Dock Boggs

In the bright sunny south in peace and content,
The days of my boyhood, I scarcely have spent, 

From the deep flowing springs to the broad flowing stream, 

Ever dear to my memory and sweet is my dream.

— Dock Boggs

I first learned of Dock Boggs from Greil Marcus' Invisible Republic, the rock critic's look into the "old, weird America."

New York Magazine called Marcus' landscape the "playground of God, Satan, tricksters, Puritans, confidence men, illuminati, braggarts, preachers, and anonymous poets of all stripes."

Boggs was one of the latter—a morose, hard drinking Appalachian poet who sang like his blacksmith daddy and picked a blues-style banjo in the fashion of the Black banjoists he heard in the railroad camps surrounding his home.

Boggs was born in 1898 in Southeastern Virginia and, as a young man, made a living working in the coal mines and peddling moonshine.

For three years in the late 1920s, he tried desperately to earn a living as a professional musician, entertaining at parties in the mining camps and recording 12 songs (eight for Brunswick Records in New York and four for Lonesome Ace Records in Chicago). 

But he quit music in 1929 when the stock market collapsed the parties and recording deals came to a sudden halt.

Boggs stayed out of the music business for over 30 years, until he was rediscovered in the early 1960s by the leaders of the folk revival.

In 1963, one of them coaxed the 65-year old Boggs out of Norton to play at large festivals. 

Boggs also recorded an album that year for Folkways Records in New York, and became a strong influence on Bob Dylan, David Crosby, and even the 15-year old Bruce Springsteen.

Say what you will of it, Boggs' music is raw. 

"I put so much of myself into some pieces that I very nearly broke down," he once told folklorist Charles Wolfe. 

Greil Marcus claimed in Invisible Republic that Boggs sounds when he sings "as if his bones were coming through his skin."

"If God ever requires that rocks cry out," singer-songwriter Lesley Miller wrote, "they may sound as old and earthy as Dock Boggs. 

"His banjo rings like the end of time, and his voice cries out from the deeply submerged recesses of the American heart and mind."

Boggs' old-time music is the polar opposite of today's Country, where the emotions and rural references are formulaic and trite and about as "country" as the corn pone at Popeye's. 

Boggs' characters, in contrast, are real: they're dirt farmers, hillbillies, convicts, wastrels, and murderers, all deeply afflicted by the fates they must suffer. 

Not one drives a Ram, supports our troops, or wears tight blue jeans. 

And they usually wind up vanquished, humiliated, or dead, not home on the couch with the hot wife and the football game.

"Dock deserves fame for his efforts to live true to what he believed God expected of him," English professor Barry O'Connell wrote.

"Never a conventional life, his was also shaped by extraordinary gifts. Among them was an almost instinctive capacity to see and hear the events of his world newly.

"Through his music, he transmuted the everyday into something more beautiful and startling and acute than we are usually able to feel."

Above: Dock Boggs by R. Crumb.

Postscript: Listen to this lovely instrumental by Nora Brown. It's Dock Boggs' "Coke Oven March." 

Then We Were New

Don't look at me, it's way too soon to see
what's gonna be; don't look at me.

— Paul McCartney

Paul McCartney, who turns 80 this week, entertained last night for nearly three uninterrupted hours at a Baltimore baseball stadium that was filled to the rafters.

 

I bought the concert tickets as a birthday gift for my wife, who had waited decades at long last to see a childhood idol perform live.

The review in today's Baltimore Sun calls the show "a lively performance," a chaste assessment you'd more likely expect to read in the Liverpool Echo circa 1963.

McCartney rocked, as a matter of fact.

I was happy he chose to include "New" in his set list, a 2013 tune that's one of his finest.

When it was released, The Daily Telegraph described the song as a "jaunty, Beatles-esque stomp," but I think it's much more than that.

In the guise of a Sergeant Peppery love song, "New" conveys the giddiness that codgers like McCartney can experience in the face of decrepitude.

It's a giddiness that can lead to a longer life—and a happier one, as well—and is based on little more than aplomb.

It's a giddiness that defies the withered outer shell. 

"Within, I do not find wrinkles and used heart," Emerson said of the aged, "but unspent youth."

"Don't look at me," McCartney sings, "I can't deny the truth, it's plain to see; don't look at me. All my life I never knew what I could be, what I could do—then we were new."

Take just a moment to listen.

Mother of Muses

Sing of the heroes who stood alone,

whose names are engraved on tablets of stone.

— Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan's "Mother of Muses," critics agree, is among the singer-songwriter's finest pieces. 

Released in 2020—seven decades after his arrival in New York as a fresh-faced folkie from Minnesota—the song represents a collage of archaic people and events that Dylan counts as sources of inspiration.

Sing of Sherman, Montgomery and Scott,
Sing of Zhukov and Patton and the battles they fought,
Who cleared the path for Presley to sing, 

Who carved out the path for Martin Luther King,
Who did what they did and then went on their way,
Man, I could tell their stories all day.

Romping the "old, weird America," Dylan is like a vacuum cleaner whose bag never gets emptied.

He compiles, more than composes; derives, more than devises—pastiching from the sourcebook we call American History and hoping listeners never forget that "we stand on the shoulders of giants."

"All ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources," Mark Twain said. "There is not a rag of originality about them."

That's certainly true of Dylan's murky lyrics. As a songwriter, he's is like a dealer at an antiques mall or a docent at a roadside attraction, ready to regale you with lore about obscure objects and eccentric people.

Listening to his words is like taking vacation with Sarah Vowell.

"When Bob Dylan performs, he channels a whole universe of time-weathered emotions, ideas, and legacies," says Giovanni Russonello, music critic for The New York Times. 

His rootedness makes him an "ambassador for the country's past and its indelible ideals."

In his memoir, Chronicles, Dylan describes songwriting as inheritance, a process of "converting something that exists into something that didn't."

"Mother of Muses" acknowledges just a few of the dusty items in the cabinet.

There are thousands more in Dylan's catalog.

NOTE: Bob Dylan turned 81 May 24.

Diehard

I was whitewashed and wasted professionally.

— Bob Dylan

Urban Dictionary defines a "diehard" as a fan who's "completely 100% obsessed." When it comes to Bob Dylan, that fits me to a T. 

There are millions of us Bob Dylan diehards around the globe.

Upon meeting, we can size up one another's standing as Bobcats readily, merely by asking whether our devotion extends even to Dylan's early-'80s albums like "Shot of Love," "Infidels," "Empire Burlesque," and "Knocked Out Loaded," released during a period of his career he would later call "wasted."

If the answer's yes, we know definitely we're dehards, companion members of the species Dylanus invictus.

So it's like a diehard's Christmas to listen to the latest Bob Dylan album, "Springtime in New York," Volume 16 of "The Bootleg Series."

On five CDs, "Springtime" packages nearly 60 alternate versions, rehearsal tracks, and outtakes from Dylan's albums of the early '80s, with the result that you are immersed for over two hours in works of unmistakable lyrical and melodic genius.

Stripped of '80s synthesizers, gated reverb, and digital overengineering, the recordings sound live and "unplugged," like classic Bob Dylan tunes. Some stripped-down versions of the songs are so well performed, they put the haphazard versions released in the '80s to shame.

The alternate versions of many of the songs, moreover, offer you a chance to follow a tune's development, and to ponder why Dylan would recast lyrics another songwriter would have sold his soul for.

All in all, "Springtime in New York" will remind you how vastly rich Dylan's song catalog is—even his catalog from the early '80s. 

NOTE: Should you want a distilled edition of the five-CD album, a two-CD edition is available for one-fifth the price of the "deluxe" one.

Inimitable

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

— T.S. Eliot

There's theft and there's appropriation. 

Theft is like porn: you know it when you see it. I recently sent an article to the editor of Successful Meetings; the following week, my article—poorly recast—appeared under a staff writer's byline. 

That's theft.

Andy Warhol, on the other hand, made imitation boxes of Brillo, not for display in grocery stores, but in art galleries. 

That's appropriation.

Whole books have been written about Bob Dylan's penchant for appropriation.

He's appropriated melodies from folk singers, blues players, country artists, and English balladeers; lyrics from novelists, playwrights, scriptwriters, and fellow composers; and paintings from other painters.

Critics are quick to call Dylan's borrowings theft, but even Shakespeare was hardly above appropriation, as T.S. Eliot noted.

"Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal," Elliot wrote of Shakespeare. 

"Bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion."

Dylan has appropriated from plenty of others; but he's welded what he's taken "into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn."

His way of welding makes him inimitable.

NOTE: Bob Dylan turns 80 this month. He resumes touring in June. A retrospective of his paintings opens in November. His archives opens to the public next May.

Wierdo

An artist must regulate his life.

— Erik Satie

Fin-de-siècle composer Erik Satie, best known for his "Gymnopédies Suite of 1888," was, to be blunt, a wierdo. To wit:

• Satie carried a hammer with him wherever he went, a lifetime habit he acquired while living in Montmartre as a young bohemian. He also slept with one eye open.

• He wore only a grey velvet suit and kept over 100 umbrellas in his apartment.

• He detested the sun and only ventured outside on cloudy days.
  
  
• He washed only with a pumice stone, never using soap. 

• He ate only white food: eggs, sugar, salt, rice, cheese (white varieties only), fish, chicken, veal, animal fat and ground bones, turnips, pastries, and coconut.

• He regulated his daily life to the minute. Every day, Satie awoke at 7:18 am; composed from 10:23 to 11:47 am; ate lunch at 12:11 pm; rode a horse from 1:19 to 2:53 pm; composed again from 3:12 to 4:07 pm; relaxed from 4:27 to 6:47 pm; ate dinner at 7:16 pm; read aloud from 8:09 to 9:59 pm; and went to bed at 10:37 pm.
  
  
• He founded an occult religion with one follower—himself. He named it the "Metropolitan Church of Art of Jesus the Conductor."
  
  
• He composed a surreal ballet that caused riots outside the concert hall during the premiere. The ballet landed Satie in a Parisian jail cell for eight days. The charge: "cultural anarchy."

• He had only one girlfriend his entire life, Suzanne Valadon, a beautiful painter of portraits who lived in the apartment next door to his for six months. Satie's penury and compulsive nature drove her nuts and she left him and married a stockbroker. 

Satie barely graduated music school and throughout his life suffered rebuke from critics, who labelled him a "clown" and called his music "worthless." 

Satie called his compositions "furniture music"—what today we'd call "Muzak"—and would scatter his ensemble throughout the room during performances, commingled with the listening audience.

The public liked what it heard—and still does.

You can hear Satie's greatest hits here.