What follows is the text of a paper I delivered in June 2012, a the ChLA conference in Boston. It really needs accompanying illustrations and perhaps a tune or two, but copyright restricts me from uploading these. Not knowing what else to do with this paper, I place it here. A list of works cited is missing.
“when asked what you think of gene autry singing of hard
rains gonna fall say that nobody can sing it as good as peter. paul and mary” (Lyrics 1962-1985, 124)
“I hate oppression, especially on children.” (Biograph, Liner Notes)
1. Dylan and kids
Bob Dylan’s 1990
album Under the Red Sky has the
dedication, “For Gabby Goo Goo.” This Gabby is apparently Dylan’s (at the time)
four-year-old granddaughter, and the album, as many have noted, contains a
number of songs that adapt and rework familiar nursery rhymes. Oliver Trager
notes that Dylan “had often mentioned recording an album for children,” and he
goes on to suggest that Under the Red Sky
“was as close as [Dylan’s critics] were likely to come to hearing one” (648). Two years later, in 1992, Dylan released
the familiar children’s song “Froggy Went A-Courtin” on the album Good As I Been To You, and in 1999 he
recorded a version of “This Old Man.” Three of his songs have been transformed
into picture books: Forever Young (2008,
illus. Paul Rogers), Man Gave Names to
All the Animals (2010, illus. Jim Arnosky), and Blowin’ in the Wind (2011, illus. Jon J. Muth). An earlier version
of Man Gave Names to All the Animals
appeared in 1999 (illus. Scott Menchin). Another picture book tells the story
of Dylan’s early years, When Bob Met
Woody: The Story of the Young Bob Dylan, written by Gary Golio and
illustrated by Marc Burckhardt (2011). These picture books target a young
audience, but a graphic work for adults and young adults also exists: Bob Dylan Revisited (2008; first
American edition 2009). This book consists of “13 graphic interpretations of
Bob Dylan’s Songs” (Book Cover), by artists such as Dave McKean, Christopher,
Lorenzo Mattotti, and Thierry Murat. Finally, I note that the Kid’s Page of the
National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences’ website contains the
lyrics to “Blowing in the Wind” [sic] (http://kids.niehs.nih.gov/games/songs/favorites/blowingmid.htm).
Clearly, we have Dylan admirers who make the connection between Dylan and kids.
Dylan
has also been photographed with children. Barry Feinstein’s photographs are
perhaps the most well known. Here [I had prepared a PowerPoint for the oral presentation of this paper] we have two photographs taken in Liverpool,
England, in 1966. The one shows Dylan sitting in a doorway surrounded by
children, and the other is a wistful shot of him watching children watching
Dylan on a mostly empty street. Dylan and the children nicely reflect each
other. These photographs deliver a sense of nostalgia worthy of the bard who
sang (and sings) prophetic songs about humanity’s endangered future. In November
1975, Dylan and Allan Ginsberg are photographed with children from the Franco
American School in Lowell, Massachusetts. The picture captures something of the
youthful energy of the Rolling Thunder Review that Dylan was taking on the road
that year. And of course we have Elliott Landry’s photographs of Dylan with his
children in Woodstock, New York, in the late 1960s.
In
October 2011, Universal Children’s Audio in Wellington, New Zealand, released a
CD that makes the argument that Dylan’s songs are relevant and appeal to
children: Kids Sing Bob Dylan by The Starbugs. The Starbugs are five young New
Zealanders who, when the album was released, ranged in age from 7 to 15. They
are Jessie Hillel, Rebecca Jenkins (the youngest), Sarah Whitaker, Ben
Anderson, and Roisin Anderson. The album’s producers are David Anthony Clark
and Radha Sahar. Clark says that he saw a “doco” (documentary) in which
14-year-olds were asked, “if they had heard of Bob Dylan,” and they had not. He
set out to rectify this situation. As for the Starbugs, they express enthusiasm
for Dylan’s songs. 10-year-old Jessie says, “Hearing and listening to him
[Dylan] was really fun,” and 7-year-old Rebecca says the songs “made her want
to dance.” Roisin noted that, “there was a lot of action in Dylan’s
music.” The kids noted the emotion
“that he puts into his songs” (Ben Anderson – quotations from Dallas and
Tuckey).
And
what of the choices for this album by and for children? Clark included a couple
of “Dylan’s folk songs [that] have long been the stuff of classroom
sing-alongs, such as ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ and ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’” (Dallas
and Tuckey), but he also included “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” and “I Shall Be Released,”
described in a press story on the album as “world weary” songs (Dallas and
Tuckey). But perhaps the most surprising inclusion is the song, “Mozambique.” When
the kids sing “it’s so unique to be/Among the lovely people living free/Upon
the beach of sunny Mozambique,” they are most likely unaware that in 1975, when
the song was first released, the long war against the Portuguese colonial
masters had just ended and a long Civil War was about to begin. Mozambique was
hardly a “magical land.” It was a land in turmoil.
In
any case, “Mozambique,” along with “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” and “I Shall Be
Released” accompany songs that had previously been connected with children –
“Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Forever Young,” and “Man Gave Names to All the
Animals.” The Universal Children’s Audio web site says the album contains
“songs appropriate to children’s lives,” and that they are “perfect for a
family sing-along, the classroom, or a long car ride.” Visitors to the web site
are encouraged to, “Let Dylan inspire your kids as he inspired you!”
Okay,
it is time for a bit of autobiography. Was I inspired? You bet. In the fall of
1963, my friend Donnie Knapp came to school with the news that he had joined
the Columbia Record Club, and that he had received a record by some guy that
had some good songs on it, but that the guy couldn’t sing worth a damn. When
pressed, Donnie said one song was about “going down the road, with a suitcase
in my hand, bling bling bling.” He reiterated that the guy – he could not
recall his name - just could not sing and that he (Donnie) was going to return
the record to Columbia. For reasons I can no longer remember, I asked Donnie if
I could listen to the record before he sent it back. Donnie just lived around
the corner from me on Winnifred Street, and so I went to his place after school
and listened to The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. I was 18 years old. I was not a
child, but when I heard those songs I felt as if I had been hearing them all my
relatively short life. That was the year I began to read. That was my last year
in high school. That was when I began to write this paper. If you had asked me
back then what I thought of that singer who could not sing, I would have said
that Donnie Knapp was half right – the songs were great – but that his
evaluation of the singing was way off in the circle of hell devoted to tin
ears. That voice struck me as a voice for the ages; what I could not say back
then was that Dylan “had the blood of the land” in his voice, but that is the
best description of his voice that I have heard.
2. Hard Rain: Kids Can Take it
And so along
with Bob Dylan singer/songwriter, painter and visual artist, and author, we
have Bob Dylan children’s artist. The question is: what does Bob Dylan’s work
contain that makes it suitable as work for children? According to the folks at
Universal Children’s Audio, the songs express the “energy and spontaneity” of a
youthful era – “the spirit of the 60s and 70s.” I get the sense that for these
folks the songs contain something of Benjamin’s “aura,” something rich and
elusive, something somehow connected to a youthful exuberance that does not age.
And I suppose this is true. We can, however, be more precise. My argument is
that in both form and content, many of Dylan’s songs speak directly to, or may
speak directly to, children. They do this because they call on traditional
forms and traditional subjects familiar to the genre of children’s literature.
In a nutshell, Dylan’s songs delight in language play and parody; they also
manifest a sensitivity to childhood as that complicated construction of adult
concerns that children are expected to explore: identity, environment, and
human rights. Dylan put this succinctly in his Oscar acceptance comments in
March 2001when he closed his thank-you speech with the words, “peace,
tranquility, and good will.” His work promotes peace, tranquility, and good
will. He is liberal to a degree; he wants everybody to be free.
But more
particularly, the concerns of early songs such as “Blowin’ in the Wind” or “A Hard
Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” not only contain elements familiar to children and their
literature, but also contain a vision of humanity vital to a continuing
tradition of imaginative possibility – dare I say of imaginative freedom? Imaginative
possibility functions both conservatively, in what Frye called a “myth of
concern,” and more progressively, in what Frye called a “myth of freedom.” For
our purposes, the myth of concern is that which socializes and keeps things
running smoothly for a political group, and the myth of freedom is that which
energizes desire for the world we want. I might locate the myth of concern in
social cohesion organized by the law of the father and the myth of freedom in
the pivotal moment of the Imaginary, that moment when we recognize for the
first time choice emanating from separation and difference. Children’s
literature crucially balances these two myths.
We know, for
example, that “Blowin’ in the Wind” is a catchy song that serves to gather
people together in a robust sing-a-long. Jon Muth, the illustrator of the
recent picture book version of the song, and Greil Marcus, who wrote the Note
at the end of this picture book, both write about the song as if it was a
sentimental call for maturity, as if the song is about the importance of
understanding that “we are the world, we are the children” and we can make a
brighter day. This sense of the song fits easily into the myth of concern, the
myth that we are all “God’s children.” But the song has a harder edge. We do
not need to historicize the song to grasp its call to action. If the answer is
blowing in the wind, then we need to get out there and take the buffets that
the wind has to offer. We need to stand in the wind. Only this way can the
sound of people crying penetrate. In other words, the song is both contained
within its musical and literary world, separate from actuality, a safe call to our
liberal humanist sensibilities, and also the trumpet that calls to action, that
topples walls, and that connects the musical and the literary with material
conditions.
Perry Nodelman
has convincingly demonstrated an “essential doubleness” to children’s
literature (59-68). We can see doubleness, an appeal to both child and adult,
an ideological pull both left and right, in Dylan’s work. As a test case, I
offer a song that has not appeared as one of Dylan’s works that appeals to children:
“A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna to Fall” (Freewheelin’,
1963). Here is a song suited to audiences both old and young. Older audiences
hear the song’s fear of nuclear night; its cold war politics and warning of
nuclear devastation. For the younger audience, however, what we have is a
ballad with its familiar story of quest and perhaps even triumph. Christopher
Ricks terms the virtue of the quest as “fortitude.” In any case, we have a
story redolent of the nostalgia children can understand and maybe even
appreciate, the nostalgia that renovates and rebuilds. I think this is what I
heard when Donnie Knapp played Dylan’s second album for me back in 1963. That
was a revelatory moment.
“A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna
Fall” consists of five stanzas nicely structured on the motif of the journey. The
stanzas vary in length from 16 lines to 9 lines. The lack of symmetry in stanza
length finds counter balance in the first 2 and final two lines of each stanza
that offer repetitions. These repetitions serve to package each stanza so that
each stanza is a self-contained unit. Repetitions of words appear throughout
the song, giving it an incantatory sound. The first two lines of each stanza
echo the traditional ballad “Lord Randal” and also the traditional nursery
song, “Billy Boy.” “Oh where have you been charming Billy?” Or, “O
where ha you been, Lord Randal, my son!/And where ha you been, my handsome
young man!" The echo of these two traditional works connects Dylan’s song
with the folk tradition, with a tradition of song and rhyme that speaks across
generations. Like the nursery rhyme, the ballad, and the fairy tale, this song
is not age specific. It has the haunting quality of the ballad. Its imagery is
familiar from such traditional material: misty mountains (sounds like Tolkien),
sad forests (what is a sad forest if not either a fairy tale forest or one
about to be chopped down?), babies and wolves, the poet who died in the gutter
(a figure we might meet in an Oscar Wilde story), white man and black dog. Then
we have the curiously elusive imagery: bleeding hammers, a white ladder covered
with water, a black branch bleeding, and a highway of diamonds with nobody on
it. We have here the uncanny. The imagery is both familiar and strange; something calls for us in these
images, something that encourages us to leave our stepping-stones behind.
As uncanny as these images
may be, the children and young people in the song – the child beside a dead
pony, the young woman whose body was burning, the newborn baby menaced by
wolves, the young children holding guns and sharp swords, and the young girl
who gives the blue-eyed boy a rainbow – are a composite of hope and despair.
Children are vulnerable in their innocence. They are capable of violence and of
generosity. They can be soldiers; they can be Samaritans. The blue-eyed son
answers the father’s questions with anaphoric intensity, giving the song a
prophetic insistence. The scattered rhyme – it is hit and miss throughout the
song – captures the brokenness of the world the young boy has experienced. And
so anaphora and rhyme counter balance, helping to give the song both its
prophetic resonance and its pessimistic reportage. We can add alliteration to
this brief list of rhetorical devices that elevate the register of the song’s
language. Everything is broken, but we need not despair.
The song ends with
resolution. When the singer, the blue-eyed son, asserts that he will “reflect
it from the mountain so all souls can see it,” he gathers all experience. We
have here a most intricate example of synesthesia, expressed in the word
“reflects.” To reflect is to bend light, but it also may refer to an echo, the
reflection of a voice or a sound. We might see or hear a reflection. To reflect
is also to consider, to ponder, to contemplate something. The song, precisely,
contemplates what I will call the mal de
siècle. Further, a reflection signals the consequence of something – such
and such reflects your decision to act in a beastly manner. Hard rain is a
consequence of human failure to reflect on the state of things. And to reflect
is to give back. The singer, the blue-eyed son, gives back what he experiences
“so all souls can see it.” They see it because they hear it. The synesthesia inherent in these lines
reflects the song’s interest in unity and connection. Everything is broken, but
we need not despair.
The message here is for the
young. Experience the world, its deepest black forests, its polluted rivers,
its empty-handed people, its damp dirty prisons, its hunger, its forgotten
people, and having experienced this bleak place tell the story. Tell it and
think it and speak it and breathe it.
The song ends with the image of the ocean, the ocean of time and space
we also have in William Blake’s poetry and art. The resolve is to stand on this
ocean until the sinking begins. The resolve is to take a hard look at a hard
world weathered by hard rain. Who better to take such a hard look but those
people who will have to live in this place for the foreseeable future? Who
better to hear this song than the young who are setting out to explore the
deepest dark forests?
