An Introduction to America’s Music

CHAPTER 17 | THE URBAN FOLK REVIVAL 435

and augmenting his repertory of Guthrie songs with material from the Harry

Smith anthology and other LPs. Like his model, Dylan soon discovered that he

also had a knack for putting words together, at fi rst fi tting them to borrowed

tunes. A highlight of his fi rst solo LP, Bob Dylan (1961), which consisted mostly of

traditional folk songs, was an original “Song to Woody,” whose words of tribute to

the older musician were sung to the tune of Guthrie’s labor song “1913 Massacre.”

Greenwich Village, a neighborhood on New York City’s Lower West Side,

had long been a haven for bohemian artists, poets, and intellectuals. By the late

1950s and early 1960s it had become a focal point for both the Beats and urban

folk revivalists. The two countercultural groups had little to do with each other;

though both despised what they saw as the artifi ciality and materialism of main-

stream society, in most other respects they cultivated different tastes. Where the

Beats were interested in jazz and Eastern religion, experimented with drugs, and

condoned a wide range of sexual proclivities, the folkies were more interested

in political activism and traditional music as a way to reconnect with an older,

more authentic way of life. Bound by the common thread of nonconformity, the

two groups seemed to inhabit parallel universes in the Village, intersecting but

not interacting. The folk singer Dave Van Ronk recalled that nightclubs would

book folk acts to perform after public poetry readings because they were guar-

anteed to drive out the Beat audience, making room for new customers.

A bridge between the two countercultures was Bob Dylan, who shared the

musical tastes of the folk revivalists and the literary tastes of the Beats. The years

of travel that eventually led Dylan to Woody Guthrie’s bedside and Greenwich

Village had been inspired in part by Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road, which

glorifi ed spontaneous road trips fueled by jazz, drugs, and alcohol. Even more

infl uential was the work of Allen Ginsburg, whose long poem Howl begins with

a lamentation for “the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.” Part

2 of the poem denounces the destroyer of those “angelheaded hipsters”: a mil-

itaristic consumer society that Ginsburg represents as the pagan god Moloch.

A modern-day Jeremiah, the poet unleashes a torrent of vivid imagery:

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood

is running money! Moloch whose fi ngers are ten armies!

Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose

ear is a smoking tomb!

Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose

skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs!

Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog!

Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities!

The effect is at once poundingly repetitious and abundantly varied.

Ginsburg’s infl uence is evident in “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” a song on

Dylan’s second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963), which, unlike the fi rst,

consists almost entirely of original compositions. But the song’s more obvious

model is the old Scottish ballad “Lord Randal” (Child 12), a dialogue between a

mother and her son, who returns from a visit to his sweetheart only to realize

that he has been poisoned:

“O where ha you been, Lord Randal, my son?

And where ha you been, my handsome young man?”

“I ha been at the greenwood; mother, mak my bed soon,

For I’m wearied wi hunting, and fain wad lie down.”

Beats and folkies

Bob Dylan

“A Hard Rain’s

a-Gonna Fall”

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