Bob Dylan's Instagram Posts Part 7

He can tell us the time, he can take us to the place

Christ Appears to Mary Magdalene, by Jan Breughel

Welcome back. In my last piece, I touched briefly on one of Dylan’s recent posts, a video of Johnny Cash and the Carter Family performing a lovely gospel song: “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord.” Here, I’d like to expand on those thoughts. On March 8, I published an essay with a photo of Cash at the top and I expressed the idea that Dylan’s audio clip called “The Last Testament of Frank James” was likely a tribute to the Man in Black on his birthday. On March 13, Bob published his segment with Cash and the Carters.

As you know, I’ve shown that Bob’s Instagram posts, with a few exceptions, are direct replies to elements of my book, “I Don’t Love Nobody”: Hidden Stories From Bob Dylan’s Rough and Rowdy Ways, and also to my writing here about those posts. Why would he do this? Because in 2020, Dylan transfigured imagery from my memoir, The Golden Bird, into the lyrics of the gorgeous “Key West (Philosopher Pirate).” And why that? Because my memoir is about the spiritual inspiration of song, and contains at its center an episode of Christian mysticism that reflects Dylan’s own such experience in 1979 and 1980. Now, here and on Instagram, he’s continuing the conversation. Subversively, artistically, and often humorously, Dylan is citing my work.

Dylan’s post of Cash and the Carter Sisters confirmed my thoughts about the Frank James clip, but more importantly, offered yet another mirror on Chapter Six, “Hindu Rituals and Gumbo Limbo Spirituals”—the essay that precipitated Dylan’s new-found affection for Instagram. He has riffed on it often through this series. Here, before I show you how “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord” plays in, I’d like to briefly review my discoveries about the source of the phrase “Hindu rituals” and all of Dylan’s Instagram references to it. Apologies for some repetition from previous essays, but I think it might be useful to stand all these mirrors next to each other, especially for any skeptics wandering by.

In Chapter Six, I theorized that the origin of Dylan’s “Hindu rituals” in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” is a scene near the end of The Golden Bird, in which my character is betrayed by a lover. The episode features my protagonist reading a passage from T.S. Eliot’s spiritual masterpiece Four Quartets and a phrase from Bob’s “She’s Your Lover Now.” In my narrative, I portray this recitation as cosmically linked with a violent windstorm in the mountains and an accident in which my girlfriend and her new conquest are crushed by a tree. Yikes! Here are the verses from Eliot as they appear in my memoir, along with a key line between them:

“The dove descending breaks the air

With flame of incandescent terror

Of which the tongues declare

The one discharge from sin and error.

The only hope, or else despair

Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre—

To be redeemed from fire by fire”

I read it aloud like an incantation.

“Who then devised the torment? Love.

Love is the unfamiliar name

Behind the hands that wove

The intolerable shirt of flame

Which human power cannot remove

We only live, only suspire

Consumed by either fire or fire”

In “Hindu Rituals and Gumbo Limbo Spirituals," I cited Eliot’s sources and discussed his imagery:

“The dove descending” is an image of the spirit of Jesus entering his apostles at the Pentecost. It is also an allusion to German bombers over London, letting fly their weapons of fiery death. Eliot unites these things under the banner of “Love.” He suggests that the fire of suffering, through sin and mortality, and the fire of purification, through the compassion of Christ and repentance, are inseparable.

Dylan seems to have a fondness for this scene from The Golden Bird. He has mirrored it with his clips five separate times. First, the film titles She Done Him Wrong and Clash by Night elegantly describe the betrayal and the result. The folk song “Skip to My Lou,” a children’s rhyme about abandoning your partner, as sung by Ken Curtis in The Searchers, also puns on it. I pointed out these mirrors in my piece called Bob Dylan’s Instagram Posts Part 2, and Dylan soon confirmed my takes, eloquently and explicitly, with a clip from The Rainmaker, of Burt Lancaster reciting to Katherine Hepburn about his power to summon a storm with chanting and song. Finally, Dylan followed up with a swamp country classic, “House of Memories,” sung by a man named, well, Storm.

I also wrote about how the title of that song puns on Dylan’s past, as hidden in the lyrics of “Key West (Philosopher Pirate).” It has occurred to me more recently that it is also a pun on my own memoir—my “House of Memories”—from which Dylan borrowed.

That’s a lot of mirrors. And I’ll add one more. As I mentioned in my last piece, Dylan’s long clip of MGK rapping to a record store audience, although it doesn’t connect directly to the episode in The Golden Bird, is also a “Hindu ritual”: those kids are going to church, harmonizing on a holy chant.

Dylan has also artfully cited my writing on “gumbo limbo spirituals.” In Chapter Six, I show how the phrase—created from another pun; see my chapter for the story—describes certain songs from his post-gospel years that convey a sense of separation between the singer and his God. In Part Two of this series, I pointed out how Dylan reflected my take with his post of Lowell George’s “Long Distance Love.”

Here’s where the Carter Family comes in. Dylan’s clip of Johnny Cash, along with Maybelle, Anita, June and Helen Carter singing a powerful hymn, “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord,” is another of his time machines. It takes us to the year of the recording, 1962, when Dylan had just released his first record, and also to 1979, when Dylan wrote and sang hymns to the exclusion of all else. As I showed in Chapter One, Dylan’s gospel years are at the center of the underground story of “Key West (Philosopher Pirate).”

But I’m not just saying a Cash gospel song might remind us of Dylan’s gospel period. I’m saying that Dylan intends to bring us to 1979, by alluding to a quote from an interview he gave that year, as it appears in “Hindu Rituals and Gumbo Limbo Spirituals”:

Jesus put his hand on me. It was a physical thing. I felt it. I felt it all over me. I felt my whole body tremble. The glory of the Lord knocked me down and picked me up.

Here’s the key line of “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord”:

Sometimes it causes me to tremble

The allusion is direct. Anita Carter’s voice is soul-shaking. As the singers echo the word “tremble,” with Cash last, down on the bottom with his baritone, you can feel the hand of the Lord. As I point out many times in “I Don’t Love Nobody,” Dylan often comments on his own experience through the work of another artist, and at least once, in the song that inspired this book, the work of a fan. This technique goes back to his early fascination, as he told us in Chronicles, with a line from Rimbaud:

I is another

The reflection between “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord” and my chapter continues down the page, as I muse on Dylan’s “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven” as a “gumbo limbo spiritual.” I discuss these lines:

I’ve been walking that lonesome valley

Trying to get to Heaven before they close the door

Here’s some of my take:

The word “lonesome,” in the third line, is a standard in hillbilly songs, appearing in any number of Hank Williams and Carter Family compositions. And perhaps the most famous “valley” in the Bible appears in Psalm 23:

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.

Not bad, as far as it goes, but I missed the specific fact that The Carter Family recorded a traditional song called “Lonesome Valley”—also put on acetate by his hero Woody Guthrie. That song, like Dylan’s “gumbo limbo spirituals,” tells about the solitary road back to God:

You gotta walk that lonesome valley

You gotta walk it by yourself

Nobody here can walk it for you

You gotta walk it by yourself

Dylan’s clip of Cash and the Carter Family confirms the idea that the Frank James post was a tribute for his outlaw friend, and points toward the Carters as the origin of his “lonesome valley” phrase. But more importantly, Bob leads us back down “Mystery Street”—that long road of faith and destiny—with a gospel song, to a moment when the physical presence of God in his life was immediate and undeniable. Anita’s voice puts us on Calvary as Christ is nailed to the cross, and in the garden with Mary Magdalene as the stone in front of His tomb is rolled away.

“Were You There When They Crucified My Lord” conveys what Dylan experienced in 1978, when the presence of Jesus made his “whole body tremble.” It takes us to the place he portrays in the second verse of “Key West (Philosopher Pirate),” when a radio signal suddenly came in “clear as can be.” The Cash and Carter Family gospel song alludes to a precise moment when, in an image Dylan transfigured from a scene in The Golden Bird, he fell “so deep in love I can hardly see.”

Yesterday afternoon, as I was preparing to publish this piece, Dylan posted again on Instagram—a bluegrass band called the Johnson Mountain Boys, playing an obscure old hymn written by Adger Pace: “I Can Tell You the Time.” Here’s the first couple verses:

I remember the time

When in darkness I wandered

Far from home

On a mountain of sin

I travelled so alone

Like a prodigal son

All my good I had squandered

Sadly I roamed

But the Savior came in

And he gave me a song

It was a beautiful song

I can tell you the time

I can take you to the place

I can show you the place

Where the Lord saved me

By His wonderful grace

But I can not tell you how

For I know not the how

And I can not tell you why

And I know not the why

But He’ll tell me all about it

In the by and by

Bob can tell us the time, he can show us the place. The Lord put a hand on him. His Savior gave him a song—it was a beautiful song. It caused him to tremble.

Last night in Tulsa, Dylan once again took to the highway, east bound, west bound, continuing his Rough and Rowdy Ways World Tour. We know where he’s headed. He’s headed for the gospel land. He’s headed for “Key West.”