Bob Dylan Read Online Free

Land’, Guthrie was the prototype hobo minstrel, thumbing rides and jumping freight-trains to criss-cross the USA through the Thirties and Forties, supporting leftist causes and singing of the tribulations and essential dignity of the common working man. “I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose,” he said. “Songs that run you down or songs that poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or your hard traveling… no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built. I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in yourwork.” Throughout his life, he considered himself simply a mouthpiece for the people, a journalist noting down the way things really were.
    His empathy with the downtrodden was well-founded in his own experience, which was tough at the beginning, tough at its conclusion, and unremittingly hard in between. Born in Oklahoma in 1912, named Woodrow Wilson Guthrie after the American President who founded the League of Nations, his childhood was scarred by family tragedy, both his sister and father killed in fires and his mother dying from the degenerative nerve disease Huntington’s Chorea. This ailment would be passed on to her son, who would spend the last years of his life, from 1954 to his death in October 1967, in hospitals, slowly wasting away—a cruelly tragic conclusion to a life so full of movement.
    By the age of 17, the orphaned Guthrie had begun the rootless drifting which would characterize a good deal of his life, joining the disenfranchised migratory workers from the ruined Dust Bowl farmlands of Oklahoma, Texas and Arkansas on their journey to the fruit farms of California—the social disaster dramatized by John Steinbeck in The Grapes Of Wrath . Taking his cue from his cousin, country singer Jack Guthrie, Woody began writing songs, adapting traditional folk tunes with his own lyrics, and quickly became the folk-poet of the underdog. Working solo, with his traveling companion Cisco Houston, or as part of The Almanac Singers with Pete Seeger, Lee Hays and Millard Lampell, Guthrie offered an alternative viewpoint to the prevailing mean-spiritedness of the times which would eventually result in the Communist witch-hunts of Senator Joe McCarthy’s notorious House Un-American Activities Committee.
    Seeger, who was condemned by that committee, persuaded Guthrie to write about his own extraordinary life, and the result, Bound For Glory , caused a sensation when it was published during the Second World War. It was this autobiography which captured the interest of the young Bob Dylan in Minneapolis, where he could be found avidly devouring the book in the coffeeshops of the ‘Dinkytown’ campus/ bohemian district, memorizing passages and drawing inspiration from Guthrie’s tales of hard traveling and social injustice. Though he was by that time familiar with some of Guthrie’s material, he subsequently spent more and more of his time unearthing and learning Guthrie’s songs—a close friend from Minneapolis, David Whittaker, recalls him listening over and over again to a record of Guthrie’s half-hour epic ballad ‘Tom Joad’, day after day. Another college acquaintance, Ellen Baker, gave Dylan access to her parents’ huge collection of folk magazines, such as Sing Out! , and records by Guthrie: her parents were impressed with his interest, though like many who encountered Dylan at this period, they felt he was drawing on Guthrie’s life in a more than merely musical sense, trying to build himself a more interesting identity to replace the relatively ordinary one he had grown up with. His slim repertoire of folk songs soon bulged with Guthrie material, and his vocal inflection changed from a rather sweet voice to an imitation of the Okie’s brusque nasal twang.
    Dylan’s obsession with Guthrie grew into a standing joke among Dinkytown friends, particularly his