When the law doesn't work.

AuthorUnderwood, Richard H.
PositionBob Dylan and the Law

Introduction I. Dylan's Traditional Songs II. The Finger-Pointing Songs A. The Ballad of Donald White B. The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll C. Hurricane III. Bad Judge Ballads A. Percy's Song B. Talkin' Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues (how I finally found some "true facts" and a source for a song) Talk'n Fordham University Law School Bob Dylan and the Law Conference Blues INTRODUCTION

I read in the paper that the former governor's son shot his ex-girlfriend. (1) She's dead. She had a restraining order, but the law didn't work. (2) Another story says that Rand Paul thinks mountain-top removal just needs some rebranding) "I don't think anybody's going to be missing a hill or two here or there," he says? That reminds me: did you know that the mountains on the back of the West Virginia quarter may be blown up? One was already being mined illegally when permission was granted for it to be destroyed. (5) Seems like there is a lot of law, but it's not working. On another page it says, "West Virginia Mine Methane Blast Worst in a Quarter Century"! (6) What happened to the law? (I hope to connect this up. Be patient.)

I'm not a "Dylanologist," or even a devotee. (7) I guess I was invited because I've written a lot of articles dealing with the "true facts" behind Southern murder ballads. You could say that these articles are in the "true crime" genre. (8) Since a tiny bit of my work has dealt with the "true facts" behind old ballads, I hoped to find some Dylan songs I could trace back to "true crime" to relate Dylan to the law in that way. Then, I tried to see what he had to say about the law in his songs. Here, I will look at Ballad of Hollis Brown, (9) Ballad of Donald White, (10) The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll, (11) Hurricane, (12) and Percy's Song. (13) I am throwing in Talking Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues (14) too, just for fun. I found a copy of the news story that supposedly inspired it.

Dylan was not concerned with "true facts" as such (as I will point out in my comments, some of his most powerful and effective songs dispensed with "true facts" to tell the story he wanted to tell). In fact, in his early days, after reading the paper or watching a television show, he was supposedly inspired to write some bleak, depressing songs that touched on the failure of the system, and the failure of the law. He started out being enamored of Woody Guthrie, so it is not surprising that he would have sung and written songs about a seemingly failed system and ruined lives. (15) We believe in the rule of law, but a lot of times the law does not work very well. When Bob Dylan set out for New York, there were a lot of failures of the law to sing about. There still are.

I grew up in the fifties and sixties, and I remember the "folk revival." "My friends and I spent many an afternoon" (16) trying to learn to play the banjo and guitar using the Pete Seeger books. We all thought Dylan was cool. I still remember the girl who tried to pass off the It Ain't Me Babe (17) lyrics to our aging English teacher as her original poetry. We ratted her out! Anyway, as we drifted into the late sixties, and I drifted off to Vietnam, I put away such things. (18) The electrified Dylan was not my cup of tea, or maybe I was in a foreign country when all that was going on. I did not know that Dylan had been born again until I started catching up for this conference, and I did not know about the album with the Santa song. (19) I will have nothing further to say about the album with the Santa song.

I guess I got back into the old music that Greil Marcus and others claim inspired Dylan when I married my wife, Virginia, who is from southwest Virginia. Her father was a coal miner, and she grew up in a "coal camp" called Clinchco, (20) in Virginia. She went to Berea College at the age of seventeen, with two dollars in her pocket. Her mother was dying of cancer, and her father, who only had one lung left because of the "black lung," was in a tuberculosis sanitarium. We go back to southwest Virginia from time to time, and I am familiar with the old towns mentioned in Greil Marcus's book in which he talks about Dock Boggs and his influence on Bob Dylan. (21) These are not places strange to me like they were to Greil Marcus or to Bob Dylan when he went there. They are pretty much just down the road. Corporations stripped off the trees, then dug up or scraped off the coal, and now they have gone back and put these scary pumps in people's yards to suck out natural gas. The folks who live there get nothing out of it, of course, except poisoned water to drink. They do not even have gas from the wells in their towns. It goes to neighboring towns. These folks are the involuntary sacrifice for our national well-being, I guess. The law, and there is a lot of it, does not seem to work for them.

Just down the road from one of these pumps is a slate pile. This is the crap that is left behind when you dig up the coal. My wife told me about two little boys who were sent by their alcoholic parents to get a jar of moonshine from an adjacent holler. They got halfway home, but by then they had drunk the whole jar, and they laid down on the slate pile and died from the noxious fumes. No one paid, including the coal company that dumped that stuff literally in the middle of town. The law did not work. I guess that would have made a good Bob Dylan song for the folks in New York City.

  1. DYLAN'S TRADITIONAL SONGS

    As I went back through Dylan's discography, I was actually surprised by the number of traditional tunes he sang, which some people seem to think he wrote, even though there was often nothing really original there except his voice and style. (22) I came across one post in which an enthusiastic fan gushed something to the effect that only Bob Dylan could have written something as weird as Love Henry. (23) Like most of the New York set, he was influenced by Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music. (24) In the early sixties, he started to do topical songs, which some people call his protest or finger-pointing songs. These apparently made him a figure in the Civil Rights Movement. As time passed, the stuff that made him unique was not his traditional tunes but his original lyrics that were sometimes set to traditional tunes and sometimes not.

    I guess you could say that a lot of Dylan's old songs have something to do with the law. The traditional songs which came from Old, Weird America involve murder (mostly violence against women), suicide, and bad judges.

    I have had people ask me about the "true facts" behind these songs, and I have to explain to them that some of the traditional songs are traceable to true crime, like Delia (25) and Frankie and Albert (26); but, some are not, like Little Sadie, (27) and In Search of Little Sadie (28) (both variants of Bad Lee Brown), and Pretty Polly. (29) Dylan got his Little Sadie from Clarence Ashley, and his Pretty Polly from Dock Boggs. These southern tunes are frightful in their misogyny. (30) The African-American community provides similar songs of the type, impossible to connect to a specific murder. Here is one by Robert Johnson:

    'F I send for my baby, man and she don't come, 'F I send for my baby and she don't come, All the doctors in Hot Springs sure can't help her none. And if she gets unruly, thinks she don't wan' do, If she gets unruly and thinks she don't wan' do, Take my .32-20 now and cut her half in two. (31) You can find a lot of wife-shooting and girlfriend-killing in the law reports around the turn of the century (nothing has changed since then). The appellate opinions are rather matter-of-fact about the whole thing.

    The prisoner was convicted of the premeditated and deliberate murder of his wife. The...

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