Greil Marcus: A Musical Crash Course in America
Three songs, deep roots
This angry, violent year has tested young America—the cosmopolitan, black-and-brown, queer-and-straight republic we’ve built up over the course of the last half-century. Zombie institutions—racism, right populism, and Gilded-Age economics—stagger on.
Of course America is old, too. It’s no mistake that the thrilling voices of our time—Michelle Alexander, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Steve Fraser, Bryan Stevenson, and others—have a historical fascination that reaches a lot further back than the first Clinton administration, tracing the roots of the political goods and ills we’re still living with today.
But what of the music? In the summer of dancehall and devotional rap, how do we maintain a healthy connection to the past? If anyone knows, it’s writer and critic Greil Marcus. At 70, he’s spent almost a half-century really looking, or listening, for an high-fidelity, complex, human image of America. From the beginning in Sixties-era Rolling Stone, he’s wandered around a national memory palace: between J.F.K. and Beatlemania, Kentucky miners’s strikes and CBGB.
If America has a future that’s alive and full of possibilities, it’s because we have not given up on getting familiar with all the oddity and noise of our past.
His great relationship developed with a particular canon of American songs—authentic, commonplace, sui generis. In his book about Dylan’s drug-fueled and free-spirited “Basement Tapes,” recorded in 1967 in Saugerties, New York, Marcus describes certain songs as opening doors onto the homeland:
America opened up into both the future and the past… The past is alive to the degree that the future is open, when one can believe that the country remains unfinished, even unmade. You could believe in the future only if you could believe in the past, and.. you could believe in the past only if you could reenact it. The present, the historical present, was meaningless.
Marcus is positing transcendence, of time and self, by acoustic guitar. It’s a little vague, a little mystical—but it comes alive in Marcus’s latest writing about our commonplace songs and “folk lyric.” An American future belongs to us—alive, full of possibilities—only as long as we can lay hands on the voices, fears, and dreams of our past.
This week, Open Source producer Max Larkin spoke with Marcus about three such “commonplace” songs —Bob Dylan’s “The Ballad of Hollis Brown,” Geeshie Wiley and L. V. Thomas’s “Last Kind Words Blues,” and “I Wish I Was A Mole In The Ground”—songs that seem as if they have no author, universal numbers that belong to everyone.
You can listen to that conversation here:
But each of these songs have complex origins and afterlives that sprawl out beyond our radio hour. If you want to dig deeper into this vision of “old, old, weird America,” listen to the songs again and read some of our analysis below.
1. Bob Dylan’s “The Ballad of Hollis Brown”
In reviews of Dylan’s third album The Times They Are a-Changin’, “The Ballad of Hollis Brown” is often understood as a protest song: a song of “social conscience,” a song that addresses the “appalling inequality of the human race.”
But Dylan doesn’t put those political views in the song, the true-enough story of a destitute South Dakota farmer who shoots his wife, his five children and himself. What does this made-up man from an unknown moment stand for?
That political sense of Hollis Brown may have been cemented in later recordings. Nina Simone’s brilliant cover of the song, which would have been performed alongside black protest songs like “Mississippi Goddamn” on a European tour, might have conjured Hollis Brown as a cause: an African-American sharecropper, maybe, stranded by white supremacy. But that either her contribution to the myth, or her audience’s projection.
The filmmaker David Lynch recorded his own version of “Hollis” — inspired by Nina Simone’s cover, not Dylan’s original — in 2013. When asked why he recorded it, he pointed back at 2008 and said that “with the financial crises and people out of work and hard up for money, I think it’s a very timely song.” But Dylan’s lyrics gives a no sense of of who’s to blame for Hollis’s poverty and offers no way out. How can he help?
A third and even more political version of Hollis Brown was recorded by the Chicago-based hardcore band, Rise Against. The music video shows a montage of modern farmers in heartland America, accompanied by explanatory captions about the threat of industrialized agriculture and intercut with action shots of Rise Against rocking out on stage. The near-humanity of Hollis Brown is buried under electric amplification and moralism—an important cause, of course, but not as musical or ambiguous.
Marcus doesn’t sanitize his catalog, and the darkness and fatalism of “Hollis Brown” fits in the irregular dark corners of our heritage.
Its musical roots reach back to a nearly 300-year-old English ‘murder ballad’ known as “The Gosport Tragedy.” The 16-verse ballad tells the tale of a ship’s carpenter, named Willie, who promises to marry his lover, Molly. But Wille finds that Molly pregnant out of wedlock, he leads her instead to her grave. When the carpenter returns to sea, his ship is forever haunted by the ghost of his former lover.
The British ballad later took root in the U.S. in the form of the Appalachian folk song “Pretty Polly.” The verses are shortened, the names change, and the haunting and the pregnancy disappear.
Greil Marcus hears violent eroticism—“real sadism and terror”—in the vicious version of the song recorded by the Virginia coal miner, bootlegger, and mountain singer Dock Boggs. Dylan, a Boggs fan, would later play “Pretty Polly” in clubs around New York, eventually transforming the melody and its homicidal climax into “The Ballad of Hollis Brown.” But in Dylan’s version of the song, the erotic element is entirely absent — the South Dakota murders take place in an environment defined by poverty, madness, and bleak despair, but not sex.
But somehow the buried sexual element of the song’s roots re-emerge, for Marcus, in a later cover of “Hollis Brown” by Iggy Pop and the Stooges.
“When you listen to the Stooges’ version” Marcus says, “you can feel that the tendrils coming off those banjo notes of Dock Boggs’s, that’s the whole song to them. That’s where it’s all happening.”
The power of the songs that branch out from “Pretty Polly” doesn’t come from moral outrage or political guidance. The terror that runs through these lyrics comes from the inability of the witness or the listener to stop or change that narrative.
2. “Last Kind Words Blues”
There’s a scene in Terry Zwigoff’s great 1994 documentary about R. Crumb when the misanthropic cartoonist shows of his collection of pre-war blues and folk records.
“When I listen to old music,” Crumb says, “that’s one of the only times I have a kind of love of humanity. You hear the best part of the soul of the common people. Their way of expressing their connection to eternity or whatever you want to call it.”
Crumb then lowers the needle onto one of the records and we hear the voice of Geeshie Wiley (“The last kind words I heard my daddy say….”) wailing over a series of Crumb’s grotesque, pencil-drawn caricatures of humanity gone wrong: a big-breasted woman covered in fur and shackled at the ankle, a large nosed and wild-eyed man kneeling in prayer, another crouched in a fetal position surrounded by electrical switches and a danger sign (Caption: “the little guy that lives inside my head.”)
It’s hard to know exactly what Crumb hears in Geeshie’s voice, but something about the pairing of his drawings with her song fascinated many who had never before heard the ultrarare 1930s record. It inspired journalist John Jeremiah Sullivan to write two long pieces—in Harper’s and The New York Times Magazine—about the song’s lyrics and the women behind them.
Part of what drew Sullivan into the story of the record was the “sheer History Channel mysteriousness of it.” Almost nothing was known about the performers, despite the virtuosity of their guitar playing and their lyrical ingenuity.
There’s also a certain material thrill in hearing the original, notoriously lo-fi Paramount recording. The idea that these mysterious singers were preserved, like insects in amber, on a record made from, as Marcus notes “lamp blacking, shellac, cotton filling, and clay from the banks of the Milwaukee River” is incredible in and of itself.
It’s this particularly gritty, almost dirty, sound that fascinates collectors who have sought Wiley and Thomas’s recordings. Marcus notes the ecstatic thrill that junk-shop owner Joe Bussard finds in his ultra-rare copy of Thomas’s “Motherless Child Blues”
You know that first note of Elvie Thomas’s The first note on her guitar: Drummmmmm ... That note sends me right up to the ceiling! That old Paramount sound! Sometimes I’ll sit down and play that first note, five, six, eight times in a row. I’ll have people over, we’ll listen to that one note.
Some of the biographical mysteries behind Elvie (L.V.) Thomas about Geeshie (née Lillie Mae) Wiley have been revealed by Sullivan’s research, but the scatted personal details about these two pistol-carrying, lesbian blues virtuosos still don’t capture the power of their recording.
A few artists, including Jack White and Rhiannon Giddens have attempted to cover the tune. But it’s hard to capture the feeling of mystery and fragility embedded in the original record. The cult British folk-punk band Mekons perhaps takes the wisest tact by not recording a direct cover, but performing, instead, a tribute track called“Geeshie.”
Those words—“To the splendor and the crimes, nothing happens twice / raise a glass of wine and try to still time”—might be the best memorial one can give to the magic of “Last Kind Words.” What else can one say in tribute?
The song calls forth a world of post-mortem paradox—in certain moods, Marcus says, you hear every character in the song as “already dead.”
The mystery woman Geeshie Wiley was an American in that she knew her stock blues phrase: “The Mississippi River, you know it’s deep and wide.” But she was also American in that she felt free to subvert the clichés for something like what Allen Ginsberg called an “eyeball kick”:
The Mississippi River, you know it’s deep and wide / I could stand right here and see my face from the other side.
“A physical impossibility, but a metaphysical truth,” in Marcus’s phrase. Or, as R. Crumb puts it, “Modern music doesn’t have that calamitous loss … people can’t express themselves that way anymore.”
3. “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground”
Much of our understanding of modern American folk music can be traced back to the songs that father-and-son duo John and Alan Lomax collected in the mid-2oth century. One of the strangest songs they ever picked up was called “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground.”
The song’s exact origins are unknown, but it was best recorded in 1928 by the “Minstrel of the Appalachians,” a song-collector and Renaissance man named Bascom Lamar Lunsford, and popularized by Harry Smith and the Lomaxes.
Even in the Appalachian folk context, the lyrics are bizarre. As Marcus notes, depending on which lyrics you emphasize or add in, it can become a song about post-bellum economics and politics (“I don’t like a railroad man/ The railroad man will kill you when he can/ And drink up your blood like wine”), a winking sexual number (“I wish I were a lizard in your spring,” as Bob Neuwirth sings it) or even a song for kids (Pete Seeger includes it on his children’s album, Birds, Beasts, Bugs, & Fishes).
Yet the lyrics become even more interesting in the songs continued evolution into new regions and styles of music.
One branch of this evolution leads across the Atlantic into the English, fingerpicking folk tradition. This leap was first taken up by Jackson C. Frank, a New York-born singer-songwriter. Frank’s life was transformed by a fire that killed thirteen of his classmates, including his then-girlfriend. The tragic loss haunted Frank for the rest of his life, but he also gained an insurance check and allowed him to leave the country on a ship bound for England. (Frank later immortalized this trip on his most famous song, “Blues Run the Game.”)
In England, Frank recorded his own version of “Mole in the Ground” but titles it “Kimbie” and refashions it as as a strained love song; the titular wish is reserved for the last verse. In Frank’s version, that wish—to become a mole—feels almost like an admission of failure on the part of Kimbie’s lover; a man who fails to live up to his partner’s desires ends up feeling pretty low indeed.
Frank’s version of “Kimbie” also appears in Nick Drake’s home recordings, which were released after his death on the Family Tree compilation. Drake, like Frank, was crippled by depression and didn’t find a large audience in his lifetime. He died from an overdose of antidepressants in 1974 and had been in the ground 33 years before his recording of “Kimbie” was posthumously released on the Family Tree compilation in 2007.
It’s difficult to read Drake’s version as a love song; according to biographers, he never had a romantic partner in his life. Yet the same feelings of desire and ultimate failure found in Frank’s version can be heard even more clearly, and painfully, here.
Marcus’s readings of folk songs often resist autobiographical interpretations — performers create false versions of themselves; all self presentation is fiction. But it’s hard not to read these two versions of “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground” autobiographically, as representations of two deeply talented and deeply haunted performers who never quite met their own expectations — and the expectations of others — while they were still alive.
The second branch of “Mole” leads away from acoustic folk and into electronic music.
The globetrotting sound collector DJ /Rupture recorded a version in Barcelona with the banjo player and scholar Sindhu Zagoren. Zagoren’s performance flattens the vocals and shifts the song into a minor key; Rupture’s production tweaks the track into something otherworldly, adding an eerie organ accompaniment and piped-in cicada cries to fill the remaining space. In the last 9 seconds of the track, he then strips away all backing sound and leaves only the two slightly clashing vocal tracks to sing out the final line.
Marcus credits the success of the song to the loose quality of Zagoren’s performance:
The artlessness of it, the way she refuses or doesn’t bother to rise to certain notes, makes her anyone, or you or me. And in this artless mall-rat manner, the song still claims the whole world.
A similarly flattened version was recorded by the German electronic duo ANBB (Alva Noto and Blixa Bargeld).
Here the vocal delivery feels closer to the playful, major key sound in Lumsford’s original recording. But the minimalist instrumental—with its insistently dark, pulsing synthesized sub-bass line punctuated by glitchy bits of white noise and strange echoing voices—turns the song into something far more sinister. Somehow, ANBB manages to bring together all the contradicting elements of the original “Mole” lyrics — their childishness along with their mysterious threats, the flirtiness and the self-deprecation, — into a truly bizarre sonic union.
There’s something oddly satisfying about the techno reinventions of “Mole,” marrying the otherworldly implications of its strangeness with the oddest aspects of modern, yet still tying them down with organic imagery.
It’s the proof of Greil Marcus’s idea: songs written between curious appropriation and individual genius come out magical, public, universal. In his telling, these songs are our under-visited national parks, not Yellowstone but dark, weird, bottomless Carlsbad. They are part of us—our good and our bad—and we better get busy exploring them.
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