Album: John Wesley Harding
Recorded: October-November 1967
Released: December 1967
Songs / length: 12 / 38:24
Recorded in Nashville in the autumn of 1967, just months after the summer sessions devoted to the Basement Tapes in Big Pink, Dylan's 8th studio album John Wesley Harding was the first official sign that he had returned to his musical roots after the rock & roll of his three previous records. As Dylan says in his autobiography Chronicles, "the events of the day, all the cultural mumbo jumbo were imprisoning my soul – nauseating me ... the free love, the anti-money system ... I was determined to put myself beyond the reach of it all. I was a family man now, didn't want to be in that group portrait." In doing so, Dylan also showed he was a step ahead of the competition, by moving away from psychedelia to a more roots-based music steeped in folk & country.
"At that time psychedelic rock was overtaking the universe and we were singing these homespun ballads" – Dylan, '78
Dylan had a wider conception of American music than most, and John Wesley Harding (and the Basement Tapes) is ground zero for the genre of Americana. Dylan's trailblazing approach would inspire bands like his greatest followers The Byrds to move in a similar direction. In October 1967, Dylan's hero, Woody Guthrie, died and essentially became the spiritual father of this record and, by extension, the Americana genre. Just a few weeks later, Dylan would be in the studio in Nashville recording three songs, including I Dreamed I Saw St Augustine, partly a tribute to Woody's song, Ludlow Massacre. Like many of the songs on the album, the atmosphere is austere and religious and the songs are stripped down and esoteric.
One of the mysteries of John Wesley Harding is where and when the 12 songs on this album were written. Many suspected that some of them would turn up among the 100+ songs in the Basement Tapes bootlegs, but no – in fact, it seems that they were written either on the way to Nashville, or soon after arriving there. They share the same spirit as the Basement Tapes recordings, but their musical accompaniment is more spare, just guitar (including bass and steel) and drums. A key factor in the album's unique sound is that all but two of the songs were written without accompanying music, something Dylan had never done before, nor after.
To my mind, this gives the album a mysterious, spiritual quality. Bill Aikins, the keyboardist during the Nashville BoB sessions, remembers Dylan spending a lot of time at the piano with his Bible on the day they recorded Visions of Johanna, and according to Dylan’s mother, Betty, there was always "a huge Bible open on a stand in the middle of his study [at his house in Woodstock]. Of all the books that crowd his house, overflow from his house, that Bible gets the most attention. He's continuously getting up and going over to refer to something." Apparently, there are 61 biblical allusions in JWH (according to Bert Cartwright), but it's not just Judeo-Christian references that give the album its religious feel, there's a wider spirituality at play, partly influenced by the Sufi mysticism and Buddhism of the Bauls of Bengal (two of whom appear on the front cover). This is an album about outlaws, misfits, minstrels, outsiders and morality, and contains some of Dylan's best songwriting.
Since the start of 2016, I've been reading the Bible from start to finish (currently I'm a quarter of the way through), so this blog on Dylan's first "religious" album dovetails nicely with my immersion in the Old Testament. Though I haven't picked out 61 references – as Bert Cartwright did in his study The Bible in the Lyrics of Bob Dylan (which I haven't read, and which is impossible to track down commercially) – I've done some song-by-song analysis of the first four tracks on the album to show the Bible's influence:
John Wesley Harding: The lead track and title of the album can be abbreviated to JWH, which is very similar to YHWH, one of the names of God in the Hebrew Bible, a transliteration of Yahweh. By looking back to his country's beginnings through outsiders and "friends to the poor" like John Wesley Harding – similar to Biblical outcasts like Jephthah who led the nation of Israel – Dylan is creating his own creation story for America, focusing on the cowboys and settlers. He's looking to channel some of their pioneering spirit and find a new direction – a response to Dylan's own line on Visions of Johanna that, "we sit here stranded, though we're all doing our best to deny it."
As I Went Out One Morning: Greil Marcus says that this song, "in which Tom Paine guest stars, is about a dinner Dylan attended years ago, at which he was presented with the Tom Paine Award by the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee. Dylan, during his acceptance speech, said something about how he might understand how Lee Harvey Oswald felt, and the audience booed." Thomas Paine, the Norfolk-born Englishman who became a Founding Father of America and helped inspire the American Revolution with his pamphlet Common Sense, was essentially an outlaw writer, which explains why Dylan would place him among other outlaws crucial to the country's early evolution.
I Dreamed I Saw St Augustine: The song starts as a tribute to Joe Hill and the American labour movement – by mimicking the opening lines of the song "I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night" – and then develops into the wider territory of mob rule and martyrdom, with St Augustine the central character. The real St Augustine, writer of the Confessions, was not a martyr himself but an enormously influential religious thinker from North Africa who, like Jesus, was concerned with the plight of the poor. In the song, he's said to be carrying a "blanket underneath his arm", no doubt to offer solace to the dispossessed. Like Jesus, the St Augustine character has the strength of faith to stand up to the mighty "gifted kings and queens" and the final verse sees the song's narrator wracked with guilt for having put St Augustine "out to death". According to Michael Gray, the John Wesley Harding track Hendrix had first picked out to cover was this one.
All Along The Watchtower: All Along The Watchtower is full of Biblical references, especially the fall of Babylon (as related in the Book of Isaiah), and inspired Jimi Hendrix to produce one of his best musical performances, a fitting soundtrack to the Babylonian morality of late '60s America. In this song especially, Dylan sticks to his self-imposed mantra for the album, which states that "the imagery was to be functional rather than ornamental", designed to "advance the story" not seek to rhyme. As the video below demonstrates, the economy and immense skill of Dylan's writing at this time means a huge narrative can be compressed into just several lines of song.
Recorded: October-November 1967
Released: December 1967
Songs / length: 12 / 38:24
Recorded in Nashville in the autumn of 1967, just months after the summer sessions devoted to the Basement Tapes in Big Pink, Dylan's 8th studio album John Wesley Harding was the first official sign that he had returned to his musical roots after the rock & roll of his three previous records. As Dylan says in his autobiography Chronicles, "the events of the day, all the cultural mumbo jumbo were imprisoning my soul – nauseating me ... the free love, the anti-money system ... I was determined to put myself beyond the reach of it all. I was a family man now, didn't want to be in that group portrait." In doing so, Dylan also showed he was a step ahead of the competition, by moving away from psychedelia to a more roots-based music steeped in folk & country.
"At that time psychedelic rock was overtaking the universe and we were singing these homespun ballads" – Dylan, '78
Dylan had a wider conception of American music than most, and John Wesley Harding (and the Basement Tapes) is ground zero for the genre of Americana. Dylan's trailblazing approach would inspire bands like his greatest followers The Byrds to move in a similar direction. In October 1967, Dylan's hero, Woody Guthrie, died and essentially became the spiritual father of this record and, by extension, the Americana genre. Just a few weeks later, Dylan would be in the studio in Nashville recording three songs, including I Dreamed I Saw St Augustine, partly a tribute to Woody's song, Ludlow Massacre. Like many of the songs on the album, the atmosphere is austere and religious and the songs are stripped down and esoteric.
One of the mysteries of John Wesley Harding is where and when the 12 songs on this album were written. Many suspected that some of them would turn up among the 100+ songs in the Basement Tapes bootlegs, but no – in fact, it seems that they were written either on the way to Nashville, or soon after arriving there. They share the same spirit as the Basement Tapes recordings, but their musical accompaniment is more spare, just guitar (including bass and steel) and drums. A key factor in the album's unique sound is that all but two of the songs were written without accompanying music, something Dylan had never done before, nor after.
To my mind, this gives the album a mysterious, spiritual quality. Bill Aikins, the keyboardist during the Nashville BoB sessions, remembers Dylan spending a lot of time at the piano with his Bible on the day they recorded Visions of Johanna, and according to Dylan’s mother, Betty, there was always "a huge Bible open on a stand in the middle of his study [at his house in Woodstock]. Of all the books that crowd his house, overflow from his house, that Bible gets the most attention. He's continuously getting up and going over to refer to something." Apparently, there are 61 biblical allusions in JWH (according to Bert Cartwright), but it's not just Judeo-Christian references that give the album its religious feel, there's a wider spirituality at play, partly influenced by the Sufi mysticism and Buddhism of the Bauls of Bengal (two of whom appear on the front cover). This is an album about outlaws, misfits, minstrels, outsiders and morality, and contains some of Dylan's best songwriting.
Since the start of 2016, I've been reading the Bible from start to finish (currently I'm a quarter of the way through), so this blog on Dylan's first "religious" album dovetails nicely with my immersion in the Old Testament. Though I haven't picked out 61 references – as Bert Cartwright did in his study The Bible in the Lyrics of Bob Dylan (which I haven't read, and which is impossible to track down commercially) – I've done some song-by-song analysis of the first four tracks on the album to show the Bible's influence:
John Wesley Harding: The lead track and title of the album can be abbreviated to JWH, which is very similar to YHWH, one of the names of God in the Hebrew Bible, a transliteration of Yahweh. By looking back to his country's beginnings through outsiders and "friends to the poor" like John Wesley Harding – similar to Biblical outcasts like Jephthah who led the nation of Israel – Dylan is creating his own creation story for America, focusing on the cowboys and settlers. He's looking to channel some of their pioneering spirit and find a new direction – a response to Dylan's own line on Visions of Johanna that, "we sit here stranded, though we're all doing our best to deny it."
As I Went Out One Morning: Greil Marcus says that this song, "in which Tom Paine guest stars, is about a dinner Dylan attended years ago, at which he was presented with the Tom Paine Award by the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee. Dylan, during his acceptance speech, said something about how he might understand how Lee Harvey Oswald felt, and the audience booed." Thomas Paine, the Norfolk-born Englishman who became a Founding Father of America and helped inspire the American Revolution with his pamphlet Common Sense, was essentially an outlaw writer, which explains why Dylan would place him among other outlaws crucial to the country's early evolution.
I Dreamed I Saw St Augustine: The song starts as a tribute to Joe Hill and the American labour movement – by mimicking the opening lines of the song "I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night" – and then develops into the wider territory of mob rule and martyrdom, with St Augustine the central character. The real St Augustine, writer of the Confessions, was not a martyr himself but an enormously influential religious thinker from North Africa who, like Jesus, was concerned with the plight of the poor. In the song, he's said to be carrying a "blanket underneath his arm", no doubt to offer solace to the dispossessed. Like Jesus, the St Augustine character has the strength of faith to stand up to the mighty "gifted kings and queens" and the final verse sees the song's narrator wracked with guilt for having put St Augustine "out to death". According to Michael Gray, the John Wesley Harding track Hendrix had first picked out to cover was this one.
All Along The Watchtower: All Along The Watchtower is full of Biblical references, especially the fall of Babylon (as related in the Book of Isaiah), and inspired Jimi Hendrix to produce one of his best musical performances, a fitting soundtrack to the Babylonian morality of late '60s America. In this song especially, Dylan sticks to his self-imposed mantra for the album, which states that "the imagery was to be functional rather than ornamental", designed to "advance the story" not seek to rhyme. As the video below demonstrates, the economy and immense skill of Dylan's writing at this time means a huge narrative can be compressed into just several lines of song.
Elsewhere on the record, Dylan sounds like a preacher moralising on The Ballad of Frankie Lee & Judas Priest, one of my favourite songs on the album, while Dear Landlord is similar to Maggie's Farm in that it shows his frustration with the music industry / scene, expressing his distaste about managers and promoters "putting a price on his head". There are also three songs about drifters, hobos and immigrants, fitting in to the album's overarching theme of outsiders, and how the Bible teaches us to treat foreigners with kindness and not suspicion or hatred. After The Wicked Messenger, a stomping meditation on prophets of doom, Down Along The Cove and I'll Be Your Baby Tonight point forward to the country rock revolution. As with many of the album's songs, you get a sense of a man on the run who is dealing with his demons, but there's also a more positive feel to these two closing tracks that gives an early taste of Nashville Skyline.
Album rating: A+
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