Dylan Bob - On Highway 61 : music, race, and the evolution of cultural freedom

ON HIGHWAY 61

Copyright 2014 Dennis McNally

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McNally, Dennis.

On Highway 61 / Dennis McNally.

pages cm

1. African Americans--Music--History and criticism. 2. Popular music--United States--History and criticism. I. Title.

ML3479.M36 2014

781.640973--dc23

2014014417

ISBN 978-1-61902-412-0

Cover design by Charles Brock, Faceout Studios

Interior design by Megan Jones Design

COUNTERPOINT

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Henry David Thoreau, who started it all

Contents

T HIS IS AN idiosyncratic history of the American alternate voice, the countervoice to the materialist mainstream of American thought, which sees instead the essence of the American idea as centering on the pursuit of freedom.

The alternate view has many strands, especially in the socioeconomic realm of labor politics and history, but the thread I felt was most important to trace is specifically connected with cultural and spiritual freedom. This quest for cultural freedom has often been associated with Bohemianism, but thats merely a label, and a frequently distracting one at that.

This work follows the concept of freedom as it moves through a sequence of connections beginning with Henry David Thoreau, who developed the grammar of freedom in Walden and embedded it in the concept of the pastoral while simultaneously creating a sociopolitical philosophy that fundamentally responded to the fact of slavery. Mark Twain brought the pastoral to a triumphant fictional existence in Huckleberry Finn and in so doing linked it forever to the struggles of African Americans. His own life documents the evolving relationship of white America to the emerging African American culture, first through minstrelsy and then through the spirituals of the Fisk Jubilee Singers.

That culture, largely in its musical manifestations, carried forward the message of freedom. As minstrelsy and spirituals were succeeded by the new musical forms of the turn of the century, increasing numbers of white people began to join Twain and respond to African American life by seeing the intellectual shackles in their own lives and learning the lessons that those at the bottom of the social pyramid had to offer. The effect of black music on white people did not always lead to overt changes, but to a widening of vision, a softening of the heart, and an increase in tolerance. Eventually, that growth would lead to an understanding that included action.

Ragtime would have an almost immediate influence on white lives through the medium of dance. Jazz would bring considerable white participation in the musics performance. Blues would influence white lives at first largely through its component presence in jazz, and then reach white youth in the 50s and after. Utimately, Bob Dylan would become the greatest artist of that tradition and the apotheosis of the white-black progression, deeply connected to the ongoing civil rights movement of his time.

Put in simplest terms, each of these artists preached a moral critique of American society and culture in light of the concept of freedom, and each was heavily influenced by the African American experience.

It is no accident that a significant part of this story takes place along the Mississippi River and the parallel Highway 61. This is a very specific place, even if ordinarily it is not so understood.

The result of this evolution was an era that challenged inherited assumptions about American culture on any number of levels, including skepticism about acquisitiveness and materialism, a rejection of institutional Christianity, opposition to racism, suspicions of power, a resistance to limits on sensual behavior, and a tendency to side with the individual against the corporation and/or nation/state. These challenges in the 1960s were the manifestation of a long, rich progression.

It is a progression that I began to study many years ago, although I began near the end, with a study of Jack Kerouac and the Beats (Desolate Angel) and then of the quintessential avatars of their decade, the Grateful Dead (A Long Strange Trip). Then I began to muse on a question: What caused the cultural shifts of the 60s? I accepted the consensus that the civil rights movement, the folk music renaissance, sexual freedom, and the psychedelic world had been the immediate stimuli, but I wanted to dig into older and deeper roots for that most intriguing era. I ended up finding a fundamental origin in the ongoing relationship between white, often young Americans and African American culture, primarily music.

A S YOU LAND at Bostons Logan Airport, its possiblewith a window seat, a forgiving angle, and some imaginationto visualize nothing but virgin forest rolling away west from the Atlantic, to picture it as it was when the first settlers arrived in 1620. It really was a new world to themthe New World, Nova Terra. Due in considerable part to the massive die-off of Native Americans thanks to European diseases like smallpox, the land seemed endlessly open and the essence of freedom, the pastoral root of what came to be called the American Dream. The pastoral ideal, wrote Leo Marx, has been used to define the meaning of America ever since the age of discovery.

But the Puritans saw the land not as an Edenic vision of gardens but as a howling wilderness that needed taming. The notion that nature was something made for man to dominate was the first of four major elements of the American creed that the nations first great social critic, Henry David Thoreau, would challenge. (The other three shibboleths were that America was the noble exception to all nations in its moral perfection, that Christianity was the only possible American religion, and that the Protestant work ethic and its implied worship of materialism were desirable and essential elements of any life.)

The worldview the Puritans brought to the new land was dramatically different from the Native American nature worship that preceded their arrival. The Hebraic shift to monotheism placed God outside and superior to nature. Their further belief that mankind was made in Gods image divided people from all the other animals, from life itself, and marked a starting point for history and the origins of modern consciousness. By the time of Christianity, which grafted Greek rationality and the notion of the soul onto the Yahwist tradition, the process was complete. Civilization was understood to be a purely human-oriented construct in a dualistic world where God was sacred and humans profane. Nature was to be used.

Initially, the Puritans opposed luxury, materialism, and individualism with a religion the scholar David Shi suggested most closely resembled late medieval Catholicism, which located ones ethical life above commerce. This would not last. The equation at the root of the Protestant ethic, wherein hard work and frugality lead to prosperity, would soon flower into Cotton Mathers notion that Gods favor could be shown in riches. By the eighteenth century, New England was ruled by a merchant aristocracy that was far more influenced by the individualism of John Locke than by Christianity.