Bob Dylan's Instagram Posts Part Six

The Hidden Story

Hello! Once again, as I was getting close to publishing this piece on Bob Dylan’s latest Instagram posts, he released three more! One with the words of composer Stephen Foster, a second clip with Paul Robeson singing one of Foster’s songs: “My Old Kentucky Home,” and a third featuring Johnny Cash and the Carter Family singing “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord” on a 1962 television broadcast. I haven’t had a chance to look into the first two yet, but I want to mention the last, as a preface to the piece below.

If this is your first visit here, please start at the beginning! Everything will make more sense. Otherwise, you know my tale: to my astonishment, delight, awe, all those things, Dylan is dialoguing with this book, “I Don’t Love Nobody’” Hidden Stories From Bob Dylan’s Rough and Rowdy Ways, by mirroring my chapters with Instagram posts. He’s speaking allusively in the languages he loves: folk and rock and blues, movies, puns and humor.

Yeah, I know.

Now he has me laughing again, falling to my knees, then standing up and laughing some more. My last post, published on March 8, led with a smiling photo of the Man in Black. I put it there because the article ended with the idea that Dylan’s audio clip of “The Last Testament of Frank James” was a reference to the complex, cosmic, and morally ambiguous world of folk legend, to hidden stories, and a tribute to Cash on his birthday.

Dylan’s new post of Cash performing “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord” is a gorgeous response, in this tale about the spiritual necessity of song. It made me tremble.

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Welcome back. Today, I’m going to catch up on the four Bob Dylan Instagram posts from February 26 and March 3 that I haven’t yet discussed. All of these mirror my chapters in “I Don’t Love Nobody”: Hidden Stories from Bob Dylan’s Rough and Rowdy Ways and my previous pieces about his Instagram clips. Here, I’ll show how that works.

For sixty-three years, Dylan has asked us to be participants in his art. It matters how we see ourselves in the songs and how we carry the songs around in our lives. As I wrote in Chapter One, that seems to be why he used imagery in my memoir, The Golden Bird, for his poetry in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate).” It’s all about the mirrors and it’s all about the inspiration. In these pieces, I’m doing my best to keep up. I’m trying to stay observant, participate, and get this story out into the world. I’m trying to dig deep and avoid the superficial. I’m pretty sure that’s my job here.

For now, this is a story of secret community. It’s down under. I have about 250 subscribers, but only half of you open the emails (I don’t understand how Substack knows that, but they do), and I imagine only half of those folks read the whole thing. It’s a big party, but we could all fit in good-sized house. This tale requires attention and patience to comprehend. It’s not for everyone. Many folks just want to look at pictures of the man in cool outfits. Others just want to whistle along. It’s all okay. The academics? I’m not sure where they’re at. Locked away in their towers, I guess.

I’m glad we’re here together, in this hard to find place, down on the bottom, in “Key West.”

So how about that MGK? Dylan’s clip was the first I’d ever heard from the artist formerly known as Machine Gun Kelly. In the comments, a lot of folks repeated variations of the opening line of a famous review of Dylan’s Self Portrait: “What is this shit?” Nothing we expected here: no classic folk or rock or blues, or sweet old movies from the ‘50s.

Once again, Dylan throws a curveball! Here it comes! And the fans swing and miss!

MGK is not really my cuppa tea either, but that doesn’t matter.

The ones participating in this art are the kids in that record store, and man, are they ever participating. In Chapter Six of “I Don’t Love Nobody” Hidden Stories From Bob Dylan’s Rough and Rowdy Ways, the chapter I published just before Dylan’s volley of Instagram posts began, I showed how the phrase “Hindu rituals” refers to the incantatory power of song. In my pieces since then, I’ve described how several of Dylan’s clips have riffed on this theme, and specifically to the episode in The Golden Bird that inspired the phrase.

If you’ve read my previous posts, I bet you’re with me here, but if not, go back and check them out. As a quick reminder, from The Golden Bird I’m talking T.S. Eliot and Four Quartets, a violent storm in the Colorado mountains, and an unfaithful lover crushed by a tree. From Dylan’s Instagram, I’m talking movie titles: She Done Him Wrong, Clash by Night, and The Rainmaker. I’m talking Ken Curtis singing “Skip-to-my-Lou” in The Searchers, a nursery song about abandoning your partner.

How does this concern MGK? He has his audience spellbound. They come right in on the crucial lines. It reminds me of me in the car, sing-shouting every time my favorite couplet in “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” comes up:

To keep it in your mind and not forget

that it is not he or she or them or it that you belong to

I never miss, and those kids in the record store never miss when MGK says …. what the heck … I can’t tell what he’s saying. But you get the point. The song is a long incantation and the crowd is getting high, like going to church, just like the crowd gets high when Eddie Van Halen plays “Cathedral” and just like Tony Rice gets high, picking and smiling, losing those “Hell on Church Street Blues.”

Near the end of this rap, MGK puts his palms together and intones, “Church.” Did you notice that?

Dylan might really like MGK, or one of his grandkids does, and he might want to support the artist by posting this clip, but what he is presenting in the context of this conversation is a chant, a “Hindu ritual,” a song with spiritual power. Dylan has crossed a lot of genres in his career; you might even say he was an early rapper with his talking blues and “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” but time marches on, new generations arise, and they have their own soundtrack. Dylan acknowledges that fact here, showing us the strong connection between a young performer and his audience. Notice that this post has two to five times as many “likes” as some of Dylan’s other Instagram clips. The kids approve.

Next up, “House of Memories” by Warren Storm. A beautiful song. Had you ever heard it before? Did you know Warren Storm? Not me. Great stuff!

Here, once again, Dylan gets punny with my writing.

In “I Don’t Love Nobody,” we’ve been spending a lot of time in Dylan’s “House of Memories,” as heard on Rough and Rowdy Ways. In Chapter One and in these posts, I’ve written a lot about “Mystery Street,” that road of faith and destiny that begins near the convent home of the Sacred Heart in Duluth, skirts Leif Erikson Park and the Armory, then runs down Highway 61 all the way to the bottom, to paradise divine in “Key West.” In Bob Dylan’s Instagram Posts Part Two, I described how in his clip of the Band playing a 1958 Johnny Otis song, Dylan bends time, so that his senior year of high school in Hibbing touches his famed collaborations with Helm, Hudson, and crew. And in Bob Dylan’s Instagram Posts Part Four, published just two days before this clip of Storm, I showed how Dylan’s segment featuring the Osborne Brothers reflects on his own performances at Newport in 1963 through 1965, as depicted in Festival, and how that film puts his famous “electric” moment into the wider context of folk music: a mystic context. I even called the clip of the Osborne Brothers “an intellectual funhouse of mirrors.” Which, as it turns out, is also a funhouse of memories.

And watch out, there’s another pun incoming! In this “House of Memories” we are still on the subject of song and incantation, as described in that crazy episode from my memoir. Why? Because of the name of this wonderful, but slightly obscure singer: Warren Storm. Do I need to say more about that? Gosh, I don’t think I do.

Next up: The Best Years of Our Lives. Title-wise, pun-wise, we’re still in the “House of Memories.” But of course, there’s more. This clip features Hoagy Carmichael as Butch Engel, at the piano in his bar, offering some advice to Homer Parrish, played by Harold Russell. Homer, back from the war with prosthetic hooks for hands, is avoiding his family and his fiancee Wilma. He’s worried that Wilma can’t really want to marry him with his disability. As Butch plinks the melody of “Lazy River” on the piano, he reassures Homer. Butch tells Homer that his folks will get used to his hooks and stop acting so strange, and all the while, the music soothes. He lets Homer know that Wilma loves him regardless. As he speaks, Butch keeps tickling those keys. Even his final words, that anyway, if a new war comes, “none of us will have to worry, because we’ll all be blown to bits the first day” is just a float down that lazy river. He finishes the song, looks at Homer and says, “So cheer up, huh?” Homer gives a big grin.

Once again, we are in the church of music.

A later scene in the film directly mirrors this one. Butch and Homer sit at the piano, where Homer is excited to show his buddy Al—another veteran just home from the war—that he can accompany Butch on a robust version of “Chopsticks.” Al is upset, however, because he’s just had a tense conversation with another veteran, Fred, and told him to stay away from his daughter, Peggy. The two have fallen in love, but Fred is unemployed and still married to an unfaithful party girl. Fred, out of respect for his soldier friend, has reluctantly agreed to break up with Peggy. Here’s the thing: while the boys play “Chopsticks,” we see Fred in the far background, in a phone booth, making the difficult call. The film’s director, William Wyler, and his cinematographer, Gregg Toland, used the innovative camera technique of “deep focus” to keep both parts of the action clear. While Hoagy and Harold Russell play a lively, superficial song out front, the drama, the pivotal action, is taking place in the background.

Music, even the simplest kind, can distract us from our troubles and woes. We can’t forget those things; they’re still clear as day, but music helps us bear them.

Finally, let’s look at the clip of Josh White, playing a very sexy song, “Jelly Jelly.” One thing to know is that White’s biographer is Elijah Wald, who also wrote Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties, the source for the recent movie, A Complete Unknown.

Wald’s Josh White: Society Blues tells the singer’s story from his beginnings as a child guide for blind blues singers in the south and a teenage session guitarist on “race” records, through to his friendship with Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, his time caught in a no-man’s land between left and right during the Red Scare years, which earned him the enmity of both camps, his role introducing the blues to white audiences, his protest recordings with Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and the Almanac singers, and his time living and playing in Europe. In short, White was everywhere and influenced everyone. The irony, however, is that he was also often shunned and sidelined, at various times perceived as too smooth for the blues, too accommodating to white audiences, and too cooperative with the House UnAmerican Activities Committee.

Read Wald’s book for more on White’s incredible life and music; this website also has some great performance clips and a deep perspective.

Dylan’s Instagram clip is a fine tribute and introduction to White. I’m sure you won’t be surprised, however, to read that there’s more to see, deep in this mirror. We are back on “Mystery Street,” strolling through Dylan’s “House of Memories.” We are in 1962, when the 21-year-old Bob is recording “In My Time of Dying,’” one of the most moving tracks on his debut record for Columbia. This gospel standard, also called “Jesus Make Up My Dyin’ Bed,” was first recorded by Blind Willie Johnson and is based on lyrics found in old hymnals. Charlie Patton recorded it as “Jesus is A-Dying Bed Maker,” and Josh White recorded influential versions in both 1933 and in the mid-forties.

We are also at Newport in 1965, where on Sunday evening (although he had been scheduled for Thursday) White made his only appearance at the festival (in any year, not having been invited previously due to some reverse-blacklisting by the organizers because of his HUAC appearance), after Dylan’s famed electric set, on the same stage. What did he sing? “Nobody Knows When You’re Down and Out,” and, you guessed it: “Jelly Jelly.”

Here, Dylan mirrors my writing about his Osborne Brothers clip with another reference to the festival. He confirms that we need to look at his ‘65 Newport set with a wider lens than the simple dualism of folk versus rock. Josh White, who could do it all, appeared on stage only minutes later, playing a sexy folk blues. White was a “commercial” artist, also frowned upon at Newport. Once again, Dylan shows something critical about himself through the image of another. White was a wide-ranging, highly skilled performer; he was the Singing Christian in his youth and a Cafe Society chanteur in middle-age; he was a bluesman, a folkie, and a jazz artist, but instead of being celebrated for his ability to flow through genres, he was often criticized by factions and writers who thought he should be something different, something they would prefer. Sound familiar?

And finally, there’s only one place that Mystery Street eventually leads; we are down at the bottom again, in my time of dyin’, in that liminal place, the place of “Nearer My God to Thee” and that spiral staircase, in “Key West.” We are in the place I described in Chapter One, walking in the shadows after dark, flying around in the alternate reality of folk songs, in a lyric that Bob Dylan transfigured from a passage of my memoir into "Key West (Philosopher Pirate)”:

Fly around My Pretty Little Miss

I don’t love nobody - Gimme a Kiss

Down at the bottom - way down in Key West

Here’s the second verse of “In My Time of Dyin’”:

Well, meet me Jesus, meet me, meet me

in the middle of the air

if these wings should fail to me

Lord won’t you meet me with another pair

See you next time. I appreciate you being here.