November/10/01
GUTHRIE, DYLAN AND THE YOUNG HOLDEN
"Song to Woody", included in Bob Dylan, it can be seen as the attempt made by a young Dylan to get legitimacy in the music world when just arrived in New York and got his first opportunities on the stages of the Village .This young musician that had travelled the nation from his native midwest to Nyc, as folk singers used to do a century before even if in opposite directions, wrote a panegyric to an artist that will always be present as a cultural heritage in Bob's production. Guthrie represents a type of poor white folk music, a style that worked as an outlet for a loud cry by those classes that stay at the bottom of the social pyramid. In the song there's also the echo of political clashes felt in the big apple that inevitably entail a social view of the things : the young Robert sees " a new world of people and things, peasants, princes and kings", with their own different life syles and opposite demands. Although being only 21 years old, Dylan had a voice resembling one of a 50years old man: he surely couldn't have sung Sinatra's "My way" but Guthrie, by that time at the Greystone Hospital in New Jersey, was already sure that Bob's voice could have guaranteed him a great career as a folk singer (even if he thought that his lyrics weren't good enough), long before that very voice started sounding as the last call for the forgotten outcasts and the sparring partners.
Analizing the song, it's interesting to notice that how Dylan looks at the hobos and at the well groomed middle class men, is the same way the young Salinger's Holden does. They are two newcomers disenchanted and a with a lot of irony: both, middle class kids that to some extent have abandoned the easy attidudes of their social condition, go around the big apple observing the ultimate and maximum result of the american society and can't help but feeling as much separated as refused by the "normal" others. But still Bob's not Holden and Guthrie's not Salinger. Surely Caulfied wouldn't be respectful, not even towards one of his role models: he would definitely decostruct him. That's a reason why the young Holden couldn't dedicate a song to anyone and why Dylan has, even if when he does, he feels like not singing enough because "there's no many men that have done the things that Guthrie has". Besides, as a future ministrel, Robert is not as "spoiled" as Holden is and when he wants to celebrate those heroes that taught him how to express his individualistic feelings, he sticks to the fundamentals: Bob here sings a genuine praise to "the hearts and hands of the men that come with the dust and are gone with the wind".
Towards the end, to display his admiration to other " monuments" of the folk genre, Bob dedicates the song also to the great singers Sonny Terry and Leadbelly (Huddie Ledbetter): artists that shared with Guthrie the ideas and a "modus vivendi" ( "the good people that traveled with you"). The young Zimmerman though, is not ingenuous to blindly throw himself into the folk culture and ideals: even if keeps "using " the folk genre to convey its message, that world had died long time before. As a matter of fact, Dyaln will be within the folk borders only before getting enough self esteem and popularity to change and revolutionate the whole genre: years later he won't be scared of becoming a great composer himself, he won''t fear "hitting some hard travellin'too".
Dario Fabbri