Greil Marcus, Three Songs, Three Singers, Three Nations

Greil Marcus, Three Songs, Three Singers, Three Nations
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

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)