The old English folk song that inspired two Bob Dylan classics: “Remember me”
The world of music is a weird and wonderful place. It is highly charged with trending topics and surging new styles, but the very nature of this variety can often be traced back to singular points in the audio universe. Flickers of inspiration or defiant stands taken against the establishment that laid the groundwork for the skyscrapers of sound to be built. For many, the start of the musical revolution we still see unfolding today started with Bob Dylan.
As part of the folk scene of New York, Dylan would break out with a new take on songwriting. He would write tracks about far-flung ideologies, huge concepts or heightened teenage rebellion. Instead, he would pick at the bones of his own life to add to the stew of his music. Through his own songs and then how they would go on to inspire others, Dylan would make pop personal.
His position as a foundational stone of modern music is undeniable. So much so that to imagine Dylan being inspired by anybody or any song seems far-flung. Of course, anyone with a modicum of knowledge about the freewheelin’ troubadour will point to his undoubted idol, Woody Guthrie, as an antidote to that particular notion. However, it wasn’t only the fascist-killing guitar player who would provide Dylan with the building blocks for his songs.
‘Scarborough Fair’ is a ubiquitous folk song. Born out of the titular town, the track refers to the popular gathering which would see a feast last for 45 days. It’s about as bountiful an image as one might gather for an ancient folk song. One can almost smell the burning fat of reared animals and the pungent puke generated by the mead on tap.
The song remained as popular as ever throughout centuries, passed only by ear to one another between bards. Popularised in the 1960s by Martin Carthy within the English folk scene, the song became the centre of a dispute between him and Paul Simon, who would cover the track on his own and, according to Carthy, pinch his arrangement. Simon then released it as a single for the 1968 film The Graduate.
In the July 2011 edition of Mojo magazine, Simon confessed: “The version I was playing was definitely what I could remember of Martin’s version, but he didn’t teach it to me. Really, it was just naivety on my part that we didn’t credit it as his arrangement of a traditional tune. I didn’t know you had to do that. Then, later on, Martin’s publisher contacted me, and we made a pretty substantial monetary settlement that he was supposed to split with Martin, But unbeknown to me, Martin got nothing.”
The two men had actually made up in 2000, however, with Carthy joining Simon to perform the song during a special show in London. But while Simon would cover the song in totality for his own records, one man got to the song before him: Bob Dylan. In fact, he used the basis of ‘Scarborough Fair’ twice before Simon had even considered taking on the track.
‘Girl From North Country’ is considered a masterpiece of Dyaln’s early work and is arguably one of the more crystalline moments of his burgeoning career. Featuring on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, the song was perfected alongside Johnny Cash a decade later. While speculation abounds about who the girl in question is, the song is built out of a melody that is found in Carthy’s version of ‘Scarborough Fair’ and even lifts the lyric, “Remember me to one who lives there, she once was a true love of mine,” directly from the song.
It is said that Dylan heard Carthy’s version of the song while travelling around Britain in 1962 and used the melody to underpin his new song. It would be such a wonderful tune that the singer-songwriter would use it once more with The Times They Are-A Changin’ song ‘Boots of Spanish Leather’. The use of melodies and arrangments was not an uncommon practice among the folk performers of the scenes in New York and London. It would only be when the money began to roll in that disputes such as Simon and Carty’s would arise. Until that point, the songs had been assessed as a communal commodity.
Of course, artists always deserve to be paid. However, if there was one thing to trade in for gold and jewels, it would be the mark of respect one achieves by inspiring a truly influential figure such as Bob Dylan.
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