The musician who made Bob Dylan gasp: “The land parted”
Bob Dylan has never struck anyone as a guy who can get impressed easily. If you were to come up to him on the street and play him one of your songs, the most that many could ever hope for would maybe be a casual eyebrow raise, and that would be it. Dylan could get knocked out by people when he wanted to, and hearing Woody Guthrie for the first time was enough to make him gasp.
When Dylan first started out as a songwriter, he was always more of a poet than a singer. Just look at the people that he hung out with around the time he started getting famous. Every rock star like The Beatles, with whom he would mingle, would also be caught reading Rimbead or hanging out with Allen Ginsburg in his downtime.
While Guthrie never fashioned himself as a poet, his music was much more poetic than he may have given himself credit for. Always the reluctant artist, Guthrie was happy to make music for the people whenever he got behind the fretboard, using his guitar more as a weapon to combat anyone who oppressed others.
There was a reason why that label on his guitar said ‘THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS’. Listening to tracks like ‘This Land Is Your Land’, Guthrie wanted to tell the story of America that he saw every day, moving from town to town almost as a folk music missionary, preaching the good word to anyone within earshot.
If this was a musical religion, Dylan was a convert from the first time he heard him. When he first got ahold of his records, Dylan became transfixed by what he was hearing, recounting in Chronicles Vol. 1, “What I heard was Woody singing a whole lot of his own compositions all by himself … songs like ‘Ludlow Massacre,’ ‘1913 Massacre,’ ‘This Land Is Your Land.’ All these songs together, one after another, made my head spin. It made me want to gasp. It was like the land parted”.
From that moment on, Dylan knew that he wanted to follow in his idol’s footsteps. After moving to the Greenwich Village folk scene, Dylan eventually found his way to Guthrie’s old home, wanting to talk to his family and get to the bottom of who this guy really was. If Guthrie taught anyone anything, though, it was about being yourself.
Dylan may have tried his hand at being a discount Woody Guthrie for a while, but his best work came when he followed Guthrie’s model by moving against the grain. Adopting the sounds of rock and country into his sound, Dylan turned himself into a chameleon, constantly making music that was a reflection of where he was at the time rather than giving the people what they wanted.
Then again, that mentality was the entire basis behind what Guthrie was supposed to be. The goal was never about just making a catchy song that people could sing along to. It was about waking people up by talking about the real problems of the day, and when Dylan spoke, fans were more than willing to follow him down whichever road he was taking.
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