American Recordings: On "Love and Theft" and the Minstrel Boy

by Sean Wilentz

It is May 24, 1966, and at the Olympia in Paris, also known as "la salle la plus importante d'Europe," time slips.

Exactly two years after this night of music, many of the young people who are in the audience will be rioting in the Paris streets, their heads full of ideas that will drive them to proclaim a revolution of the imagination, fight pitched battles with the police and the National Guard, and try to burn down the Paris Stock Exchange, in what would become known forever in Left Bank lore as "la nouvelle nuit des barricades," the most dramatic cataclysm of May '68. Seven hundred and ninety five rioters are arrested, and 456 are injured.

But now it's exactly two years earlier, to the minute, and the rebels-to-be sit expectantly, waiting for the second half of the show, when the curtain parts, and there they see to their horror, attached to the backdrop, the emblem of everything they are coming to hate, the emblem of napalm and Coca Cola and white racism and colonialism and imagination's death. It is a huge 50-star American flag.

What's the joke? But it is no joke. They are here to hear the idol, and know full well that the idol now will play electric (after what turned out to be a frustrating-to-all-concerned acoustic set), but this stars-and-stripes stuff turns a musical challenge into an assault, an incitement, as in your face—more so—to the young Left Bank leftists as any Fender Stratocaster. In England, the idol had traded insults with the hecklers, but in Paris, on this, his 25th birthday, he strikes first.

Whether they like it or not, the idol will give them his own version of "America," a place that they have never learned about in books, and, if they have, that they do not comprehend.

Not quite five months after this concert, the French pop singer Johnny Hallyday plays the Olympia. He has two young women back-up singers, one wearing a miniskirt, the other, vaguely resembling Marianne Faithfull, dressed in trousers and a vest. He also has a back-up band that doubles as his warm-up act, a new group, still in formation and a little rough, that is introduced to the audience as hailing from Seattle, Washington, and that performs, among other numbers, a bent-out-of-shape version of the Troggs' top-40 summer smash "Wild Thing." There is no flag, and by now the Paris audience has caught up, musically—enough to be amazed, not dismayed, by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, in its fourth public appearance.

Suddenly, it's May '66 again, Hendrix and company have vanished, and the star-spangled banner is back. An organist and a drummer and a bunch of guitarists take the Olympia stage. The organist is the guy from the Sir Douglas Quintet, and the lead guitarist is only 10 years old or so, and the headliner, skinny as a fence rail, has swapped his Mod-cut houndstooth suit for a black and silver Nashville number, and he wears a five-gallon hat; and somehow during the intermission he has sprouted a Dapper Dan pencil moustache. Then the kid guitarist turns into a grownup and the band rips into, not "Tell Me, Momma," but a faster version of "From a Buick Six," curling the ears of the rebels-to-be. The headliner rasps the opening lines:

"Tweedlee Dum and Tweedlee Dee/
They're thrown' knives into the tree…"

***

Love and theft, Bob Dylan has said, fit together like fingers in a glove. But don't quote somebody when you can steal.

The new album's title, people have noticed, is the same as a book by Eric Lott on the origins and character of American blackface minstrelsy. In the 1820's and 1830's, young working-class white men from the North began imitating Southern slaves on stage, blacking up and playing banjoes and tambourines and rat-a-tat bones sets, jumping and singing in a googly-eyed "Yass suh, Noooooo sah" dialect about sex and love and death and just plain nonsense. The minstrels stole from blacks and caricatured them, and often showed racist contempt—but their theft was also an act of envy and desire and love. Bluenoses condemned the shows as vulgar. Aficionados, from Walt Whitman to Abraham Lincoln to Mark Twain, adored the minstrels for their fun, and for much more than that. "'Nigger' singing with them," Whitman wrote of one blackface troupe in 1846, "is a subject from obscure life in the hands of a divine painter."

Whether Dylan stole his title from Lott is anybody's guess. But there is plenty of theft and love (and divinity) in "Love and Theft," some of it obvious. One needn't know much more about the songs of Robert Johnson and the rest of the Delta blues players than the versions copped by the Rolling Stones in order to recognize the po' boy prodigal son or the line in "Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum" about someone's love being "all in vain." Johnson again, but also the upcountry white pickers Clarence Ashley and Dock Boggs get plundered on "High Water (For Charley Patton)," the best song on the album. Patton, who is something of the presiding shade of "Love and Theft," also wrote and recorded a song about the great 1927 flood in Mississippi, "High Water Everywhere." "Lonesome Day Blues," was the title of a song by Blind Willie McTell of Georgia.

Dylan has been committing this kind of theft all of his working life, right down to swiping his own surname. The tune of "Song to Woody," on his very first album, is a direct steal of Guthrie's own "1913 Massacre." Now, as then, Dylan is a minstrel, filching other people's diction and mannerisms and melodies and lyrics and transforming them and making them his own, a form of larceny that is as American as apple pie, and cherry, pumpkin and plum pie, too. Or as American as Chang and Eng, the original Siamese twins, who, though born in Siam, started touring the United States in proto-carny style in 1829, coming to town right beside the minstrels, before they signed up with P.T. Barnum in 1832, for whom they worked for seven years and then retired to Wilkesboro, North Carolina, became American citizens, married a pair of sisters, and raised two families before showing up on "Love and Theft" for "Honest with Me."

But Dylan is a modern minstrel—a whiteface minstrel. The hard-edged racism taken for granted by the 19th-century troupes is of another age. The disguises that Dylan has sported on stage—"I have my Bob Dylan mask on," he told his New York audience, off the cuff, on Halloween night, 1964—are more of himself, his time, and his America. While he has tipped his hat to the old-time minstrels, he has inverted their display, as when he actually whitened his face for the Rolling Thunder Revue.

As a modern minstrel, he has continually updated and widened his ambit, never more so than on "Love and Theft," lifting what he pleases from the last century's great American songbook. Folk songs, as ever: The wonderful tag line of "Mississippi" comes from an old folk tune called "Rosie." "The Darktown Strutters' Ball" is here, plain as day. But there are also melodies and lyrics reminiscent of songs from the 1930's and 1940's and 1950's, and bits and pieces of the rockabilly "Hopped-Up Mustang" appear on "Summer Days" and "High Water."

(In a disarming little story about three jolly kings that became the liner notes to "John Wesley Harding," Dylan pokes fun at the Dylanologists who search for the great true meaning in his songs. "Faith is the key!" one king says, "No, froth is the key!," the second says; "You're both wrong," says the third," the key is Frank!" In the story, the third king is right, sort of—but who would have ever imagined that Frank might turn out to be someone like Sinatra.)

And, of course, among the great old last-century songwriters whom Dylan recycles is himself—and not just from his songs or his adaptations of other people's. In New Orleans, there was a streetcar that had as its destination a street called "Desire." Tennessee Williams used it for the title of his play; Dylan appears to have adapted it (or used Williams) for the title of an album. ("Streetcar," the play, seems to turn up elsewhere in Dylan, as in Blanche Dubois's immortal line about how her family's "epic fornications," led to the loss of its estate on a called-in mortgage: "The four-letter word deprived us of our plantation," Blanche remembers, the word in question being either fuck or love.) Well, "Desire" is back on "Love and Theft." "Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum" and "Honest With Me" and "Cry A While" are all variations of standard 12-bar blues, but listen hard and I think you'll catch the musicality of "Buick Six" (especially the unreleased version, if you've had the chance to hear it) and of "Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat" (like "Song to Woody," a standard number Dylan's recent live shows) and of "Pledging My Time". (Same thing with the 8-bar blues "Po' Boy" and the 8-bar "Cocaine," yet another recent concert standard.) The opening guitar lick of "High Water" brings my ear back to "Down in the Flood;" and the rest of the song recalls John Lee Hooker's "Tupelo," as rendered on the complete bootleg version of The Basement Tapes. Dylan's been singing his own version of "The Coo Coo" at least since his Gaslight days forty years ago.

There's no message to this modern minstrel style. It is a style, a long-evolving style, not a doctrine or an ideology. But that's not to say that Dylan, a craftsman, is unaware of that style, or that we should be either. Several years ago, Johnny Cash released an excellent album of traditional songs which he called "American Recordings." "Love and Theft" could have the same title, though Dylan's musical reach is even wider than the great Cash's, and his minstrelsy more complicated. He's unfurled that American flag once again.

In keeping with the seemingly miscellaneous but highly structured randomness of the minstrel shows, "Love and Theft" is an album of songs—greatest hits, except they haven't become hits yet, Dylan has said. And like the shows, the album is funny, maybe the funniest Dylan has produced since he was writing songs like "Outlaw Blues." Some of the jokes, like the minstrels', read flat on the page—"Freddy or not here I come" ???—but Dylan's delivery of them makes me laugh out loud. Here's another one, a rim-shot pun that could have come right from an old minstrel show—dull to read, but funny when sung:

I'm stark naked but I don't care/
I'm goin' off into the woods I'm hunt'n' bare

When asked who his favorite poets were in 1965, Dylan mentioned a flying-trapeze family from the circus, Smokey Robinson, and W.C. Fields (who through vaudeville had his own connections to minstrelsy); now, in "Lonesome Day Blues," he pays a little homage to Field's snowbound gag-line in "The Fatal Glass of Beer": "T'aint fit night out for man nor beast!"

Many of the other jokes are high-low literary and operatic. Don Pasquale's 2 a.m. booty call in "Cry A While" comes right out of Donizetti's "Don Pasquale," a farce about an old man's lust for young women, first performed in Paris in 1843—high-minstrel time in America. Then there are the Shakespearean jokes about shivering old Othello and the bad-complexioned Juliet. All of these high-low jokes, too, are in the updated minstrel style, last heard from Dylan in this humorous way on "Highway 61 Revisited": the blackface companies regularly performed spoofs of grand opera and Shakespeare ("Hamlet" was a particular favorite)—works as familiar to popular American audiences a century and a half ago as "Seinfeld" and Walt Disney are today.

Dylan delivers every joke poker-faced, like someone out of something by the minstrel show patron Twain. And some of the jokes are sinister. To the steel-guitar background in "Moonlight," all is songbirds and flowers in the heavy dusk, when, lightly lilting, the crooner sings:

Well, I'm preaching peace and harmony,
The blessings of tranquillity,
Yet, I know when the time is right to strike.
I'll take you 'cross the river, dear,
You don't need to linger here;
I know the kinds of things you like...

Ah, the silver-tongued devil. Rudy Vallee turns into Robert Mitchum. It's scary, and yet it's hilarious.

And there is plenty more serious and fearful play on "Love and Theft." More than any old-time minstrel (and more like later bluesmen and "country" singers) Dylan thinks about the cosmos contained in every grain of sand. All of those floods aren't just floods, they're also The Flood. Why else do Charles Darwin and his ultra-materialist friend George Lewes (lover of the great novelist, George Eliot) turn up in "High Water," wanted dead or alive by a snarling Mississippi judge? Lewes tells the believers, the Englishman, the Italian and the Jew (Protestant/ Roman Catholic/ Hebrew?) that, no, they can't open their minds to just anything, and for that the high sheriff's on his tail. "Some of these bootleggers," Dylan sings on "Sugar Baby," "they make pretty good stuff." Beware of false prophets.

The Lord's messenger is vengeful. Hear what Dylan does with "Coo Coo":

Well, the cuckoo is a pretty bird, she warbles as she flies/
I'm preachin' the word of God, I'm puttin' out your eyes

And Jesus isn't any pushover either. Listen to "Bye and Bye," another crooner's tune, and imagine that, alongside Augie Meyers's wickedly goopy organ, the crooner is Christ Himself, in some of the verses anyway, singing lyrics written by the Biblical prophet John of Patmos:

Bye and bye, I'm breathin' a lover's sigh/
While I'm sittin' on my watch so I can be on time/
I'm singin' love's praises with sugar-coated rhyme…

Well, I'm gonna baptize you in fire so you can sin no more/
I'm gonna establish my rule through civil war/
Gonna make you see just how loyal and true a man can be.

Christ comes with peace—and a sword.

And there are other seers and magicians here too, the hoo-doo men of the Delta blues—bragging mannish boys with their St. John the Conqueroos who say if you can do it, it ain't bragging.

From "High Water":

I can write you poems, make a strong man lose his mind/
I'm no pig without a wig, I hope you treat me kind

"Summer Days":

Yes, I'm leaving in the morning, just as soon as the dark clouds lift/
I'm breakin' the roof, set fire to the place as a partin' gift

"Honest With Me":

When I left my home the sky split open wide

"Cry A While":

I don't carry dead weight, I'm no flash in the pan/
All right, I'll set you straight, can't you see I'm a union man

Feel like a fightin' rooster, feel better than I ever felt

And this, from "Lonesome Day Blues":

I'm going to spare the defeated, I'm going to speak to the crowd
I'm going to spare the defeated, 'cause I'm going to speak to the crowd
I'm going to teach peace to the conquered, I'm going to tame the proud

That last one may just also be a paraphrase from Virgil's "Aeneid."

There is a richness to these all of these musical and literary references in "Love and Theft" that was only foreshadowed in "Tombstone Blues," with its mere glimpses of Ma Rainey and Beethoven—just as there is a richness to Dylan's silk-cut voice and to his diction and timing (he has been listening to Sinatra, and maybe Caruso and surely Allen Ginsberg) uncaptured on previous studio recordings. He's mastered so much more, including his own performing style, or at least his recorded performing style. Listen to the break-neck opening lines of "Cry A While"--"didn't havta' wanna' havta' deal with"--then the sudden bluesy downshift; or the killer long-line about repeating the past in "Summer Days"; the pause in Juliet's reply to Romeo; the "High Water" Judge's creepy, "Either one, I don't…care," the last word dropping and landing with a thud like one of the song's lead-balloon coffins.

And with his expert timing, Dylan shuffles space and time like a deck of playing cards. One moment, it's 1935, high atop some Manhattan hotel, then its 1966 in Paris or 2000 in West Lafayette, Indiana or this coming November in Terre Haute, then it's 1927, and we're in Mississippi and the water's deeper 'n as it come, then we're thrown back into Biblical time, entire epochs melting away, except that we're rolling across the flats in a Cadillac, or maybe it's a Mustang Ford, and that girl tosses off her underwear, high water everywhere. Then it's September 11, 2001, eerily the date this album was released, and we're inside a dive on lower Broadway, and, horribly beyond description, things are blasted and breaking up out there, nothing's standing there. And it's always right now, too, on "Love and Theft."

Dylan, remember, has been out there a very long time. He spent time with the Rev. Gary Davis, and Robert Johnson's rival Son House, and Dock Boggs, and Clarence Ashley, and all those fellows; he played for Woody Guthrie, and played for and with Victoria Spivey; and Buddy Holly looked right at him at the Duluth Armory less than three days before Holly plane-crashed to his death; and there isn't an inch of American song that he cannot call his own. He steals what he loves and loves what he steals.

Sean Wilentz teaches history at Princeton University. For many years, his family ran The Eighth Street Bookshop in Greenwich Village. There, in December 1963, in Wilentz's uncle's apartment above the shop, Al Aronowitz introduced to each other Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg, just returned from India, was staying at the apartment temporarily.