Bob Dylan Goes Twang Part Two

The first Dylan Goes Twang installment established the premise: Dylan's country and folk influences are not limited to the Nashville Skyline period. They run through the catalog from the beginning and continue through the acoustic work of the 1990s and beyond.

Part two follows the thread backward — to the Woody Guthrie influence, to the folk revival roots, to the early recordings that show where the synthesis began.

Part three continues the Nashville Skyline period in depth: Dylan Goes Twang Part Three. Part four is at Dylan Goes Twang Part Four.

The Woody Guthrie foundation

Dylan arrived in New York in January 1961 to visit Woody Guthrie in the hospital. He had spent the previous months in Minnesota and the Midwest absorbing Guthrie's records and becoming, by his own account, obsessed with what Guthrie represented: the folk singer as American truth-teller, the song as a vehicle for what the official culture wouldn't say.

The early Dylan recordings document someone who had learned from Guthrie's example and was already moving past it. The voice on Bob Dylan (1962) is partly Guthrie imitation and partly something else entirely — the Dylan voice that would develop into one of the most recognizable in American music.

The country foundation in this early period is Guthrie's country: the dust bowl Oklahoma country, the working-man's country, the country of the American plains rather than the Nashville country of commercial production.

The folk revival and the country connection

The folk revival of the late 1950s and early 1960s — the scene that Dylan entered at the Gaslight and the other Greenwich Village clubs — was already in conversation with country music. The old-time music tradition, the Appalachian ballad tradition, the blues-country synthesis — all of these were being researched, performed, and contested by the people Dylan was learning from.

Pete Seeger, Leadbelly, Dave Van Ronk — these were the teachers, and each of them carried a different dimension of the American roots tradition.

The pre-electric country material

The songs Dylan was performing and recording in his acoustic folk period contain country structures throughout:

• "Girl from the North Country" — the folk ballad melody that is also the country ballad melody
• "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" — the picking pattern that runs through folk and country simultaneously
• "It Ain't Me Babe" — the chord structure that could be country, could be folk, is both
• "Tomorrow Is a Long Time" — the slow country ballad, one of Dylan's best songs

What Part Two argues

The argument is that Nashville Skyline, when it arrived, surprised people because they hadn't been paying attention to what was already there. The country in Dylan's music was always there. Nashville Skyline just made it explicit.

Part three takes that explicit period in depth. Part two builds the case for what preceded it.

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