Greil Marcus, Three
Songs, Three Singers, Three Nations
Harvard University Press, 2015
© 2015 Greil Marcus
ISBN 978-0-674-18708-5
Harvard University Press, 2015
© 2015 Greil Marcus
ISBN 978-0-674-18708-5
I have just finished reading one of the strangest little
books I have ever read. Strange, in that
it is about songs and singers you have never heard of. Little, physically (it’s the size and shape
of a mass-market paperback), in length (it’s a mere 164 pages, and maybe a
third of that’s notes and the index), and in subject matter [it treats no high
themes, it makes (explicitly) no great claims, it is, in the end, something
like the third of the three songs].
The first song, and the first singer, will be familiar
enough—it’s Bon Dylan’s epic “The Ballad of Hollis Brown,” from his third album
and the first of his albums I bought), The
Times They Are a-Changin, released in 1964.
(A live version, by Dylan here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWG5PsIsDrc. A remarkable version of it, by Nina Simone,
here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Xe73l3JqRs. Lyrics here: https://www.bobdylan.com/songs/ballad-hollis-brown/) I always, almost reflexively, thought it dealt
with an actual event. It did not. But is seems in all its particulars too detailed,
too demanding of our attention, to have been invented. Marcus discusses the song in great
detail. But this is the key:
The story of the song is
the story of how Bob Dylan was able to make the song sing as if it were not
his, as if it were found as the images Michael Lesy* discovered in the files of
Charles Van Schaik (in the 1890s the town photographer of Black River
Falls),,,It’s the story of how Dylan finally made the song slip his skin, until
it could feel…as mythical as “Frankie and Johnny,” as factual as “Casey Jones.”
It seems, listening to the song, that it must be real. Or, alternatively, I think, as if is had
grown from a real event, to become as mythis and as real as (to use another
example) “Tom Dooley.”
But that’s just the beginning. The second song is one I had never heard (or
heard of) until I read this book. The
singer was also unknown to me (and as Marcus suggests, unknown to everyone,
even to the obscurity of her name). The
song is “The Last Kind Word Blues,” and no one knows how old it is, or who
first sang the version that grew into many versions. Its first recorded version (that anyone knows
of) was recorded in 1930 by the Paramount label (a division, believe it or not,
of the Wisconsin Chair Company--, things are already getting weirder), in
Grafton (which is nowhere near Black River Falls)), Wisconsin. The song is credited to Geeshie Wiley (singer
and guitar player). But it soon escaped
from captivity and took on a life of its own, with literally hundreds of
performances and recordings, all of them probably different. (You can listen to it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIsbDzMRTf0;
and one set of lyrics can be found here: https://genius.com/Geeshie-wiley-last-kind-word-blues-lyrics) Marcus traces the song, and the people, and
we can see how the song mutated and grew.
How it was rediscovered…
Finally, we arrive at the story of Bascom Lamar Lunsford (of
whom some of you might have heard; he remained active into the early 1960s,
performing at folk festivals—including his own, singing this song and many
others) and another strange, constantly mutating song called (as Lunsford wrote
it down) “I Wish I was a Mole in the Ground.”
(This is Lunsford: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICXYMjgmG88; here are his lyrics: https://genius.com/Bascom-lamar-lunsford-i-wish-i-was-a-mole-in-the-ground-lyrics) Marcus says of it that “…it is a song with a
thousand face. It’s an old American song—no
one knows how old.’” He traces some
version of it back to the American Revolution (there’s reference to a “forty dollar bill”—piece of
currency that existed only in paper money issued by Alabama during the War of
Independence—and he has a picture!) It
seems to be a song about making this world disappear:
I wish I was a mole in the ground
Yes I wish I was a mole in the ground
Like a mole in the ground
I’d root that mountain down
And I wish I was a mole in the ground
Yes I wish I was a mole in the ground
Like a mole in the ground
I’d root that mountain down
And I wish I was a mole in the ground
We also have
lizards (which makes me wonder whether Jim Morrison, the Lizard King, knew or
knew of this song). We have birds in a
tree, a killer in the sand, a dream in the night. Marcus claims to see traces of it in Dylan’s “Stuck
Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again” (a song worthy of exegesis in
its own right). Marcus notes its use by
some in the Free Speech movement in Berkeley.
He digresses to quote Mark Twain at length about the difference between
a humorous story (American), a cosmic story (English), and a witty story
(French) (pp. 140-141). He connects it
(through Lunsford) to the “John Henry” saga. And he concludes:
He** knew the song was a mystery before and after
it was anything else, and he knew it was a mystery he was passing on, As he did so, every time he sang the song—Bascom
Lamar Lunsford erase himself; He wished himself into the song and sent the song
out into the world…
I’ll leave
the rest of that passage, which is on the last page of the book, for you to
discover for yourselves.
*See the book Wisconsin
Death Trip.
**Lunsford)
