By Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood
This made for TV movie was recorded in 1963 at Westinghouse TV Studio and starred The Brothers Four, Barbara Dane, The Staples Singers and Bob Dylan.
The promotional poster is pretty cool too!
Unfortunately this has never been made available on DVD as far as I know (officially that is).
The complete set list is shown below. Fortunately the three Dylan performances are available on YouTube along with a couple of other tracks.
Introduction / Rock Island Line
- Blowin’ In The Wind
- Song Of The Ox Drivers
- The Tenderfoot
- Sit Down Servant
- Payday At Coal Creek
- Man Of Constant Sorrow
- Wish I Was In Bowling Green
- Famine Song
- Nobody Knows You When You’re Down And Out
- Backwater Blues
- Pastures Of Plenty
- Ballad Of Hollis Brown
- Great Day
- Last Night I Had The Strangest Dream
- Finale / This Land Is Your Land
Here is the introduction along with Rock Island Line, totally worth a watch just for Bob’s introductory walk past!
Tony: I love seeing TV productions from this era for the way that they were trying to adapt the traditions of the theatre and live musical performances into what TV could do. It really is quite fascinating to see how in some of these TV productions great performers were manipulated into being dummies and puppets forced to mime their recordings, or act in a way that the TV station owners thought was appropriate.
Actually I should have said much earlier in this series, I’m amazed at how you are finding all of these Aaron.
Blowin’ In The Wind
A Man Of Constant Sorrow. This was included in the No Direction Home movie and accompanying Bootleg Series 8.
Tony: “I know something you don’t know”. Now that is quite a thought. Could the whole of Dylan’s songwriting be referenced to that? The commentaries here are really interesting.
And Bob’s voice is in particularly fine fettle here.
The Ballad Of Hollis Brown
Tony: Ah… I wanted to see the banjo player as well. Where is he or she? (Incidentally, Bob’s not putting on any sort of show is he – except for the walk-off at the end.)
Aaron: Let’s round things off with the finale of This Land Is Your Land.
“And a couple of problems…” No mention of racism and gun violence then. I wonder what Bob thought of all this in 1963. For by the time this TV programme was recorded Bob had already written “Oxford Town”, “Hollis Brown”, and “Hard Rain”.
But still a great bit of archive material Aaron. Thanks for finding it.
Dylan released and unreleased
- Part 1: Dylan Released and Unreleased
- Dylan Released and Unreleased: 2 – The usual, Pretty Boy, People get ready.
- Dylan Released and Unreleased: 3 – Hard to Handle the full one hour video
- Dylan Released and Unreleased 4: from the nursery to looking back
- Dylan Released and Unreleased: Girl From the North Country
- Dylan Released and Unreleased: Quest
- Dylan Released and Unreleased 7: Down along the cove
- Dylan Released and Unreleased 8: The Compilation Albums
- Dylan released and unreleased 9: the Galas
- Dylan released and unreleased 10: Soundstage, The World of John Hammond
Very interesting ..,,,obviously made before Kennedy was shot…..
Dylan does sneak in gun violence in “Hollis Brown”
John Henry Faulk was a folk lorist and activist in the dark days of blacklisting ‘communist’ entertainers in the US.
Dylan wrote a song protesting against the blacklisting of Faulk:
Go down, go down the gates of hate
You gates that keep men in chains
Go down and die the lowest death
And never rise again
(Bob Dylan: Gates Of Hate)
Refusing to accept censorship, Dylan travelled to Toronto, and recorded a number of his songs on the CBC-TV Quest show.
Hally Wood recorded ‘Worried Blues” (she’s credited with the writing of the song including the line “Going where the orange blossoms bloom”) from which Dylan builds his version of the song but without that particular line.
She married John Henry Faulk.
Ignore that the date given for Wood’s performance of the song is on exactly the same day, month, and year that she exited her mother’s womb,
Tony:
The banjo player on Hollis Brown sounds like it’s Mike Kirkland of the Brothers Four ….photos shots above appear to back this up.
Dylan plays harmonica on an album by Carolyn Hester.