with faster feet.
He was Johnny Appleseed
with songs instead of pips.
He was Cooper's leather
stocking with a sense of humor.
He was Huck Finn as an old man
having long since understood
as Edmund Wilson wrote in 1922,
for what drama his
setting was the setting.
The drama was to make a
sound that would prove
to all the world the world
remained to be found even made.
Went to the depot, looked up on the
board McGee sang for a first verse.
Taking a commonplace line and
throwing it away out of the way
of the story that he was
telling on his guitar.
Went to the depot looked up on the
board, went to the depot looked
up on the board it said good times
here, but better up the road.
Let's listen to Sam
McGee's Railroad Blues.
[ Music ]
Now whoever's playing in an instant
you can see them standing on a table
in a bar full of drunks
and then you can see him
in a concert hall dashing back and
forth from one side of the stage
to the other as an audience
of respectful folk revivalists
sit thrilled and confused.
You can glimpse a man walking into
a barbershop looking for change,
filling his hat and then tossing
the coins back at the rounders
in the place like Levon
Helm and the Band's
Up on Cripple Creek telling the tale
of what his Bessy did with her half
of their racetrack winnings,
tore it up and threw it
in my face just for a laugh.
Who is this man?
Not Sam McGee, but the figure
comes to life as Sam McGee plays.
He's one of many figures who
appear in American vernacular music
as it was recorded in
the 1920's and 30's.
People who appear with such force
and such charm, such a broad smile
or an implacable scowl is to claim
the whole of the country's story is
if it was his or hers alone.
It's incontestable for
example that there's no room
for the creature running
through railroad blues
in the nation established by Bela
Lam and his Greene County singers
as they recorded in Richmond,
Virginia when Okeh Records held
a joint recording session there
in 1929.
A recording session that featured
as well the Monarch Jubilee Quartet,
the Roanoke jug band, the
tub size Hawaiian orchestra,
the Bubbling over Five
and eight other acts.
Bela Lam ZandderVon
Beliah Lamb was born
around 1870 and he died in 1944.
He was a big man with a
huge handlebar mustache.
And the Greene County singers
were Lamb, his wife Rose,
their son Alva, Rose's brother Paul.
In 1927 in New York they recorded a
profoundly peaceful version of See
that my Grave is Kept Green,
an old song about the countless
unmarked graves from the Civil War
that later found its way into
Blind Lemon Jefferson's See
that my Grave is Kept Clean.
In 1929 in Richmond though
the Sylvan Glade was nowhere
in evidence.
Bizarrely atonal banjo and
guitar clang unpleasantly
into even uglier singing.
Into nothing that can be called
a rhythm or even a melody,
but rather a translation
into music of a conviction
so murderously complete,
so uninterested
in what you think you believe
that suddenly you feel very small.
On the outside of a story that's
yours whether you want it or not,
the story of Jesus Christ,
your Savior, come to take you
and the person of the
Greene County Singers.
And let's hear the
Greene County Singers.
[ Music ]
If tonight you'd end the world
is a sound of peopled rooted
to their ground, certain
that no merely human force
could move them an inch.
It's a procession of singers, of
singers stumbling down the street,
stumbling because they can't keep
time because their harmonies are
as arthritic as their hands must be.
Their cracked and quivering
voices are any clue to their age.
That the music builds on itself
until you too are waiting
for the end of the world.
If tonight should end
the world then what.
They know you don't.
It isn't that the faithful
and if tonight should end the
world would turn away from the man
in railroad blues as a sinner
or that they would turn him away
from their church, they don't
recognize him, he doesn't exist.
They're people who move
into the settlement
that the railroad bluesman
has just left working hard,
looking straight ahead, raising
their church, building the town
so that when the man blows
back into the place in a year
or so he won't even recognize it.
To the Greene County
Singers free in the embrace
of the Lord the man speaking in
railroad blues is no more a prisoner
of his own animal -- is
no more than a prisoner
of his own animal appetites
and against people
like him their town
doesn't even need a jail.
Bela Lam's banjo picks out crown him
Lord above and you can feel that he
and the rest of the Greene
County Singers are already
in another world, even as they
claim all rights to this one.
And in the same way it's hard
to imagine the free American
in railroad blues countenancing
the destroyed individual
in Emry Arthurs Man of
Constant Sorrow from 1928.
It's not today an obscure song.
Bob Dylan recorded a version of
it for his first album in 1962.
And as the maid of Constant
Sorrow Judy Collins sang it
with pseudo Elizabethan preciousness
at the height of the folk revival.
The Stanley Brothers
recorded it, many more.
In 2001, the Cohen
Brothers' film O Brother
Where Art Thou George Clooney,
John Turturro, Tim Blake Nelson
and Chris Thomas King for a
moment the Soggy Bottom Boys
with Dan Tyminski of
Alison Krauss's band,
the voice be behind George
Clooney's dashing mic work.
They swept the movie south with
this song and you didn't doubt
for a minute that everyone
there wanted to hear it more
than they wanted to
hear anything else.
Let's listen to this
Soggy Bottom Boys.
[ Music ]
That Emry Arthur who in 1929
accompanied the Virginia banjoist
Dock Boggs on guitar
who Boggs recalled him
and shot through the hands.
He couldn't reach the cords,
bullets went through his hands.
He was the first person to
record Man of Constant Sorrow.
Now you just say the
first lines of the song.
I am a man of constant sorrow,
I've seen trouble all my days.
Those lines are instantly
overwhelmingly sentimental
and unless you completely
ignore the lines as you sing
as the Soggy Bottom Boys
do and be going for speed
and flash those lines are
impossible not to dramatize.
As Bob Dylan and Judy Collins found,
the more quietly you sing those
words the louder they become.
And the more of a poseur, the more
of a fake they reveal you to be.
But Emry Arthur bangs on his guitar
as if he's been shot
through the hands.
You can almost see
the bone sticking out.
Plink, plink he says and he
says it no more musically
than Bela Lam's band.
I am a man of constant
sorrow he says plainly,
as if he were saying
I'm hungry or I'm cold.
As if he's learned to say
such things with dignity.
I have seen trouble all my days.
It's that have, I have
seen trouble instead
of the usual contraction
of I've seen trouble.
This says what the singer is saying
isn't obvious, it isn't common,
it's not something you
really want to hear about.
So this is Emry Arthur,
Man of Constant Sorrow.
[ Music ]
Now you can imagine the
Greene County Singers trying
to pull Emry Arthur into their fold.
They'd recognize him if only
because they speak the same blank
language the Greene County Singers
singing as if they don't care if you
hear them even though their records
and Emry Arthur's records
these weren't field recordings,
these weren't taken down by
folklorists these were recorded
for commercial record companies with
the idea that people would buy them.
But the Greene County Singers
sound as if they don't care
if you hear them and Emry Arthur
sings as if he can't believe
that anyone would ever
listen to him.
But why would the man in
Railroad Blues even pause?
In his thin voice which
imperceptibly moves from bitterness
to acceptance from anger to peace.
The fire in the Man of Constant
Sorrow offers a kind of challenge,
a rebuke to God's gifts and
it's this that will keep him
out of Bela Lam's church.
After a verse or two the tunlessness
of Emry Arthur's performance settles
into a hurdy-gurdy beat and you're
no longer afraid of the singer.
He's put you at ease so he
can put you on the spot,
so he can show you how
absolutely you will never know him.
Oh, you can bury me
in some deep valley
for many years there I will lay
and when you're dreaming while
you're sleeping while I am sleeping
in the clay.
It's the irreducible
individualism of the details,
details that rarely have ever moved
into other versions of the song,
the already traditional song.
Perhaps because they
communicate as so specific
to a particular individual that to
appropriate would be a kind of theft
that the folk process
couldn't even excuse.
It's those details that sealed
the bottomless well of this song.
The unusual reference to dreaming,
the use of clay not just ground
and the singer goes on after
this verse not in death,
but relating more of his
travail, but he doesn't need to.
Like the Greene County Singers
with If Tonight Should End the
World he's told a finished story
and having done so he's delivered
a finished verdict in his words
in my own true country the
land that I have loved so well.
If that nation as it's been
composed into a republic
of which the singer is a
citizen has cast him out,
then the country is a
fiction and there's no home
for anyone or ought not to be.
Born in 1900 in Wayne County,
Kentucky Emry Arthur died
in 1966 in Indianapolis.
And he likely wouldn't
have recognized
or maybe wouldn't have deigned
to recognize the Bob Dylan
who recorded Man of
Constant sorrow in 1962,
but he would've recognized a
very old song, the very old song
When First Unto this Country
as Bob Dylan sang it in 1997.
Whether he would have
recognized or accepted the majesty
that Dylan brought to a song as
bereft as his own I have no idea.
Starting in the mid-1980's
Dylan playing by himself
with acoustic guitar and
harmonica and then later
with a band began working more
and more traditional
material into his concerts.
Old songs about knights and damsels
and sailors and buffalo scanners
and all sung without a trace of
irony or doubt just an awareness
of one's own smallness in the face
of the enormity of these figures.
And many of these songs
were collected
on the insanely rigorous
nine CD bootleg,
the Genuine never ending tour, the
Covers Collection 1988 to 2000,
which presented Dylan's
concert performances of songs
by others organized into different
discs for country and soul
and rhythm and blues and folk songs
and traditional blues and pop right
down to alternates and retakes.
More versions of songs already
appearing on all the other discs.
One last obviously redundant
piece of plastic meant
to squeeze another $30 or so
out of anyone crazy enough
to even think about
buying this thing.
But on this last disc,
alternates and retakes,
that's where the action was.
The first eight CDs make an enormous
colorless lump and in the last one
with every genre mixed
up everything is alive.
And here you find the version
of when First Unto This
Country that sticks.
When first unto this
country a stranger I came.
You can't say more, you can't
overdramatize those lines,
that's the whole story
of the country.
As surely as a TV Guide
summary of the film
of Moby Dick I once saw was
the whole story the country,
a mad captain enlists others in
his quest to kill a white whale.
Dylan takes all the
drama the song has.
An electric guitar finds the
hesitation in the melody,
in the bass notes and it plays
an actual overture and a wash
of symbol noises like a wave
lapping up the side of a ship
and a muffled thump from the bass
drum lets you feel the singer
step ashore.
And then everything slows down as
if before the story
was even begun you have
to hear the ending and you do.
The theme has been stated and
it's elegant and it's fine
and it's beautiful in the way
that you can imagine the ruins
of a Greek temple are more beautiful
than the actual complete
building could ever have been.
A second electric guitar
turns the melody into a count
and as the singer walks into
America his steps are measured
and let's listen to
that for a moment.
[ Music ]
The singer courts Nancy,
her love I didn't obtain.
For reasons that he
never gives out of rage,
out of a will to self-destruction,
out of a sense
of irredeemable estrangement
from the land and the people
who already claim to belong.
He steals a horse and he's captured
and his head is shaved, he's beaten,
he's thrown into prison
and forgotten.
I wish I'd never been a thief
he says tearing the words
out of his throat.
It's so painful, you might
imagine the man finally free
after five years, maybe 10 years,
but the pain in the man's
voice is its own prison.
And so you can imagine him moving
from town to town, bar to bar trying
to find somebody to listen to
him, to listen to his story,
to listen to his song and
he repeats the first lines
of the song over and over again.
And now with the finished
story weighing
down on every word the first
lines not just of the song,
but the first lines of the country.
Now all these people, the happy
man in Railroad Blues and the saved
in If Tonight Should Save the
World, the dead man in Man
of Constant Sorrow and
the walking dead man
in When First Unto this
Country they're all separates
from each other.
They're isolatos [phonetic] in
Melville's words from Moby Dick.
There's miles and miles
between the church
and this congregation of Ishmaels.
Good times here, but
better down the road the man
in Railroad Blues says
with every note.
Neither the Emry Arthur in Man of
Constant Sorrow or the Bob Dylan
in One First Unto this Country
would hear that man anymore
that Bela Lam would
suffer to listen to him.
What these songs, what these
performances say is playing.
If this is a republic
it's fated to scatter.
It was made to guarantee its
citizens the freedom that was theirs
by right not to limit it.
Everybody understands
this and that's the rub.
Within the boundaries
of that freedom anything can
happen and everything will.
If this is one republic
nobody can see it whole
and only the bravest
and even think about it.
Now when Sam McGee first
recorded Railroad Blues in 1934,
he was just then stepping out of a
hole that had opened up in the story
of American vernacular
music or folk music.
Hundreds of people had come forth
to tell that story in the 1920's,
when early in the decade it became
clear to northern record companies
that they were paying
audiences for the kind of music
that these people already knew.
Stuff they could hear on
a neighbor's front porch,
in the barrel house for blues, for
ballads, for folk lyric hybrids
of the two, for sounds
that carried novelty,
for sounds that were already
called old-time music.
So from all over the south from
Texas, New Orleans, the Carolinas,
Tennessee, Arkansas, Alabama,
Mississippi and America
that had hidden in folktales
and the unwritten journals
of the wanderings the first
generation of African-Americans
to be born out of slavery.
This America emerged
from the shadows
of family memory and
solitary meditation.
That America took the form of many
bodies, profit, trickster, laborer,
gambler, whore, preacher, thief,
penitent, killer, dead woman,
dead man, but the queer
thing about this country was
that this country was seen
and heard almost exclusively
by people who already lived in it.
In other words, the records that
were made were sent right back
down to where they came
from and nowhere else.
Nowhere else with some
exceptions that I'll get to.
People bought records that
reminded them of themselves.
That gave them proof
of their existence.
That raised their existence
from the level of subsistence
into a heaven of representation.
And then came the depression
and the music market collapsed.
Communities that harbored
the stories,
the nation at large still had no
time for collapsed in its wake.
Subsistence was no longer
a matter of the boredom
of one day following another, one
indistinguishable following another.
But it was a real drama and
in this squalid tragedy,
a father spending a
family's last dollar
on a phonograph record
would've been a horror story.
So record companies recalled their
scouts, they cleared their catalogs
and they closed their
recording facilities.
By 1934, when Sam McGee first
recorded Railroad Blues businesses
had begun to reorganize and not
because the economy had come back
to life, but because people looked
out at the ruins of their society
and they discovered with a
shock that they weren't dead.
When the recording of white
and black folk music much
of a traditional authorless and
commonplace, much of it composed,
little of it copyrighted, most
of it entering the public domain
as if it had been there forever.
When the recording of
this music began again,
it was on a much more rational basis
than had happened in the 1920's.
Instead of the open auditions where
oddballs and families appeared
in their strange clothes with
Sears catalog instruments
and their neighbors' or their
grandparents' songs professionals
were now favored.
And instead of music
that everybody knew
and anybody could play record
companies looked for virtuosity,
for music that only a
few people could make.
And this is where the first
Railroad Blues comes from.
Born in 1894, Sam McGee
lived until 1975
when he was killed in
a tractor accident.
And he played and recorded for years
with the great banjoist Uncle
Dave Macon of the Grand Ole Opry.
Sam McGee could play anything and
when he recorded Railroad Blues
in 1934 he sounded as if he were
in a cutting contest with himself.
As if he were not one
but two guitarists.
As if the two of them facing off
against each other like duelists.
And it's brilliant the way an
instrumental phrase goes up and down
like a yo-yo and then
slips right back up.
Now you see it, now you don't.
But there's something missing,
something only the version
that McGee recorded precisely
30 years later reveals.
The 1934 version of Railroad Blues
puts the spotlight on the performer,
the fastest gunslinger in town.
But by 1964, something
closer to what happened
when vernacular music was recorded
in the 20's was taking place.
Many of the people who made
that music were different
from the people around them.
They had more nerve, they were less
afraid of the shame of failure,
they had a deeper belief in
themselves, they took greater risks.
The risk of appearing before a
businessman in a suit who more
than likely would send you away
as if you were no better
than anybody else.
The critic, Robert Christgau
writes tellingly about Dock Boggs.
Boggs passing an audition in his
hometown of Norton, Virginia in 1927
and then traveling to New York to
record his scary and damn songs
about death, but so full of beans
at the chance that he's gotten
that he can barely contain not
his rage, not his resentment,
not a sense of exclusion, his
fear of embarrassing himself
in front of New York sharpies.
What he can't contain is his joy
that he's getting this chance.
And you can hear the like of
this all through the generic,
but also unique discs that
Harry Smith compiled in 1952
for the anthology that at first
he just called flatly American
Folk Music.
The thrill at the chance to speak
even only as a faraway premise
to speak one's peace to the whole
country, even the world at large
because the Sears catalog not only
sold instruments it sold records
by Dock Boggs, it sold records
by Sam McGee in Singapore,
in Tierra del Fuego, in
Barcelona, in Japan, in Turkey.
The thrill to speak to the country.
The thrill to imagine that you could
speak to the whole world had to be
at the root of the peculiar spell
that those records cast in 1952
for Harry Smith and all those
who heard them and the same spell
that those records cast now.
When in the 60's folk
revivalists sat before
such 1920's and 1930's heroes.
As Mississippi John hurt, Clarence
Ashley, Dock Boggs, [inaudible],
Skip James, [inaudible] House
they might've celebrated them
as representatives of
the people, of the folk,
as the folk musicians of the folk.
But as they listened
and as they watched,
as they were thrilled they
may have been responding less
to what made these
musicians part of the folk
than what set them
apart from the folk.
Their ambition, their inner
drive, their inability
to tolerate their fellow
human beings.
But the music is nothing if not a
mystery and the mystery that occurs
when a version of the nation's
story that has been excluded
from the story as it's
officially told is suddenly offered
to the public.
That's what happened in the 1920's
when southern musicians
produced their version of America
and taken together they argued
for a more contingent life,
a less absolute death, an America
where nothing was impossible
and no settlement was ever final.
And in this mystery the radical
individualism that you can hear
in 20's folk music
is always questioned
and it's questioned
by the same voice.
One of the most shadowy
features of the music,
one of the most queer is
the element of anonymity.
The way the performer seems to step
back from himself or herself back
into the community of which
the performer is a part
or if the performer is not part
of a community or sounded as if he
or she couldn't be the anonymity
of the way the performer seemed
to slip back into the oblivion
where he or she lived alone.
Like Paul Muni stepping back from a
camera and into darkness at the end
of I Was a Fugitive
from a Chain Gang.
How do you live he's
asked, I steal he says.
When the tension between the
self-presentation of the artist
and the anonymous, even seemingly
bodiless being behind the artist
comes into a verge the result
is something no less exciting
and no less unsettling
than the appearance
of the radical individual.
And this is what I
think is happening
in Sam McGee's Railroad Blues
as he recorded it in 1964.
This is no longer the
experienced side man stepping
out to claim his own career,
to record under his own name,
to show off all the
tricks in his bag.
Something bigger is happening and
in a country with more room in it
than the country present
in the 1934 version,
a country with more room
in it comes into view.
And you're hearing someone who's
seen all over the country its past,
its future and he's made
a remarkable discovery.
America has never changed
and it never will.
In a version of the republic
that's enacted in Railroad Blues
in 1964 nothing matters
but movement.
How you move, how you carry
yourself, the promises you make
in your very demeanor, the way
you walk, the way you talk,
the way your clothes fit, the way
your expression fits your face,
the way your face somehow
changes everything you see.
The specter in the music
emerges immediately, the pioneer,
the wanderer and in his
freedom he threatens those
who stay home working,
saving, hoping, frightened.
But he also leaves a blessing
without living his life you're
allowed to know how it feels.
So it's no longer Sam McGee,
but a kind of abstraction
who offers Railroad Blues in
1964 or in 2002, 27 years later
on a Smithsonian folkways collection
called Classic Mountain Songs,
which is where I first
heard Railroad Blues.
When McGee recorded in 1934
that signpost that appears
in the beginning of the song was
crucial, the kickoff to the record.
Went to the depot looked up on
the board, it said good times here
but better down the road.
In 1934 that was a direct
and political statement.
It had to be said in
1934 in the ditch
of the depression it was the last
thing anybody could take for granted
if they could believe it all,
better times down the
road, good times here.
And the same words are said
in 1964, they're tossed off.
But as an event in the music
they've already happened,
you've already heard it,
you've already felt it.
That swoop, that astonishing
lift, that fat note breaking
into a thousand glittering fragments
as the strings shake have already
called the train before the man gets
a word out of his mouth.
Those high notes are no longer
a performer's calling card,
they have a life of their own.
Those notes are thinner
with every measure.
The way the note stretches out
all the way out you can't believe
that it's still hanging in the air.
And the way a following note seems
to just barely draw the breath
of that first note and
then continue the story.
The bass note that says not
so fast, the notes shoot
out of the air they don't
pay any attention to it.
You're sure they're gone
and then they pick up again.
That's what's uncanny, the sense
that in the truest tales
the country can tell
about itself those tales
must be incomplete just
like that note stretching
out, stretching out
and never coming to an end.
Those notes, the country
story has to hang in the air
so that anybody can find it, so that
anybody can take it out of the air.
And that finally is what took place
at the beginning of this story,
a story about a certain
historical emergence
of certain versions
of the American story.
Now there's one piece of music
that I know that sees every gothic,
pious, drunken, murdering,
thieving loving figure moving
through the old American
music for who he or she is
and embraces them all and song
is Richard Rabbit Brown's James
Alley Blues.
It was recorded one day in 1927,
the only day that Richard
Brown ever recorded.
And for me that he recorded only
once is like Melville not bothering
to keep Hawthorne's
letter about Moby Dick,
the letter of which Melville
could say I spent a sense
of unspeakable security is
in me because Hawthorne had
in Melville's unbearably direct
words understood the book.
We'll never know what
Hawthorne said.
The smallest, most modest notes
creep out of Brown's guitar
like tadpoles swimming in search
of their melody, their rhythm
and a bass note gongs
shaking the air.
Nothing is pressed, an
old ragged voice sour,
laughing at its own sourness begins
to tell a story about a marriage.
And he snaps at his strings to drive
a point home, but every time he does
that a weird gonging is there
pulling the real story away
from the story that being told.
Pulling the story away
putting it in the air.
This is James Alley Blues.
[ Music ]
When Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller
produce the Drifters' There Goes My
Baby in 1959, the first time
anybody ever layered the equivalent
of a complete symphony orchestra
over a piece of rock 'n roll.
The effect they said was
like a radio dial caught
between two different stations.
You can imagine that Rabbit Brown's
James Alley Blues could've had a
similar effect on those few who
heard it except it would've been
as if the performer existed between
different eras, different lives,
different ways of understanding
the world
and like There Goes My Baby made
you understand that the divisions
between those things
are meaningless.
That was the meaning
of that mystical gonging
behind the prosaic facts
that the singer was relating.
That was the meaning of the small
searching notes that shot out ahead
of everything blindly
seeking a destination
that could never be named.
It was those same tiny seeking
notes that Sam McGee would seek
out himself in 1964 -- 1934,
but not truly recapture
until three decades after that.
He would from the start
cast off the fatalism
that Rabbit Brown's notes
carried, the thick fat notes
that McGee would use to
symbolize escape and liberation.
That swoop, that up and down,
that if you don't believe I'm
leaving you can count the days
I'm gone.
Notes that in James
Alley Blues are filled
up by Brown's echoing
flapping gongings not warnings
of what might happen, but
portends of what will happen.
In McGee's hands those notes
will no longer speak of death.
And If Tonight Should End the
World, Man of Constant Sorrow
and When First Unto this
Country the singers value nothing
so much as death.
And James Alley Blues
has room for them too.
The small notes in James Alley
Blues move like mice scurrying
from one room to another
and never stopping
and the house only gets
bigger as they move.
The man singing James Alley Blues
and you have to imagine him small
and wiry and weary moving carefully,
smiling, looking over his shoulder.
The man singing James Alley
Blues welcomes them all
and they enter his house because
they sense that he knows more
about death than they do.
But that's not all
Rabbit Brown knows.
Railroad Blues is frank about the
fact that it's made for pleasure.
It's an argument that freedom
is more pleasurable than death.
If Tonight Should End the
World, Man of Constant Sorrow
and When First Unto this
Country are arguments
that death is more
meaningful than pleasure.
Arguments that hide their power and
passion or their perfection of form,
elements of performance
that give pleasure
because their beauty makes it seem
as if their arguments are true.
But Rabbit Brown knows
something about pleasure
that it seems nobody else does.
He knows how to give pleasure
as if it were the gift
of a guardian angel.
And what he leaves behind
the sense of a place so big
that there's room for anyone.
A place that's too big for anyone
to escape is exactly a story
that can only start in the
middle with whoever telling it
like Sam McGee in the
middle of Railroad Blues,
Rabbit Brown in the
middle of James Alley Blue,
with whoever telling
the story unsure
if he should go forward
or if he should go back.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]
Thank you.
I have to ask somebody
what time it is.
[ Inaudible Comment ]
Anybody has any questions,
any arguments,
disputes I'd be happy
to try and respond.
>> Hi, I was interested
in interested
in hearing the Dylan version
of When First Unto this Country
which I've never heard
partly because what I hear
in that jangling electric guitar at
the beginning of it is an imitation
of the autoharp of the New Lost City
Ramblers who recorded that song.
And we have a field
recording here at the library,
which I believe was the source of
the New Lost City Ramblers version
and I'm just wondering if those
sort of specific histories
of individual songs and
performances touch on the sort
of more general historical
context of these songs
that you're talking about.
>> Greil Marcus: Yeah, I
mean threads of scholarship,
the kind of knowledge that
you're talking about move all
through this story, but secretly.
Bob Dylan's knowledge of the
kind of music that I was talking
about tonight is enormous.
And I mean knowledge of who recorded
when and in what city and who was
that person recording with
and who was the engineer
that kind of knowledge.
And so what you've just
said there's no way
that he didn't know the New
Lost City Ramblers' version
and it's very, very likely
that he knows the other
version you're talking about too
and that all that goes in there.
And it's a way of keeping the
story going and passing the baton
from one person to another,
but also changing it.
Because there is a different --
because yes the autoharp melody
and even the orchestration is
there in that guitar opening and
yet there's a different kind of
drama, there's more glamour to it,
there's more cinematic suspense,
you know, it's in color.
At least that's how I hear it.
But you're completely right that
that's all present and, you know,
it's present all through.
None of these people who I was
talking about tonight were ignorant
of what anybody else was
doing, they were all listening,
they're all in competition, they're
all stealing from each other.
>> You kind of the at the end you
finished with the Rabbit Brown
or all the fellows the story
that had to start in the middle
and the speaker didn't know, the
singer didn't know if they should be
or head back or heading forward.
So I wonder if you think Rabbit
Brown knew just how powerful he was
when he was recording that song
and the meaning that he was getting
out of it or is that something
that comes later once the
audience gets to hear it.
>> Greil Marcus: Well look here's
a guy he's a New Orleans street
singer, he really supported
himself by standing
around Lake Pontchartrain and
offering to serenade couples
when they would take a boat
out on Lake Pontchartrain.
And can you imagine, you
know, you're about to propose
to someone you think it would
be really romantic to go
out on the lake and wow,
we'll get this guy to sing
and he'll sing something really
lovely and create the mood
and he sings James Alley Blues.
So here's this person and he
gets once chance to record
and nobody knows exactly when he
was born, he died I think in 1935.
And he gets one chance to record
and he can probably figure he's
never going to get another chance,
you know, maybe somebody told
the record scout you ought
to hear this guy or maybe somebody
was hanging around the lake
and heard him gives him a
chance to record for Victor,
you know, for a major company.
And this is his chance,
this is his one chance.
He records five songs that day.
And this is his song, this is
the one he's really worked on,
this is the one he's crafted
out of pieces of other old songs
that he's put together
in his own way.
That he's worked out an arrangement
for and he knows this is a chance
to get it right, he's never
going to get another chance.
I think it's the greatest
record ever made and I don't say
that as any kind of joke.
From the time I first heard
it I thought this must be.
That was let's see
that was 40 years ago
and I haven't heard anything
better yet, so maybe so.
[ Inaudible Comment ]
Yeah, yeah.
And so one of other recording he
made of the five was a version
of the Titanic and it's a version
of the Titanic unlike
any I've ever heard.
The words are completely
conventional,
the way he dramatizes them is not.
You know, he says you know
and this was happening
and oh my God can you believe
this and have you heard.
But this is a version of the Titanic
takes into itself the knowledge
that everybody in the
African-American community knew.
That the Titanic advertised
itself not only is unsinkable,
which is what's come down
to us, but as all white.
Not only were there no black
people allowed as passengers,
not only were there no black people
employed as stewards or waiters
in the dining rooms they weren't
even going to have black people
in the boiler room
beneath the hold, nowhere.
But there was one black person who
stowed away on that ship according
to many versions of the song and I
won't go into what happens with him.
The way Rabbit Brown sings the
song the Titanic when he gets
into nearer my God, then the
way he stretches out the line.
He sings these lines with so
much glee, with so much delight
at all these people going
down, it's really something.
But it's not like this, it's
not like this perfect record
with these sounds unlike
anybody had ever made.
Well I could go on as you can tell.
>> What happened to
the black stowaway?
>> Greil Marcus: Excuse me?
>> What happened to the black
stowaway of the Titanic?
>> Greil Marcus: Well he was
the guy who got into a lifeboat
and he was sitting in that
lifeboat and he was looking
up at all the women on
the ship who began pulling
up their dresses saying take me,
take me I'll give you anything
and he just turned his
back and went away.
He was known as Shine in song.
Yeah.
>> I'm interested in this
question or this statement you made
that the lobby singers were
invested with this kind
of radical individualism.
And if I heard you right, you said
if this is this a republic
that's made to scatter.
And that is so different than
the folk music revival that was
so invested in this sort of
social collective and this idea
of a republic, a different
kind of republic
that was based on those
kind of ideals.
So I wonder if you could speak
a little bit about the tensions
that were there between these
people that were coming to perform
at these folk festivals in Newport
and whatnot they were considered the
folk by the folk movement revival,
but perhaps were coming with as you
say different ambitions and whatnot.
>> Greil Marcus: Well, I mean
it's a question of ideology
and it's a question of
ideas that people bring
to an event before they've
experienced the event.
An idea of somebody's identity
that you already form before
you've ever met that person.
And, you know, Mike Bloomfield
described this maybe better
than anybody.
He said, man's lips had played
electric guitar for years in Texas,
but when the people from the
Newport folk festival brought him
up they made him leave his
electric guitar behind.
He said they treated him
as if he was the tar baby,
meaning just a figure from
black folklore not a real person
who could make his own decisions
about how we wanted to play
and how he wanted to sound.
He had to be brought forth as
a representative of the folk
and the folk didn't
play no electric guitar.
That's the best way I
can answer it briefly.
>> So were there any
tensions there [inaudible]?
>> Greil Marcus: Yeah, I mean
there was tremendous tension.
I mean you take somebody
like Clarence Ashley,
somebody like Skip James who were
ordinary disagreeable proud people
and they were, you know, put in
yo9u know kind of musical forums
where the whole point would
be to illustrate a genre.
And these people would say I'm not a
genre, you know, this is what I have
to say, this is my way of saying it.
And, you know, there would
be a lot of anger there
and sometimes it would come
out and sometimes it wouldn't.
And often it would come out
though in the performances
that you saw that one could see.
Someone's going to have to
tell me when I have to leave.
>> [Inaudible] one more question.
>> Greil Marcus: Okay.
>> [Inaudible] invite
everybody to the book signing.
>> Greil Marcus: If
there is one more?
I didn't mean to be intimidating.
>> Anne McLean: Well thank
you very much all for coming.
Thank you.
>> Greil Marcus: Thank you.
>> Anne McLean: Greil
Marcus very, very much.
>> Greil Marcus: Thank
you for coming.
[ Applause ]
>> This has been a
presentation of the Library
of Congress, visit us at LOC.gov.