It’s the irreducible individualism of the details—details that rarely if ever moved into later versions of the already traditional song, perhaps because they communicate as so specific to a specific person that to appropriate them would be a theft no notion of the folk process could excuse—that seals its bottomless well: the unusual reference to dreaming, the use of clay, not mere ground. The singer goes on, after this verse, not in death but relating more of his travails, but he doesn’t need to.
Like the Greene County Singers, he has told a finished story: having done so, he has delivered a finished verdict on, in his words, “the land that I have loved so well.” If that nation, as it has composed itself into a republic, of which the singer is a citizen, has cast him out, then the country is a fiction, and there is no home for anyone—or ought not to be.
Born in 1900 in Wayne County, Kentucky, Emry Arthur died in 1966 in Indianapolis. He likely would not have recognized—or, maybe, would not have deigned to recognize—the Bob Dylan who recorded “Man of Constant Sorrow” in the early sixties, but he would have recognized the very old song “When First Unto This Country,” as Dylan sang it in 1997. Whether he would have recognized, or accepted, the majesty Dylan brought to a song as bereft as his own I have no idea.
Starting in the mid-1980s, Dylan, playing by himself, with acoustic guitar and harmonica, then later with a band, began working more and more traditional material into his concerts, old songs about knights and damsels, sailors and buffalo skinners, all sung without a trace of irony or doubt, just an awareness of one’s own smallness in the face of their enormity. Many were collected on the insanely rigorous nine-CD bootleg
The Genuine Never Ending Tour: Covers Collection 1988-2000,
which presented Dylan’s concert performances of songs by others organized into different discs for country, soul, R&B, folk songs, traditional blues, pop, and on, and on, right down to “Alternates and Retakes,” more versions of songs already appearing on the other discs—one last, obviously redundant piece of plastic, meant to squeeze another thirty dollars out of whoever was foolish enough to even think about buying the set. And this is where the action was. The first eight CDs make an enormous, colorless lump; in the last one, every genre mixed up, everything is alive. And here you find the version of “When First Unto This Country” that cuts.
“When first unto this country / A stranger I came.” You cannot say more; you cannot overdramatize. That is the whole story of the country, as surely as a
TV Guide
summary for the move version of
Moby-Dick
I once saw was the whole story: “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 plays an actual overture. A wash of cymbal noise is like a wave lapping at the side of a ship; a muffled thump from the bass drum lets you feel the singer step ashore. And then everything slows down, as if, before the story has even begun, you must hear the ending—and you do. The theme has been stated, and it is elegant and fine, but beautiful in the way that you can imagine that the ruins of a Greek temple are more beautiful than the untouched temple 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.
He courts Nancy: “Her love I didn’t obtain.” For reasons he never gives—out of rage, a will to self-destruction, a sense of irredeemable
estrangement from the land and the people who already claim to belong—he steals a horse. He is captured, his head shaved, he is beaten, thrown into prison, and forgotten. “I wished I’d never been a thief,” he says, tearing the words out, like Stevie Wonder at the end of “Living for the City” in 1973—not like Dylan himself in his sardonic rewrite of the song he’d learned years before he turned it into “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” in 1965. You can imagine the man finally free, moving from town to town, bar to bar, trying to find someone to listen to him. He repeats the first lines of the song, now with the finished story weighing down on every word: the first lines of the country.
All of these people—the happy man in “Railroad Blues,” the saved in “If Tonight Should End the World,” the dead man in “Man of Constant Sorrow,” the walking dead man in “When First Unto This Country”—are separate from each other, isolatoes, in Melville’s word from
Moby-Dick,
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” nor the Bob Dylan in “When First Unto This Country” would hear that man any more than Bela Lam would suffer to listen to him. What these songs, these performances say, is plain: if this is a republic, it is fated to scatter. It was made to guarantee its citizens the freedom that was theirs by right, not to limit it; so everyone understands, and that’s the rub. Within the boundaries of that freedom, anything can happen, and everything will. If this is one republic, no one can see it whole; only the bravest can 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 vernacular American music. Hundreds of people had come forth to begin to tell that story in the 1920s, when early in the decade it became clear to northern record companies that there were paying audiences for the kind of music they already knew,
the stuff they could hear on a neighbor’s front porch or in the local barrelhouse, for blues, for ballads, for the folk-lyric hybrids of the two, for sounds that carried novelty, for sounds that were already called “old-time music.”
From all over the South, from Texas, New Orleans, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Kentucky, the Virginias, from Arkansas and Alabama and Mississippi, an America that had hidden in folktales and the unwritten journals of the wanderings of the first generation of African-Americans to be born out of slavery emerged from the shadows of family memory and solitary meditation. That America took the form of many bodies—prophet, trickster, laborer, gambler, whore, preacher, thief, penitent, killer, dead woman, dead man—but the queer thing was that this country was seen and heard almost exclusively by those who already lived in it. People bought records that reminded them of themselves, that gave them proof of their existence, that raised their existence from the dirt level of subsistence into a heaven of representation.
Then came the Depression, and the music market collapsed; communities that had harbored the stories the nation at large still had no time for collapsed in its wake. Subsistence was no longer the boredom of one indistinguishable day following another, but a real drama, and in this squalid tragedy a father spending the family’s only dollar on a phonograph record would have been a horror story. Record companies recalled their scouts, cleared their catalogues, closed their recording facilities.
By 1934 businesses had begun to reorganize, not because the economy had come back to life, but because people looked out at the ruins of their society and realized with a shock that they were not dead. When the recording of black and white folk music—much of it 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, as if a blues as distinctive as Robert Johnson’s “Stones in My Passway” had been passed from hand to hand long before he was born—began again, it was on a much more rational basis than had obtained in the 1920s. Instead
of the open auditions where local oddballs and families appeared in their strange clothes with Sears catalogue instruments and their neighbors’ or grandparents’ songs, professionals were favored; instead of music everybody knew and almost anybody could play, record companies looked for virtuosity, for the music only a few could make.
That is where the first “Railroad Blues” came from. Born in 1894, Sam McGee lived until 1975, when he was killed in a tractor accident. He played and recorded for years with Uncle Dave Macon. He could play anything, and when he recorded “Railroad Blues” in 1934 he sounded as if he were in a cutting contest with himself. It’s brilliant, the way an instrumental phrase goes down like a yo-yo and then slips right back up, now you see it now you don’t. But there is something missing, something only the version McGee made precisely thirty years later reveals.
The 1934 “Railroad Blues” puts the spotlight on the performer himself, the guy who can kick it like nobody else, the fastest gun-slinger in town. But in 1964, something closer to what happened when vernacular music was recorded in the 1920s was taking place. Many of the people who made that music were different from those around them: they had more nerve, were less afraid of the shame of failure, had a deeper belief in themselves, took greater risks—the risk of appearing before a businessman in a suit who more than likely would send you away as no better than anybody else. Robert Christgau writes tellingly of Dock Boggs, Boggs passing an audition in his hometown of Norton, Virginia, in 1927, then traveling to New York to record his scary, damned tunes about death, but “so full of beans” at the chance he’s gotten he can barely contain not his rage, his resentment, his sense of exclusion, his fear of embarrassing himself in front of New York sharpies—not that, but “so full of beans” he can barely contain his joy.
You can hear the like of this all through the generic but also unique discs Harry Smith compiled for the anthology he at first flatly called
American Folk Music.
That thrill at the chance to speak, even only as a faraway premise, to speak one’s piece to the
country, even the world at large (the Sears catalogue not only sold banjos to people like Dock Boggs or Uncle Dave Macon, it made their 78s available in Japan, Turkey, and Tierra del Fuego), had to be at the root of the peculiar spell so many of the folk recordings cast on the present when Smith rereleased them in 1952, and the spell they cast today. When, in the 1960s, folk revivalists sat before such 1920s and ’30s heroes as Mississippi John Hurt, Clarence Ashley, Boggs, Buell Kazee, Skip James, or Son House, they might have celebrated them as representatives of a people, of the People, as the folk musicians of the Folk—but as they listened, as they watched, as they were thrilled, they may have been responding less to what made these musicians part of a folk than to what set them apart from their folk: their ambition, their inner drive, their inability to tolerate their fellow human beings.
But the music was nothing if not a mystery, the mystery that occurs when a version of a nation’s story has been excluded from the story as it is officially told is suddenly offered to the public. That is what happened in the 1920s, when southern musicians produced their version of America: 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. In this mystery, the radical individualism one can hear in ’20s folk music is always questioned, and by the same voice.
One of the most shadowy features of the music, one of the most queer, is an element of anonymity, the way the performer seems to step back from himself or herself, back into the community of which the performer was a part—or, if the performer was not part of a community, or sounded as if he or she could not 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 the camera and into darkness at the end of
I Was a Fugitive from a Chain Gang.
“How do you live?” the fugitive is 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 to a verge, the result is something no less exciting, 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 sideman 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 a country with more room in it than the country present in the 1934 version comes into view. You are hearing someone who has seen all around the country, its past and its future, and he has made a remarkable discovery: America has never changed and it never will.
In the version of the republic that is 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 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. In his freedom, he threatens those who stay home, working, saving, hoping, frightened—but he also leaves a blessing. Without living his life, you are allowed to know how it feels.
So it is no longer Sam McGee but a kind of abstraction who offers “Railroad Blues” in 1964—or in 2002, twenty-seven years after his death, on a Smithsonian Folkways collection called
Classic Mountain Songs,
which is where I first heard “Railroad Blues.”
When McGee recorded in 1934, that signpost was crucial, the kickoff to the record. “Went the depot, looked up on the board / Went to the depot, looked up on the board / It read, ‘Good times here, but better down the road.’” In 1934 that was a direct and specific political statement. It had to be said; in 1934, in the ditch of the Depression, it was the last thing anyone could take for granted, if they could believe it at all. The same words are said in 1964, tossed off, but as an event in the music, they have already happened.
That swoop, that astonishing lift, that fat note breaking into a thousand glittering fragments as the strings shake, has already
called the train before a word gets out of the performer’s mouth. The high notes are no longer a virtuoso’s calling card—they have a life of their own. Thinner with every measure, so they can reach farther, their pace quickening, even as a bass note says “not so fast,” the notes shoot out into the air and hang there fading, until you’re sure they’re gone—but the way the next movement picks up off the note you’re still trying to hold in your memory tells you that the note was never gone at all.