Why Dylan Matters. Richard Thomas F.

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СКАЧАТЬ Country Blues” from The Times They Are A-Changin’—a mining blues folk song Dylan would sing at the Newport Folk Festival on July 26, 1963, then once again, for the last time at a concert, at Carnegie Hall, on October 26 of the same year. “This is a song about iron ore mines, and—a, iron ore town,” he said at Newport. The song is in the voice of a woman, as we discover only in the fourth verse, brought up by her brother, who falls victim to the mines, following the same end as her father. In a final blow her husband deserts her and her three children. Dylan had written the song following a trip back to Hibbing, before the public discovered that he had grown up in the town. Andrea Svedberg broke the news of that reality in a Newsweek article published the Monday after the Carnegie Hall concert.

      Once the Hibbing connection was made, “North Country Blues” was too easily situated in Hibbing and to the background of Bob Zimmerman, despite its narrator’s female voice and the far different details of its story. Maybe that was why Dylan sang it only once more, in 1974 at a benefit concert for the Friends of Chile. By 2001, when “Floater (Too Much to Ask)” came out, Dylan cared less about people knowing where he came from, and B. J. Rolfzen in his talk is not the only one to have detected autobiographical undertones to the song, both in the lines he quoted and in the ending of the same verse, on the young people of the town:

      They all got out of here any way they could

      The cold rain can give you the shivers

      They went down the Ohio, the Cumberland, the Tennessee

      All the rest of them rebel rivers

      By the time of that song, 2001, Dylan’s real identity and background was even more beside the point. While “North Country Blues” is a song that can be tied to the hard lives of those who worked and died in the mines of Hibbing, Minnesota, it is even more a song that came more from the folk tradition of mining songs, and especially from the fertile mind of Bob Dylan. Like Dylan, our group soon enough boarded the bus and headed south, following his fifty-year-old trail, to the University of Minnesota, and the next day for coffee in Dinkytown, where he went in the fall of 1959 to take up the art of folksinger performance on his way to Greenwich Village and destiny. The conference itself was memorable enough, but what has stuck in my mind most is that day, spent in the little Minnesota town of Hibbing.

      LATIN AND THE LATIN CLUB, HIBBING, 1956–57

      As the only classicist in the group, I was also in Hibbing looking for something else, for traces of a bond I shared with Bob Dylan that for me dated back to 1959, when I began studying Latin at the age of nine. Following lunch at Zimmy’s, I slipped out and walked the two blocks to the Hibbing Public Library. One of the waitresses had told me there was a Dylan exhibit there, featuring a copy of the Hematite, Dylan’s high school yearbook from 1959, the year he graduated. The Hematite was named for the mineral form of iron oxide that brought wealth to the town, and had in the days before the main lode dried up paid for the building of its magnificent school. I had already seen page 76 of the yearbook, at a Dylan exhibit in Seattle in 2005, and in the Scorsese documentary No Direction Home, so I knew what to expect. On that yearbook page the life and career of the future Nobel laureate was summed up in just three details:

      Robert Zimmerman: to join “Little Richard”—

      Latin Club 2; Social Studies Club 4.

      Plenty has been written about Bob’s early interest in Little Richard, one of the foundational singers of rock and roll, whose hit “Tutti Frutti” shot up in the charts at the end of 1955, when Bob was a freshman at Hibbing High. By the following fall, backed by the Shadow Blasters, his name for the first band he had put together, Bob Zimmerman was himself now imitating the songs and stage antics of Little Richard. Indeed, the head shot of Bob Zimmerman at the top of that same yearbook page even alluded to the identity his notice craved, in the form of his trademark Little Richard pompadour hair style. This was well before he started taking on the persona, and the look, of Woody Guthrie as he headed for the folksinging scenes of Greenwich Village.

      But few have paid much attention to his membership in the Latin Club. With his newfound performing interests, and from the evidence of his dropping off the honor roll from 1956 to 1958—he made it back on for his last year—his later claim to be interested in nothing beyond his music (liner notes, Biograph, 1985) might seem credible enough, though mostly on piano, not yet guitar. But right around this time he was also turning up to Latin class and to Latin Club meetings, and he certainly posed for the group photo of the club that came out in the 1957 Hematite. Bob Zimmerman’s enrollment file “disappeared” years ago from the meticulously kept records of the school, but we know that he was taking Latin and learning about Rome that same year he put his first band together. In addition to the yearbook, the school paper, the Hibbing Hi Times, for November 30, 1956, in the regular “Club Notes” column also gives us a unique rarity, a record, unimpaired by the potentially creative memory of those friends who later recalled this or that detail—part of a day in the life of the fifteen-year-old:

      SOCIETAS LATINA HOLDS INITIATION

      Societas Latina [Latin Club] held its annual initiation party and ceremony for new members recently in the high school cafeteria. Several associated members of the club were present also.

      Second-year students vied on a mock TV program, answering questions on Roman gods and goddesses and identifying words dealing with various phases of Roman life. Winners were awarded prizes. After the formal pledge of allegiance by new members, initiates received badges and were raised from the status of slave to that of plebeians. Members then adjourned to the punch bowl where Consul Mary Ann Peterson and Anna Marie Forsmann, in Roman dress, presided.

      Consul Joe Perpich, assisted by Dennis Wickman, Bob Zimmerman, and John Milinovich, was in charge of the formal induction and radio program.

      For whatever reason, interest in the Roman gods and goddesses, helping with the radio, or the favorable gender imbalance (fifty girls to fourteen boys)—or all three—Bob Zimmerman was a member of the Hibbing High Latin Club. The only other information about the Latin Club comes with the paper’s issue for March 15, 1957, in the spring of Bob’s membership year, under the headline LATIN CLUB EDITS IDES OF MARCH NEWS:

      Societas Latina members today published a paper to celebrate the death of Caesar on the Ides of March (March 15). The paper included Roman history, an original poem, cartoons, and many other items with a Roman background.

      Any trace of that paper is long gone, but it is safe to assume Bob Zimmerman played some role in the celebration. Almost sixty years later, as we’ll see, Dylan was quoted as saying, “If I had to do it all over again, I’d be a schoolteacher—probably teach Roman history or theology.”

      We can’t be sure what got Bob Zimmerman interested in Latin and the Romans, but it looks as if those interests started in the years before he walked into Miss Irene Walker’s Latin class in the fall of 1956. Bob’s uncle owned the Lybba, named after Dylan’s great-grandmother, one of the town’s four movie theaters, along with the State, and the Gopher, like the Lybba both just a few blocks from his home, the fourth a drive-in. The early to mid-1950s saw an intensification of movies about Greece and Rome, the latter in particular, along with biblical movies, with or without Romans. This was part of a post–World War II, Cold War–generated escape into the relative security of antiquity: swords and sandals, rather than the atom bomb. At the same time, these years saw the height of McCarthyism and the blacklisting of Hollywood actors, producers, and directors. The ancient world could be used as a medium for camouflaging contemporary red-baiting while depicting persecutions emanating not from Washington, D.C., and the House Un-American Activities Committee, but rather from the city of Rome: between 1950 and 1956, when Bob decided to take up Latin, any number of such movies were available for him to have seen, including Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1953 hit version of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, СКАЧАТЬ