Seen in Sound: The Bob Dylan song that inspired Pauline Black
Forever considered one of the key figures in the British ska and two-tone movement, Pauline Black has always employed a broad range of influences beyond the genres she works in her music. As the leader of The Selecter, traces of pop, soul, and punk can be found in hits such as ‘Three Minute Hero’ and ‘On My Radio’, nodding to the band’s appreciation of other styles.
Emerging from Coventry at the end of the 1970s alongside fellow two-tone icons The Specials, both bands always placed emphasis on the importance of identity and diversity in their music, and with Pauline Black fronting a band as a black woman in the UK, she was regularly seen as an important source for politically conscious lyrics and speaking out on matters of racial prejudice and misogyny.
While it’s not immediately obvious that there’s a link to be made between The Selecter and Bob Dylan from a musical point of view, there are parallels in how both Dylan and Black tackled certain topics, especially in the world of politics. In a feature for Uncut, Black expressed a fondness for early Dylan records, especially the song ‘Oxford Town’ from The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, and spoke about how the track and its subject matter were hugely inspiring to her as a young woman.
The song itself was written in response to the news of the enrollment of a black student, James Meredith, at the University of Mississippi in 1962, which went on to stoke the Ole Miss riots in the aftermath of the event. As the sole black student enrolled at Lanchester Polytechnic College in Coventry at the time, the subject matter of the song resonated strongly with Black, something she says made her think about how “if I was in the Deep South of America, none of this would be happening, I would be fighting to try and get into a university”.
While Dylan doesn’t explicitly mention either the university of Meredith in the lyrics of the song, it alludes to the rioting and violence that ensued afterwards and references segregation laws from the time in lines like “come to the door, he couldn’t get in / all because of the colour of his skin”. With similar events, such as the Notting Hill riots, having taken place in the UK only four years prior, it’s understandable that this song would have had a profound effect on Black at the time.
Speaking about the change in environment she was going through at the time, Black explains, “I’d just come out of Romford and was thrust into all this, but it opened up the mind. I started playing guitar around folk clubs in Coventry and it went from there.”
Despite the fact that the music of The Selecter doesn’t sound remotely like early Bob Dylan, the way that the band tackled topics of social injustice were akin to the warnings that Dylan issued across his lengthy career.
Black would also pick a varied selection of other tracks and albums from disparate genres as amongst her favourites for the feature, expressing a love for records by the likes of Aretha Franklin, Björk and Little Simz.
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