Greenwich Village In The '60s

It is Friday afternoon, and my boot heels don’t want to go a wanderin’ today, so I thought I’d write a few words about Bob Dylan inspired by a 2CD compilation I’m listening to at this very moment. It is called Greenwich Village In The '60s. It was seeing the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown recently that reminded me to give it another listen. As you may know I have long been interested in the music of this place and time and have written pieces previously about many of the musicians who lived and played in Greenwich Village during this era. People like Dave Van Ronk, Eric Anderson, Fred Neil, Tim Hardin, Tim Buckley, Phil Ochs, Karen Dalton, and Judy Collins who all contribute to this album.                                                    However, It was a song on the album by somebody I hadn’t heard of previously that got me thinking, and wondering about Bob Dylan and what motivated him during this time. The song is called Go ‘Way From My Window by John Jacob Niles. The lyrics Go 'way from my window, Go 'way from my door, Go 'way, way way from my bedside, And bother me no more, are so similar to Dylan’s It Ain’t Me Babe, Go away from my window, Leave at your own chosen speed, I'm not the one you want, babe, I'm not the one you need'. There can be no doubt where Bob got the idea for his song from.

The Clancy Brothers from Ireland also have two songs on the album. They had emigrated to New York and Bob saw them perform frequently in such places as the Gaslight Poetry Café, Gerdes Folk City, and the Café Wha. When Bob heard their song The Patriot Game which was written by Dominic Behan, he soon appropriated the traditional melody and altered Dominic’s words to create With God On Our Side and claimed it as a Bob Dylan original. Dominic criticised Bob publicly for claiming the song and called into question the provenance of Dylan's entire body of work.

I have read that during a tour of the UK by Bob, Dominic rang him at his hotel room with an angry tirade. When Bob Dylan suggested that "My lawyers can speak with your lawyers", Dominic replied, "I've got two lawyers, and they're on the end of my wrists” I can believe that story because it reminded me of a scene in the documentary Don’t Look Back where during an after show party in a hotel room Bob asked if there were any poets in Britain like Allen Ginsberg, and somebody suggested Dominic Behan, Bob replied, “I don’t wanna hear any Dominic Behan”, which suggests that there might have been a bit of bad feeling between them. I expect it was also the Clancy’s version of The Parting Glass that Bob heard in Greenwich Village that he soon changed to Restless Farewell. I’m not sure whose version of the traditional song Lord Randall Bob heard first, but it provided him with A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall in 1962, introducing each verse with variants of the first lines to each verse of Lord Randall. People often think Bob wrote it as a reaction to the Cuban Missile Crisis, but in fact he first publicly performed the song a month before the crisis began.

Bob realised that one of the great things about traditional songs was the fact that they didn’t have any copyright on them, which meant you could help yourself to the melody, then change the words and voila! a brand-new song by Bob Dylan. While the likes of Joan Baez and Pete Seeger were quite content to keep the traditional ballads unchanged in their repertoires, Bob saw an opportunity to become the most famous songwriter of the 1960s. As Bob is quoted as saying, ‘Anyone who wants to be a songwriter should listen to as much folk music as they can, study the form and structure of stuff that has been around for 100 years. Opportunities may come along for you to convert something—something that exists into something that didn’t yet.” He carried on with this philosophy on his first visit to England where he heard many trad songs around the folk clubs. Hearing Martin Carthy perform Scarborough Fair provided him with Girl From The North Country and Boots Of Spanish Leather. Paul Simon also cashed in with that same song a short time later.

There are many other examples of Bob Dylan taking traditional songs he heard from other singers and making them his own, and other people have sometimes criticised him for this, but it was the words that Dylan wrote that marked him out as one of the greatest poets since Keats or Shelley. Once Bob had exhausted the rich mine of traditional folk music he found in Greenwich Village he was ready to enter his greatest era and create masterpieces such as Mr Tambourine Man, Visions Of Johanna, Desolation Row, and dozens of other inspirational songs that nobody could accuse him of stealing. I believe in centuries to come it will be as a poet that Dylan is remembered. This is why he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, and nobody has deserved it more.