78 Blues: Folksongs and Phonographs in the American South

Chapter One: Learning to Listen

11 When I was eight or nine, my mother bought records at a neighborhood five-and-dime chain store. Her preference was country and western, but she listened to other styles as well. My own favorites were, predictably, the Beatles. I still remember the day she went after a record she had just heard on the radio, something called “Mr. Tambourine Man” by a folksinger named Bob Dylan. My mother came back home disappointed . The Woolworth’s did not have Dylan’s recording on a 45, so she had settled for a cover by the Byrds, a group of electrified former folkies who, by rearranging Dylan’s song with a Beatles bounce, pioneered what came to be called folk rock. Bob Dylan, it turned out, was a young man from Hibbing, Minnesota, named Robert Allen Zimmerman who allegedly had rechristened himself for a dead Welsh poet (none other than Dylan Thomas). This new Dylan proved to be quite a wordsmith as well. From his early fame in the urban folksong revival, he emerged as the single most important songwriter in rock—arguably the greatest American songwriter of all time—the only contemporary of the Beatles to influence them more than they influenced him. Not long after, I heard the rumor, current among my peers, that“Mr. Tambourine Man” was “about drugs,” an interpretation then invariably assigned to any song with cryptic lyrics. I still really do not know what “Mr. Tambourine Man” is about, though I love it to this day, whether by Dylan or the Byrds.1 It was around this time, on one of my own trips to the record counter at Woolworth’s, that I first heard the equally cryptic “Sunshine Superman” Learning to Listen Chapter One 12 | Learning to Listen (another record “about drugs”!) by a British folksinger called Donovan. I was later told that Donovan, who had a last name after all (Leitch), was the “Scottish Dylan.”2 About this time too I had my first face-to-face encounter with a self-styled folksinger, sitting around a campfire in a crowd of strangers while a young man strummed a guitar and sang songs most of us identified with nationally known records—the Kingston Trio’s “Tom Dooley” (Capitol 4049, 1958), “Abilene” by George Hamilton IV (RCA Victor 47-0948, 1963). He also sang a piece I had not heard before, though the song’s unusually repetitive style (what I much later learned was termed incremental repetition) made it easy for me, like thousands before, instantly to commit it to memory. The song began, Hangman, hangman, Slack your rope awhile. I think I see my father coming, He’s traveled many a mile. Father, did you bring me any silver? Father, did you bring me any gold? Father did you come to see me hung, High upon the gallows pole? The father replied that the last—to see the speaker hang—was indeed the case, and the narrative proceeded in like fashion through a succession of relatives (mother, sister, brother), each of whom had come only to witness the prisoner ’s demise. Finally, the condemned’s sweetheart arrived, presumably with the ransom, but the hangman had apparently grown impatient, and the performance ended abruptly with a strangling sound. Having heard the song once, I sang it to myself for years, when I was pleasantly shocked to hear it again—this time sitting around a stereo in a suburban Houston living room—performed by the British rock group Led Zeppelin on their third album.3 Like a lot of my peers, I grew up a little confused about what makes a folksong. But records? Those I knew. But it turns out this song—and many more I knew from similar sources— doesstemfromsomethingmoreproperlycalledfolksong,havingbeenperformed at other, more intimate hearths and on other, less cosmopolitan recordings. For this is one of the venerated Child ballads—so called for Harvard professor Francis James Child—the very cornerstones of American folksong research. My Learning to Listen | 13 song, the ballad folklorists know as “The Maid Freed from the Gallows” (Child 95),is the British derivative of a story current throughout Western Europe,most likely introduced into English tradition by Gypsies in the second half of the seventeenth century.4 These British offshoots were subsequently transplanted to North America, where in the twentieth century folklorists documented an especially hale branch. North Carolina alone yielded two score versions. One of...