Organization: Penn State University
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 1993 19:53:37 EST
From: Ross Whitwam <REW4@psuvm.psu.edu>
Newsgroups: rec.music.dylan
Subject: Re: Blowin' it in the wind...

In article <Dg50wB2w165w@clovis.felton.ca.us>, tcbowden@clovis.felton.ca.us
(Timothy Bowden) says:

>A major component of sixties folksinging was what came to be
>known as Social Consciousness.  It was assumed our heroes
>would duly pity the poor innocents.

>Judgment about who was innocent thus becomes an item.

>Dylan has extolled the virtues of such as Ruben `Hurricane'
>Carter, `Pretty Boy' Floyd, `Crazy Joe' Gallo, and John Wesley
>Hardin (although the latter he mistakes as `Harding' on the
>album and tune of that name).  These are, in order (1) an
>ex-fighter convicted twice of cold-blooded murder with hard
>ballistic evidence, (2) an Oklahoma bank robber who became a
>folk hero, at least to those who held no love of banks in that
>era, which was most everyone, (3)  an old-line mafiosa
>enforcer and killer who made his rep in such activities as the
>Anastasia barbershop rubout and the hit of Joe Columbo one
>Columbus Day in the park, and (4) a psychotic Texas killer
>whose affinity would be much closer to the KKK than Robin Hood.

>John Wesley Hardin happens to be a homeboy of mine, albeit
>from the late 19th century, and so I may be a bit more
>familiar with his modus and motives than the average New Yawk
>City folksinger.  Mr Hardin published his own autobiography
>during his untimely-long lifetime, which  we may presume
>places him in the light he feels most flatters him, and even
>given that and some outlandish concoctions he is shown at
>heart to be a remorseless serial murderer whose only claim to
>pride or fame is his production of corpses.  He and Clay
>Allison and many other notorious gunmen operated against
>freedmen, yankees, and carpetbaggers precisely as did the
>outfit founded by one General Nataniel B Forest in the same era.

>Dylan sings about how this `Harding' `never hurt an honest
>man' yet I don't know how Wes could detect the honesty of an
>individual he blasted for snoring from his bed through the
>wall of an Abilene hotel, and also he was `never known to make
>a foolish move' even though this Abilene fracas caused him to
>look pretty foolish skedaddling out the window and out of town
>in his long johns just ahead of Bill Hickok.

>All in all, it would appear more myth than reality and
>certainly more romance than research goes into the antic
>anthems of our own blue-eyed hip Homer.  I begin to think
>maybe Hattie Carroll had it coming...

I wonder if Dylan didn't intend his JWH song as an hommage of
sorts to Guthrie's "Pretty Boy Floyd" -- a song for which he
obviously has a lot of respect, as he quoted in one of his
first original compositions and he covered it 30 yrs later
on the Guthrie tribute album.

I think Guthrie probably knew that Floyd was no modern-day
Robin Hood, was only out for himself -- but Guthrie wrote the
song primarily as a means of setting up the last lines
slamming banks and bankers.

If Dylan knew the real story of Hardin's disreputable
life -- and why wouldn't he?  and maybe the addition
of the G to Hardin's name was Dylan's jokey way of
alerting us that this isn't the true storey of JWH?  -- perhaps
he deliberately chose to distort that life to produce a song in
the "Pretty Boy Floyd" vein, in which a villain's life
is glorified with fictious events in order to emphasise
what the songwriter considers to be the more important
message of the song.  Of course, "JWH" appears to be
a song totally *devoid* of any message... but the whole
_JWH_ album is so cryptic to me, I don't know that
maybe the lack of a message isn't intended to be some
kind of message... if you know what I mean?


Ross Whitwam                  REW4@psuvm.psu.edu
Dept. Molec + Cell Biology
Penn State University

Newsgroups: rec.music.dylan