North Country Blues: there is no solution. The meaning of the lyrics and the music

By Tony Attwood

Dylan is strong on the decline of communities and traditional economics – as can be readily seen from two totally different pieces of music.

There’s Union Sundown

the car I drive is a Chevrolet
It was put together down in Argentina
By a guy makin’ thirty cents a day

And North Country Blues

it’s much cheaper down
In the South American towns
Where the miners work almost for nothing.

The theme of economic change and the destruction of communities and individuals by an uncaring economic system is very a Dylan theme.   Hollis Brown is another obvious example.

But he’s not so good on solutions.  Indeed when does Dylan do solutions to problems?  We might be living in a material world, just like they might be selling postcards of the hanging, but Bob’s not going to make a recommendation, other than “You gotta serve somebody” – at least some of the time.

It is not something I have considered before and I am sure you can immediately tell me some solutions other than the religious one, but when I start thinking about problems I get problems in the economic system, as above, and problems in personal relationships, problems with TV, the problems of self-doubt (“What good am I) and personal relations (“You’ve got a lot of nerve to say you are my friend”).

Indeed he even kindly summed it all up once for us

Trouble
Trouble, trouble, trouble
Nothin’ but trouble

And the solution is… to walk off down the road, One too many mornings style.  The drifter, wandering from town to town, is the model solution.  Or else there is no solution, and the past and the future merge, as with Tangled up in blue.  Or, God comes along and determines what we should do.  There’s no solution that is man made and that works.

True, Times they are a changing (the song not the album) offered a solution, but as I noted before, the album’s title song is quite out of line with the rest of the album, which offers no hope.

So this song is a forerunner of this bleak desolate outlook, modelled on his childhood home – a theme that runs and runs on to one particular high point when Dylan said,

Mercury rules you and destiny fools you
Like the plague, with a dangerous wink
And there’s no time to think

You rush around forever trying to put things right, but you really don’t have time to work any of it out.   We are what the world makes us (except for the time Bob thinks we are what God makes us).

Musically the chord sequence is as sad and simple as it could be: A minor and G major alternating.   That rocking slowly backwards and forwards, not of the old timer on the porch enjoying the later years of life, but the desperate sad starving woman trying to hold herself together.

Above it the bleak lines echo.

• Line 1/2 ends on a down note
• Line 3 answers and rises high and energetic but…
• Lines 4/5 repeat lines 1/2
• Line 6 gives up the battle and goes down into misery.

Even the sixth line of the third verse, “To marry John Thomas, a miner.” which ought to be upbeat – she is getting maried after all – isn’t upbeat at all, because it echoes with the knowledge that nothing ever changes until the mine goes bust.  Capitalism always wins.

The song was composed in 1963 and has huge elements of the Woody Guthrie and (separately) the blues influence in it – that representation in black and white of the old communities broken up and swept aside.

The actual town is considered by those who study such things to be the Mesabi Range on the Iron Range in Minnesota where open pit mining took place, near Dylan’s home of Hibbing.

So we have desolation row – not the desolation row of the mind or of a total and utter collapse of a society’s way of thinking, but of a twon now empty, a mother who dies young, a brother and father killed in mining accidents, he husband put partially out of work, the failure of the government to act over cheap imports, the husband who walks out but unlike Hollis Brown seemingly kills only himself, and now there is nothing left here.

To me one of the prime accomplishments of the song is its ability to move between settings as one verse follows another.  Consider this..

And what of the widow of John Thomas?  Her children will go, and she?  What of her in this desolate wasteland?

For her there is nothing.  Not now, not in the future.  Nothing.

I’ve not thought about Tales of Bleakness before as a way of considering Dylan, but now I come to it, it seems to encompass so much of his writing.  Times they are a changing was never the real Dylan.  Mostly it is decay, decline and dissolution.

Except when he found God.

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