Bob Dylan's "Days of '49": What is a Folk Song?

The singer on his debt to the tradition: "If you'd sung 'John Henry was a steel-drivin' man' as many times as I did, you'd have written 'Blowin' in the Wind, too."

This little essay is—well, let’s call it a case study. Or, alternatively, “Down the Rabbit Hole with Bob.”

Everybody knows that in 1965 and ‘66, to the horror of the folk music world, Bob Dylan forcefully injected rock into folk, most dramatically with his plugged-in set at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, but more enduringly with three albums that he churned out at a feverish pace: Bringing it All Back Home (released in March 1965), Highway 61 Revisited (August 1965), and the double album (one of rock’s first) Blonde on Blonde (June 1966).

So it’s ironic that few, if any, figures in contemporary pop know more American, British and Irish folk songs than Dylan does. The singer has always been disarmingly quick to acknowledge the formative influence of ages-old folk songs on his music, once saying something along the lines of “If you’d sung ‘John Henry was a steel-driving man’ as often as I did, you’d have written ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, too.” (Years ago, in the file-sharing days, I came across a two-hour solo Dylan concert of nothing but centuries-old Anglo-American ballads. Introducing one of the greatest of them, “The Golden Vanity,” he told his audience, "This one’s got everything. All that good stuff.”)

Dylan ended his epochal Sixties (still only 29, he had nine albums under his belt and had bulldozed and rebuilt pop music) in typically contrarian manner. June 1970 saw the release of a more than intermittently awful Dylan project. His second double album, Self-Portrait is a grab-bag of outtakes from earlier projects; wan covers of contemporaries’ material (Gordon Lightfoot’s “Early Morning Rain” and Paul Simon’s “The Boxer,” in both of which Dylan harmonized with himself, off-key); four songs from his eagerly anticipated appearance at the August 1969 Isle of Wight festival,¹ sung (as was much of Self-Portrait) in the fake croon that Dylan had adopted for Nashville Skyline) and erratically played even though the backup band was the Band; a treacly take on Rodgers’ and Hart’s “Blue Moon”; six songs listed as traditional, and other lackadaisically delivered fare. Self-Portrait baffled public and critics alike. Greil Marcus famously began his Rolling Stone review by asking, in disgust and incredulity, “What is this shit?” (I’ll note that in 2013, Dylan and his handlers released Another Self-Portrait, the eighth installment of the ongoing “Bootleg Series.” Another Self Portrait is a similar potpourri, assembled, however, with a great deal more thought and energy than the original. ²

I’ve never investigated Dylan’s motives in releasing such an awful album, nor will I here. (Several of Dylan’s 1980s and early ‘90s albums are arguably worse. To my ears, Down in the Groove (1988) and Under the Red Sky (1990) lack a single redeeming track.) Self-Portrait’s awfulness, however, is more overwhelming. A double album, it has so many bad songs. I did I find a small handful of appealing songs scattered amongst the dross: the moonshining ballad “Copper Kettle,” for instance, in which Dylan momentarily abandons his croon du jour to cut loose with a triumphant snarl: “We ain’t paid no whiskey tax since 1792!” An A.F. Beddoe claimed to have written “Copper Kettle in 1953,” but Pete Seeger, for one, always considered “Copper Kettle” a folk song. Folk music is littered with dubious, and sometimes patently false, claims of authorship. Much more on that shortly.

The Self Portrait song that really grabbed me was the ode to the California Gold Rush era, “Days of 49.” (Another Self-Portrait’s version is identical, except that the drummer has been erased). Dylan takes the song at a rocking medium tempo, singing with real brio, and in his real, sandpapery, voice. “Days of ‘49” is a winner (even if its opening chords mirror those of the Gilligan’s Island theme), in which the last surviving member of the 1849 California Gold Rush’s cast of prospectors, gamblers, and escaped convicts salutes his departed compadres. I found myself returning to “Days of ‘49” all that summer of 1970.

Our narrator introduces himself:

I'm old Tom Moore from the bummer's shore in the good old golden days

They call me a bummer and a gin sot too, but what cares I for praise?

I wander ‘round from town to town just like a roving sign

And all the people say, "There goes Tom Moore, from the days of '49."³

And launches into the refrain:

In the days of old, in the days of gold

How oft’times I repine for the days of old

When we dug up the gold, in the days of ‘49.

And, after regaling us with the misadventures of the likes of “Rag Shag Bill from Buffalo,” “New York Jake, the butcher’s boy,” and a handful of other miscreants, old Tom Moore bids us farewell:

Oh the comrades all that I have had

There's none that’s left to boast

And I'm left alone in my misery

Like some old poor wandering ghost

And I pass by from town to town

They call me the rambling sign

There goes Tom Moore a bummer sure

In the days of ‘49.

Whence comes Dylan’s “Days of ‘49”? First of all, he didn’t write it. Although Dylan, especially early in his career, was known to advance highly debatable claims of authorship (he was threatened with a plagiarism lawsuit at least once, settling out of court), he stakes no such claims here.

“Days of ‘49” is a folk song. What do I mean by that? To offer an informal definition, a folk song is a song of unknown provenance, or authorship, which almost invariably exists in several versions. These need not differ radically, but are clearly non-identical. A genuine folk song is at least several generations old, since it takes time for variants to evolve, and is often much older. Folk songs are in the public domain, ie. they cannot be copyrighted. We call Woody Guthrie a folksinger, but “This Land is Your Land” is not, strictly speaking, a folk song. Guthrie wrote it himself, in 1940, and recorded it in 1944 in the Manhattan offices of what was then Asch, then Disc, and finally Folkways, Records, the label operated by the great record man Moses Asch. Pete Seeger, another Asch artist, was hanging around when Woody and his buddy and harmony singer Cisco Houston recorded the simple, seven-note song, and, as Seeger was candid enough to admit to me years later, “I considered it one of Woody’s lesser efforts. Well, I was sure taught a lesson.”

“Days of ‘49,” on the other hand, is a folk song, ie., has no known provenance. Oddly, in Self-Portrait, Dylan extends credit to three individuals.⁴ The first, Frank Warner, was a mid-20th-century folklorist who collected, not wrote, a number of well-known songs, including “Tom Dooley,” a traditional murder ballad that became a #1 Billboard hit for the Kingston Trio, purveyors of the saccharine folk music that blossomed in the late 1950s.

Mention of the second and third claimants to “Days of ‘49”’s authorship sets off alarms to anyone familiar with folk-music scholarship. The Lomaxes, John (1867-1948) and Alan (1915-2002) , père et fils, were, and remain, America’s best-known song collectors. John Lomax’s Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, published in 1910, has been called “the first important collection of American folksong.”⁵ The book is dedicated to, and bears an introductory salutation from, Teddy Roosevelt. Postmarked “Cheyenne, Aug. 28th, 1910,” Roosevelt’s note begins: “Dear Mr. Lomax, You have done a work emphatically worth doing and one which should appeal to the people of all our country, but particularly to the people of the west and southwest.”

Some background on the Lomaxes (a third and fourth, John, Jr. and Bess Lomax Hawes, also distinguished themselves as folk-song experts). In 1934, John and Alan, the latter only 19, published the massive American Ballads and Folk Songs, which went through multiple editions and contained more than 200 songs.⁶ American Ballads and Folk Songs launched Alan on his career as an even greater song collector than his father—perhaps the greatest ever. Although Alan Lomax never obtained an advanced degree, he did more than enough research and advanced theoretical work to insert himself into the academic community (ethnomusicologists and folklore PhDs), who did not always receive him graciously: a lifelong maverick, he was, moreover, “under-accredited.” Alan Lomax was an individual of massive accomplishments, including what is generally acknowledged as the first oral history, Mister Jelly Roll (1950); literally inventing a theoretical framework—he called it “cantometrics”—for studying the world’s folk musics, and writing the massive memoir/study The Land Where the Blues Began, which won the 1993 National Book Critics’ Circle Award for non-fiction despite being replete with inaccuracies, exaggerations, and opinions presented as fact. (Many of Alan Lomax’s flaws as a scholar and author can be seen as attempts to bolster a fragile ego. I knew Lomax late in his life, though not well.)

For all that the Lomaxes did to advance our knowledge of and insights into America’s (and in Alan’s case the globe’s) folk music and culture, and for all the artists they could legitimately claim to have discovered (Huddie Ledbetter, or Lead Belly, and McKinley Morganfield (Muddy Waters) were perhaps the greatest),⁷ they were also chiselers, copyright claimants to many an anonymously or collectively authored song. To take just one example: one of the loveliest versions of one of the loveliest of folk songs, “Dink’s Song,” was recorded by, among others, Dave van Ronk in his 1967 essay into folk-rock Dave van Ronk and the Hudson Dusters. (Van Ronk’s performance is so strong that not even the schmaltzed-up string arrangement can weaken it). On the Hudson Dusters album, the song’s authors are listed as John Lomax and Alan’s older brother, John Lomax, Jr. “Dink’s Song,” which appears in the Lomaxes’ 1934 American Folk Songs and Ballads, was in fact collected by John Lomax in 1909 from an African-American woman whom Lomax knew only as “Dink.” When she sang for Lomax, Dink was washing clothes for a group of migratory levee-builders on the stretch of the Brazos River that flows just outside of Houston, TX. “The woman called herself Dink,” Lomax wrote. “She was a lithe, chocolate-colored woman with a reckless glint in her eye. ‘You’re jes’ lucky I happened to want to sing this mornin’, maybe to-morrow I wouldn’t ’a’ sung you nothin’. Anyhow, maybe to-morrow I won’t be here. I’m likely to git tired, or mad, an’ go. Say, if I got mad, I’d about dump that tub o’ wet clo’s there in that bed, an’ I wouldn’t be here by night.’”⁸

“Dink’s Song,” which John Lomax collected from a Texas woman in 1909 and for which he and his older son, John Lomax, Jr., receive credit on this version by Dave van Ronk and his late-’60s band the Hudson Dusters. Dylan sang “Dink’s Song,” too, as far back as 1960, ie., in his days in Minneapolis’s bohemian “Dinkytown” community. Dylan told his friends that he’d heard the song sung by Dink herself. (Didn’t Dylan ever worry that someone was going to catch him out in one of these outrageous lies?) Dylan also, to van Ronk’s fury, stole the latter’s arrangement of “House of the Rising Sun,” of which van Ronk was exceedingly proud, and which Dylan admired as well. Though he’d promised van Ronk that he wouldn’t touch the arrangement, it’s right there on Dylan’s first, 1962, album. It took a long time for van Ronk to forgive Dylan; writes one journalist, “Bob never regained his former friend’s full trust.”

OK, back to “Days of ‘49.” When John Lomax compiled his Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, ⁹ two of his best sources were libraries and second-bookstores, where he repeatedly came across moth-eaten song collections.

“I read through the files of Texas newspapers that printed columns of old songs,” Lomax writes in his 1947 autobiography, Adventures of a Ballad Hunter, “and I bedeviled librarians for possible buried treasures in frontier chronicles.” He considered Gold Rush ballads an important portion of Americana, and journeyed to the University of California at Berkeley, where, he writes, “I came on a stack of dog-eared, paper-backed pamphlets tied together with an ancient cotton string [which] crumbled in my fingers. There they were: a choice collection of early ‘California Songsters’ [as song compilations were known in those days]: Ben Cotton’s Songster, The Sally Come Up Songster, Put’s Original California Songster, Put’s Golden Songster, and many another.

“I discovered,” Lomax continues, “that ‘Old Put’ [a pseudonymous mid-19th-century ballad singer] and a group of men singers went from gold camp to gold camp in the early [Eighteen] Fifties and sang to the miners. When they ran out of songs, Old Put and his like made up songs describing the life of a mining town, telling how the Forty-Niners got to California. They were rough and crude creations, but among them I turned up ‘Sweet Betsy from Pike’ and the ‘Days of ‘49.’ Uncovering these two songs repaid me for the long trip from Texas.”

So much for Self-Portrait’s attribution of authorship of “Days of 49” to the Lomaxes and Frank Warner. (Alan, in fact, wasn’t even born when his father came across the song.) It’s far from the only time that the name of Lomax has come to be attached to a song that no Lomax had a hand in writing. But let’s take a look at the first verse of “Old Put”’s version of “Days of ‘49”:

We are gazing now on old Tom Moore,

A relic of bygone days;

‘Tis a bummer, too, they call me now

But what cares I for praise?

It’s oft, says I, for the days gone by,

It’s oft do I repine

For the days of old when we dug up out the gold

In those days of Forty-Nine.”

Compare that to the first verse of Dylan’s Self-Portrait version. Not only the first verses, but the songs in their entirety, are clearly the same, yet very different. “Days of ‘49” is starting to look like a true folk song: that is, a song whose travels through time and space result in significantly different versions.

But wait. As Lomax’s biographer, Nolan Porterfield, writes, “If the definition of a ‘real ballad’ required… anonymous authorship, Lomax set that aside in accepting such songs as “Days of Forty-Nine”…. which he had traced to what he felt were fairly certain origins.”¹⁰ Indeed, in his “Collector’s Note” to Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, Lomax writes that “the songs in this collection, never before in print, as a rule have been taken down from oral recitation.” He found lots of them in songbooks! “Dutiful pupil that he was,” says Porterfield, “he must have felt a twinge or two of conscience whenever he violated the boundaries of the nebulous ballad territory that his mentors had charted….”

We can go Porterfield one further. “Old Put,” it turns out, was a real person with a real name: John A. Stone, “a colorful writer-entertainer who had made the overland trip to California in 1850 and spent some fruitless years prospecting for gold. Assuming the name ‘Old Put’, he became San Francisco's foremost minstrel composer and the singing voice of the California Gold Rush. From 1853 to 1858, he wrote more than fifty different songs about miners and their life. He published about half of them in a collection called Put's Original California Songster. The little book sold phenomenally well, and was reprinted several times. In 1858 Stone published Put's Golden Songster, containing his most famous composition, ‘Sweet Betsy from Pike.’”¹¹ So Old Put—John A. Stone, that is—was not merely a collector, but a songwriter. Is he the uncredited author of “Days of ‘49”? We’ll never know the answer to that.

But before we castigate old man Lomax too harshly, let’s take a look at the expanded second edition of Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, published in 1938 (with Alan listed as co-author, or co-collector, which is only fair—Alan played a large role in expanding the book from its original 112 songs to a whopping 227). As expected, “Days of 49” is here. But in the 1938 printing, an asterisked sentence at the bottom of the song reads, “From Florence N. Gleason of Bakersfield, Calif.” Old John has reined in his ego; here he is, giving credit where credit is due. Either Ms. Gleason sent John (or Alan) the song, or one of them came across her. Verses One through Four are all but identical to the “Days of ‘49” that John may or may not have lifted from Old Put, but Verse Five is significantly different. What we have is, if not a new song, a definite variant. Here is Verse Five of the first, 1910 edition:

There was Wylie Bill, the funny man,

Who was full of funny tricks,

And when he was in a poker game

He was always hard as bricks.

He would ante you a stud, he would play you a draw,

He’d go you a hatful blind,—

In a struggle with death Bill lost his breath

In the days of Forty Nine.

And here’s Ms. Gleason’s Verse Five:

There’s Poker Bill, one of the boys,

Who was always in for a game.

Whether he lost or whether he won,

To him it was always the same.

He would ante you a slug, or rush the buck

He’d go you a hatful blind—

In the game of death Bill lost his breath

In the days of Forty-nine.

(Last two lines repeated).

Both verses, ie., in the 1910 and 1938 Lomax editions, vary widely from Dylan’s Self-Portrait version, which also has a different number of verses (six) than the eight published by the Lomaxes. If we overlook what may or may not be Old Put’s authorship of “Days of ‘49,” which is never going to be ascertained, what we’ve got is a genuine folk song, ie. a song of unknown authorship that exists in more than one version.

Still, it would be a bonus to know where Dylan came across “Days of ‘49.” Did he cobble together the two Lomax variants that we’ve seen? No, because, there are lyrics in Self-Portrait’s version that appear in neither Lomax version. Are there still more variants out there, one of which matches up with Self-Portrait’s?

Irwin Silber was a folklorist and journalist who co-founded the folk movement’s Bible, Sing Out!, and ran it from 1951 to 1967. He’s also one of several suggested targets of Dylan’s scathing 1965 put-down song “Positively 4th Street.” When Dylan shifted from polemics into the personal and poetic, a process which began in earnest in 1964 with Another Side of Bob Dylan (“My Back Pages,” “It Ain’t Me Babe,” “Spanish Harlem Incident” and others), Silber wrote him an open letter in Sing Out! complaining that Dylan “had somehow lost contact with people…. Some of the paraphernalia of fame [are] getting in your way.” Dylan responded by instructing his manager, Albert Grossman, to see to it that no more Dylan songs were to appear in Sing Out! and, perhaps, by whaling away at Silber with lyrics like, “I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes/And just for that one moment I could be you/Yes, I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes/Then you’d know what a drag it is to see you.”

Silber was an energetic song collector among whose many publications is the 1967 Songs of the Great American West. While compiling it, he came across the hoary compendium The Great Emerson New Popular Songster, published in San Francisco in 1872, in which Silber found, yes, a version of “Days of ‘49.” He made it the centerpiece of an eponymous chapter, to which he wrote an evocative introductory note:

“The miners brought their dreams, their lore, their songs. Most came to make their pile and return back East, but only a handful went home. For the miner, there was always another digging, another chance for the lucky strike. Before he knew it, he was an old settler and a citizen of California.” Midway through his note, Silber tosses in a fetching bit of Barbary Coast doggerel:

The miners came in ‘49,

The whores in ‘51;

And when they got together

They produced the native son.

“The Gold Rush minstrel was a commentator on his times,” Silber writes, who expounded “on all subjects, from business practices to temperance, from styles in clothing to Mormon jokes. He was combination town crier, local newspaper, court jester, and village idiot…. At his worst, he was cliché-ridden and a careless versifier; at his best, he had that spark of genius which memorializes an age.”

But alas, the differences between Silber’s version of “Days of ‘49” and Self-Portrait’s are many. Is it possible that Dylan absorbed all three variants, Silber’s and the Lomaxes’, to come up with his own? Not likely. Dylan’s “Days of ‘49” is, after all, credited to the Lomaxes and Frank Warner, and Dylan has never been one to fail to give himself credit for a song he has written. He’s more likely to do the opposite.

Logan English was 13 years Bob Dylan’s senior, born in 1928 in Henderson, KY. English’s father and grandfather were were Baptist ministers; according to English, it was his grandfather’s preaching and the songs the fieldhands sang on his father’s farm that generated in him a deep love of folk music.

Folksinger/poet/playwright Logan English (1928-1983), a once-vital, long-forgotten face in Greenwich Village’s ‘50s and ‘60s folk scene whose 1961 encounter with Bob Dylan had a tremendous, rarely acknowledged impact on Dylan’s career. And whose fine rendition of “Days of ‘49” may (or may not) be the source of Dylan’s.

After studying acting in college and serving in Korea, English enrolled in the Yale School of Drama, where he received an MFA. He wanted to be both an actor and a folksinger, and pursued both careers in Greenwich Village, where he headed after Yale. Logan English had what the music writer Bruce Eder calls a “a startlingly melodious voice,” was a fine guitarist, and recorded six albums, largely of ballads such as “Geordie,” an ages-old nickname for a resident of Newcastle upon Tyne. A young Joan Baez heard English’s “Geordie” and put the song into her repertoire. English wrote, too: poems, plays, and prose but, oddly, not songs, which probably hindered his career (a serious drinking habit didn’t help). “From the wild-flower dusks of mountain villages, out of steamy southern mud-flats and dusty midland prairies,” English wrote in the liner notes to his American Folk Ballads (Monitor, 1962), “off the sun-silver steel of cinder-blown railroad tracks and out of the chill damps of prison cells—from churches and saloons, cradles and gravesides come the songs of America that must be sung.”

In 1960, English’s and a very young Dylan’s paths crossed, with epochal results. On June 1, English and the singer Carolyn Hester performed at the opening night of the folk/blues club Gerde’s Folk City, which quickly became, and remained for a quarter-century, one of the hot spots of the Village’s folk-music scene.¹² English made such a good impression on Gerde’s owners that he was given the job of MC.

Probably in 1960, English made the acquaintance of Woody Guthrie. The great songwriter was nearing the late stages of Huntington’s Chorea, a devastating disease that ran in Guthrie’s family. In Guthrie’s case, even after he was diagnosed with Huntington’s in 1952, it went essentially untreated, in those days, there was no effective treatment. Guthrie spent his final 10 years in three New York-area mental hospitals, and died in 1967, barely able to talk or to control his limbs. In 1961, he was still given weekend leaves, during one of which, at the East Orange, NJ home of the folk enthusiasts Sidsel and Bob Gleason, Guthrie and Logan English met.

The Gleasons liked to hold mini-hootenannies in their living room. As English’s wife, Barbara Shutner, wrote, “One night, we”—English,. Shutner, Gleasons, a barely functioning Guthrie, and a scruffy, hygienically challenged kid who worshipped Woody and was doing his best to gain a foothold in the folk scene—"were all sitting around. Woody said something like, ‘Play something’ to this kid. The kid was Bob Dylan, and he sang, and it was beautiful. Logan immediately said, ‘I’m working at Gerde’s. I’m the MC. We’ll get you to play there.’ So that Monday night, Bob Dylan came in and did his first set.” Catching one of Dylan’s sets towards the end of September (Dylan wasn’t even the main act, but the opener for the much better-known Greenbriar Boys), the New York Times music critic Robert Shelton, barely mentioning the headliners, wrote so enthusiastically about Dylan—“Mr. Dylan is vague about his antecedents and birthplace, but it matters less where he has been than where he is going, and that would seem to be straight up”¹³ —as to effectively launch Dylan, whose face had not yet shed its baby fat, on his rise to stardom.

In 1957, Logan English had recorded two albums for Folkways, Kentucky Folk Songs and Ballads—and The Days of ‘49: Songs of the Gold Rush. English’s version of “Days of ‘49” contains a stanza that’s not in Dylan’s version; English would have taken it from either the Lomaxes’ 1938 edition of Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads or Silber’s Songs of the Great American West, in both of which it appears. Apart from this one verse, which tells us about “‘Old Lame Jess,’ the hard old cuss, who never did repent,” and a slightly different order of verses, Logan English’s “Days of ‘49” is almost identical to Dylan’s Self-Portrait rendition.

Have we found its source? In 1957, when English’s Days of ‘49 album came out, Bobby Zimmerman, a high-schooler in Hibbing, MN, was uninterested in folk music. His ambition, he wrote in his Hibbing High yearbook in 1959, was to “join little Richard.” But within a matter of months, a freshman at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, he was calling himself Bob Dylan¹⁴ and had developed a consuming passion for folk music.

Dylan was well aware of Folkways Records, the label of the folk cognoscenti. When he arrived in New York, in January 1961, it was Folkways that the boy wanted to record for, not the more commercial labels. “I envisioned myself recording for Folkways Records,” Dylan wrote in his 2004 memoir, Chronicles, Volume One. “That was the label I wanted to be on. That was the label that put out all the great records. [Never mind that a Folkways record typically sold 500 copies.] It would have been a dream come true if Moe would have signed me to the label.” (It would have turned into a nightmare before long, with Dylan, like virtually every Folkways artist, showing up at Asch’s office begging for even part of his royalties). Asch was fonder of his collection, musicians grumbled— and the Folkways catalog was indeed splendid, eventually the world’s biggest trove of was not yet known as “world music”—than of them. “Unless you made a special arrangement with Moe,” Bess Lomax Hawes told me, “he didn’t pay royalties.”¹⁵

Folkways’s catalog was already immense, but it’s not at all unlikely that Dylan would have found his way to Logan English’s Days of ‘49: Songs of the Gold Rush. He not only would have admired English, but he knew English—the guy, after all, had gotten him his first gig at Gerde’s.

The Days of ‘49: Songs of the Gold Rush, Logan English’s 1957 album for Moe Asch’s Folkways Records. The album’s title song may or may not be the source of Dylan’s powerful recording of it on possibly his worst-ever album.

I, for one, am ready to call the search off. English’s “Days of ‘49” is as close as we’re going to get, in this pursuit not merely of the source of one of the only good songs on the awful Self-Portrait, but through the highways, byways, definitions, and gray areas of folk music.

Logan English’s inability to write songs, as well as his mounting problems with alcohol, made it harder and harder for him to pursue a music career. Probably to save money, and also to find work, he moved upstate to Saratoga Springs, NY long known as an artist’s colony. He was commissioned by the Actors Theatre of Louisville, in his home state of Kentucky, to write a play based on the life of Cassius Marcellus Clay (not Muhammad Ali, but the prominent Kentucky abolitionist after whom Ali was originally named). English never finished the play. In 1983, aged 54, he was fatally struck by an automobile while out walking. He may have been weaving a bit—after all, he was a well-known gin sot.

Notes:

1. The Isle of Wight appearance was much-anticipated because Dylan had appeared in public only twice since the end of his 1966 world tour: at a 1968 Carnegie Hall memorial concert for Woody Guthrie and on Johnny Cash’s TV show in May 1969.

2. Another Self Portrait contains outtakes from what, when the original Self-Portrait came out, was the soon-to-be-released New Morning; Dylan’s entire ‘69 Isle of Wight performance; more songs by his contemporaries (Tom Paxton and Eric Andersen); outtakes from a number of earlier Dylan albums, and a host of traditional songs, this last group reinforcing Dylan’s reputation as exceptionally well-versed in traditional folk material. Another Self-Portrait was much better received by critics and sold well, reaching #4 on Billboard’s Top 200. (Self-Portrait hadn’t exactly flopped with record-buyers; it had gone to #5).

3. Several terms clarified: "Bummer" was 19th-century slang for a fellow of low reputation who drifts from town to town, performing just enough menial work to get by. A “bummer” was a 19th-century loafer or vagrant; the “bummer’s shore” was the West Coast of the Gold Rush era. “Gin sot” was a term of the day for a drunk. The Seeger quote is from Part 2, “Pete Seeger Saw It All,” of my three-installment “The Asch Series,” on Moses Asch and his hugely influential record labels, Asch, Disc, and Folkways. The Moe Asch series was posted on March 23, March 31, and April 7, 2024. Folkways, whose huge catalog Asch donated to the Smithsonian Institution before his death in 1986, is going strong today as Smithsonian Folkways.

4. Interestingly, on 2013’s Another Self-Portrait, “Days of ‘49” is listed as traditional. Someone involved in the Bootleg Series rightfully decided to remove the three “authors.”

5. Nolan Porterfield, The Last Cavalier: The Life and Times of John A. Lomax, 1996, p. 153. Porterfield is also the author of the definitive Jimmie Rodgers biography, Jimmie Rodgers, 1979.

6. John A. Lomax, “Self-Pity in Negro Folk-Songs,” The Nation, August 9, 1917, p. 143. The edition of American Folk Songs and Ballads that I own is the book’s 17th printing, published in 1962 and containing 246 songs.

7. Alan Lomax can take some credit for discovering Woody Guthrie—he was the first to record the great singer/songwriter, in 1939, for the Library of Congress, although Guthrie had already acquired a following, largely through a series of late-1930s broadcasts over the Los Angeles radio station KFVD.

8. John A. Lomax, “Self-Pity in Negro Folk-Songs,” The Nation, August 9, 1917, pp. 141-145. John Lomax, I’ll add, a Texan born and raised (as was Alan) was a more or less unreconstructed racist.

9. Porterfield, op. cit., p. 154.

10. Ibid, p. 154

11. This account of Stone’s life and doings is from Wikipedia, and is hence less than 100% reliable. I’ll add, however, that Wikipedia isn’t my only source regarding John A. Stone. In his 1967 collection Songs of the Great American West, Irwin Silber (see above) credits Stone with the lyrics to “Sweet Betsy from Pike,” which, as we know, old John Lomax himself discovered, and well before there was a Wikipedia.

12. The Texas-born Hester (“One of the ones that got away,” Dylan the well-known Lothario is said to have sighed) also played a significant role in getting Dylan’s career off the ground. While producing Hester’s first, 1961, album for Columbia Records, the great talent scout and Columbia executive John Hammond took special note of Hester’s eccentric, shabbily dressed harmonica player and occasional backup singer. Straightaway, Hammond auditioned and signed Dylan to Columbia, his recording home for all but a few albums.

13. Robert Shelton, “Bob Dylan: A Distinctive Folk-Song Stylist; 20-Year-Old Singer Is Bright New Face at Gerde's Club,” The New York Times, September 29, 1961.

14. Whether Dylan renamed himself after the Welsh poet (he changed his surname legally in 1962) is still a matter of debate. Dylan himself has said that he’d first taken to calling himself “Dillon,” after Gunsmoke’s Marshal Matt Dillon, and apparently moved more or less arbitrarily to his permanent surname.

15. Asch and van Ronk conducted a mutual charade in the days before van Ronk, broke and disgusted, quit Folkways. In a special Salvation Army-bought “Moe Asch Collecting Uniform,” van Ronk would wait outside Asch’s office until it was crowded with witnesses. Finally staggering in, he croaked pathetically, “Moe—you’re not paying me.” “Oh, Dave. I’m just making up your royalty statement now.” Snatching up a random piece of paper, Asch pretended to scan it. “Says here I owe you seventy-five bucks.” Then and there he’d write van Ronk a check. A real royalty statement never existed. His utopian vision notwithstanding, Asch ran Folkways less as a corporation than a feudal patriarchy.