Very rarely do I get to use Hegel and Woody Guthrie in the same post, but I've luckily hit upon a topic that can quell the needs of both my inner nerd and inner lover of great folk music. What I want to explore is an example of sublation in folk music, all centered around the idea of moving through the American landscape. We should begin with our "thesis", what has been called on many occasions the greatest folk song ever written, "This Land is Your Land" by Guthrie. Here are the lyrics. (Note, the lyrics and the youtube version don't quite match up, but not to the the point where I think we can't talk about them as a unit).
At least for the first three verses, Guthrie gives us a depiction, from the point of a walking traveler, of a beautiful landscape - America is portrayed with all the natural glory it possesses. But while the subject matter of these verses is the bounty of the land, it is couched in democratic terms. The beauty belongs to you and me, of course, but the singer also treks through the land on foot, the most universal way to travel. This is not a song about road tripping through the states and marveling about how beautiful everything is. The walker who guides us through our shared land is representative of us all. He moves across the ribbon of highway that connects us from California to the New York Island - something unnatural, it is important to note. The highway system created in the early twentieth century is in many ways the great democratic project - the roads are for everyone to use, regardless of money or class. If you don't have a car, so what? You can ramble alongside Guthrie, seeing the beauty of the land we all share.
Even in the face of obstruction - the sign that says no tress passin' - the land still belongs to us all. Guthrie's lines in the fourth verse suggest that even though there are some who will fall into avarice, taking the shared land for themselves, they cannot fully succeed. The sign is blank on the back side, I think, for that very reason.
The last verse is not all peaches and cream, of course. Guthrie is writing during the depression, and those people grumbling and wondering are justified in their discontent. But considering the rest of the song, I think it's safe to say that Guthrie is pushing us towards an understanding that America is a place where great goodness and beauty occurs, we just have to get out of our own way sometime. He ends with the chorus repeated twice, not just because it's catchy as hell, but because he wants to underscore the goodness he sees as he roams and rambles. It is not an entirely hopeful song, true, but it projects an idea of America that can be achieved, a place where the land truly is yours and mine.
Think of such a depiction of America in contrast to Dylan's A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall. Here are the lyrics.
Dylan takes the call and response structure from Lord Randall to depict an America nearly bereft of beauty. A father asks his blue-eyed son about what he has seen on his travels, each time receiving dark images and tragic events. Guthrie was Dylan's idol, and in many ways his predecessor in American folk music. One could almost believe, then, that Dylan, being blue-eyed himself, is speaking to Guthrie, who plays a paternal role in much of Dylan's early music. Perhaps I am going too far, but consider the first four lines the son sings:
I've stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains
I've walked and I've crawled on six crooked highways
I've stepped in the middle of seven sad forests
I've been out in front of a dozen dead oceans
Much of the imagery is the same as in This Land is Your Land. Dylan is too smart for this to be coincidence - he is putting Guthrie's depiction of the beauty of the American landscape on his head. We have now moved, for whatever reason, into the shadowy version of what Guthrie gave us, where whatever beauty we once possessed has been crippled or perverted. This perversion is taken up again in the second verse, with the "highway of diamonds with nobody on it." Once again Guthrie's imagery of the desert of diamonds and highway as great equalizer becomes an empty and desolate place.
Even Dylan's chorus is, in a way, antithetical to Guthrie's. Unlike the natural bounty that belongs to all of us in This Land is Your Land, here nature has a destructive, almost even presence. A hard rain's a-gonna fall - presumably destroying everything in its path. For Guthrie, nature was something to be marveled at and shared. For Dylan, it is something from which we must flee - the sound of thunder "roar(s) out a warnin'." Our walking narrator here has seen the bounty of the land, and it is frightening.
Even the last lines seem coated in looming darkness. "What'll you do now?" the father asks, to which the son replies, "I'll go out again, and speak what I have seen." Yes, perhaps one could see the son then as a man on a heroic quest, out to tell us of the danger upon us, but it appears, at least from the son's perspective, that his task is a fruitless one. He'll stand in the ocean until he starts sinking - yes, maybe he'll be able to spread the word, but more likely he'll die trying. Going out into the chaos again, where the water is poisoned and souls are forgotten, seems like a doomed project. Unlike Guthrie's walker, who treks the land with a anthem of brotherhood, Dylan's narrator seems to be all alone, with nothing but foul portents to sing to those poor souls he meets.
But Dylan's picture feels so dark as to be untenable, as the utopian ideal Guthrie gives us feel almost too light. What may be required, then, is the same kind of story as that which occurs in these songs, but where neither the darkness nor light has been forgotten. And for that, I humbly submit Walking Far from Home by Iron and Wine. Here are the lyrics - with one caveat, the lyrics here say "I saw widows in the temple to the Lord" - I don't think he's saying "Lord" here, but "law", so "I saw widows in the temple to the law."
Sam Beam, aka Iron and Wine, knows his folk music, and so I can say with assurance that he's familiar with both songs discussed above. More than that, I think, Walking Far from Home is his take on the same story, that of the traveler who speaks of what he sees as he treks across the American landscape (Beam's songs always take place in the states). The very first line invokes Guthrie's "As I was ramblin..." - and Beam's walking narrator sees highways and oceans like his predecessors. Guthrie's worries that appear in the last verse of This Land is Your Land appear again in the building that is as high as heaven, but unable to be entered because the door is too small - the skyscraper is the symbol of the American elite, and most of us have no access to the kind of lifestyle where one lives and works in such buildings. The doors are too small to let all of us in.
But what makes this song a synthesis of Guthrie's and Dylan's works is its ability to blend both the beauty and the heartbreak of the two songs into one cohesive vision - the good and the bad of this world are placed side by side, and the singer cannot help but wonder at it all. Consider the second verse:
I saw rain clouds, little babies
And a bridge that had tumbled to the ground
I saw sinners making music
And I dreamt of that sound, dreamt of that sound
Rain clouds - which may or may not portend of a hard rain to fall - juxtaposed with babies, juxtaposed with a broken bridge. Images of nature, beauty, and destruction all side by side, all in one. The chaos of which Dylan sings is there in that broken bridge - something constructed by man that has collapsed, that cannot buttress the weight placed upon it. But in the same breath Beam sings of children, of life and rebirth. He sees sinners, but they are making music, devoting their energy to art, and something that haunts the narrator. Now haunted can be taken either way, but that, I suspect is the point. The image of sinners making music is ambiguous - it's unclear whether the music provides the sinners grace and when dreaming of it the narrator is remembering the transcendent power of music, or whether he cannot forget the revelry of evil people. Most of us I think would assume the former, but Beam doesn't give us an easy answer, especially considering the parallel to this image that occurs later on. A prisoner takes a pistol, saying "join me in song." That to me seems like an example of transcendence through music, but then again the man asking us to join him is both a prisoner, and brandishing a weapon. Is this a moment of grace or of terror? We cannot know, and either way the narrator is awestruck.
This ambiguity and mingling of beauty and destruction goes throughout the song. Naked dancers in the city speak for us all - the degraded members of society speak for us, not, noticeably, the women in the temple to the law. Does that mean that their experience is exemplary of the American experience, i.e. a degraded one? Or does Beam mean that these women have an understanding of life that stands for all of us? Are we one with these women, or are their trials a show of how far off from Guthrie's dream we are? Maybe it is all these things at once.
And, like Dylan's blue-eyed son, Beam's walking traveler feels a call. The blue-eyed son feels called to sing out about the terrors he has seen, though it is unclear what the call from the Lord Beam's narrator hears actually is. In expect it is a moment of transcendence, a taking in of all that he has seen that feels, to him, as if he is touched by the hand of God. Beam himself is agnostic, though many of his characters aren't, yet there is no reason, I think, to assume the man walking far from home is particularly religious. Notice that it is the circle of the wet road that comes like a call from the Lord - "like a call," not a call itself. He feels called, but it need not actually be from a divine hand. Obviously he, like his predecessors, feels the need to relate what he has seen, and perhaps that is all the call is, a call to speak. Nonetheless, what he must speak is neither the claim that this land is both yours and mine, or that a hard rain is a-gonna fall. It is something else, something both good and evil, wrapped up together. Perhaps, then, Walking Far from Home is the most true to the land it surveys.
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