Dylan & Us: Beyond America: 3. Love, Dancing, Sex, Sadness, TR-63 – part 1

by Wouter van Oorschot

Translated by Brent Annable

Details of previous episodes from this series are given at  the end

 —————

3. Love, Dancing, Sex, Sadness, TR-63 – part 1

Well, I’ve been lookin’ all over
For a gal like you
I can’t find nobody
So you’ll have to do
(‘Honey, just allow me one more chance’,

The freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, 1963)

Appreciating the value of Dylan’s work is facilitated by a prior knowledge of the development of Western folk music in America in the twentieth century, against the backdrop of its origins.

Non-western readers will perhaps forgive me my unfamiliarity with their popular music forms, necessitating me to limit my discussion here to Western folk music, which shall be defined as the music of European peoples and their dominant settlements in other continents.

Campfire and pub songs, ballads, chansons, operas, musicals, operettas, German Schlager, brass-band music, waltzes, marches, even the world-famous refined kitsch of André Rieu, all belong to Western folk music. The blues and all of the genres to which it gave birth also qualify, for while imbued with the African heritage of their creators, they nonetheless emerged against the oppression of the preeminent European settlers in the United States, becoming dominant musical movements.

Those wishing to further suppress their colour-blindness may choose to go one step further, stating that in the twentieth century, ‘black’ music even achieved the dominant position that until then had been reserved for ‘white’ forms. Personally, I am no fan of this recently imported identity-based thinking from the United States, as it serves more to divide people than to unite them. Music belongs to the human race. It should be clear, after all, that I did not learn to do the twist from my clog-dancing, carnival-revelling compatriots!

Rock ‘n’ roll and pop, therefore, are forms of Western folk music. For the preservation of our communal mental health, however, let us at least separate them from Schlagers, musicals, operettas, waltzes, marches, brass bands and most certainly ‘refined kitsch’. Like all forms of popular music, pop and rock ‘n’ roll are simple in structure. The two most common rhythmic frameworks used are duple/quadruple time  (i.e. the even time signatures, which have proven so effective for mating displays) and triple time (which seems only to serve as a prelude to the former).

Chord progressions are very straightforward, and melodies are nearly always crowd-pleasers (provided the lyrics are not all-that elaborate, so that everybody understands what they are about). The greatest distinction between rock ‘n’ roll/pop and all other popular forms is that they are first and foremost young people’s music. But like all of their relatives – and I would hazard the same assessment for non-Western folk music – they are also primarily about love, sex, and heartbreak.

It is therefore a simple fact that the role of pop music essentially boils down to accompanying teenagers and adolescents throughout their sexual maturity. (The fact that some never outgrow it in their later years is a form of nondiscretionary behaviour that points, if anywhere, only to rudimentary musical development – the perpetuation of which can also be a deliberate choice.) This blossoming sexuality is the reason why duple time is more dominant in rock and pop than triple time: mating is a skill, and must be learned.

It should be equally unsurprising that the lyrics are one-dimensional and rarely venture beyond requited love, dancing ‘til you drop, sex, and the sorrows of love, though not necessarily all at once. However, if the teenagers and adolescents feel the music intended for them has no ‘affinity with the zeitgeist’, then there will be simply no success for the artists in question. The three rock-‘n’-roll giants – Little Richard (*1932), Chuck Berry (*1926), and Elvis Presley (*1935) – had this affinity in the mid-1950s, with the three pop giants from the 1960s, Dylan (*1941), The Beatles (*1940-43), and The Rolling Stones (*1936-1943) in turn resonating with post-Second World War baby-boomers like myself.

The term ‘rocking and rolling’ goes back to the seventeenth century, when English sailors used it to describe the ship’s swaying movements from front-to-back and from side-to-side. The oldest documented song containing the term, ‘The camp meeting jubilee’, dates from around 1900 and contains the lines ‘We’ve been rockin’ an’ a-rolling in your arms/In the arms of Moses’. Rock ‘n’ roll’s musical roots, on the other hand, lie in the black population of the United States. ‘Rocking’ and ‘rocking and rolling’ turned up in secular black slang, as more or less veiled euphemisms for dancing, sex, or both. Trixie Smith makes no bones about it in the chorus of her blues number ‘My man rocks me’, recorded in 1922:

Trixie Smith – My Daddy Rocks Me: https://youtu.be/nzVCFiyCsoc

My man rocks me with one steady roll
There’s no slippin’ when he once takes hold
I looked at the clock and the clock struck one
I said "Now Daddy, ain’t we got fun"
He kept rockin’ with one steady roll

My man rocks me with one steady roll
There’s no slippin’ when he once takes hold
I looked at the clock and the clock struck three
I said "Now Daddy, you a-killin’ me!"
He kept rockin’ with one steady roll

My man rocks me with one steady roll
There’s no slippin’ when he once takes hold
I looked at the clock and the clock struck six
I said "Now Daddy, you know a lot of tricks!"
He kept rockin’ with one steady roll

My man rocks me with one steady roll
There’s no slippin’ when he once takes hold
I looked at the clock and the clock struck ten
I said "Glory! Amen!"
He kept rockin’ with one steady roll

The lovemaking for the lady in question was perhaps not so enjoyable after all: her ‘daddy’ took around ten hours for his ‘steady roll’, which to me would seem a little excessive, even for the most modern of androsexuals. But #MeToo movement or no, it is a blues, after all.

Not until the 1940s did journalist Maurie Orodenker (1908-1993) first employ phrases such as ‘rock-and-roll spiritual singing’, ‘…displays its rock and roll capacities when tackling the righteous rhythms’ (1942) and ‘tight rhythmic rock and roll music’ (1945) in Billboard, a weekly music and entertainment magazine.

One year later, ‘Good rockin’ tonight’ (1947) by blues singer Roy Brown (1925-1981) became perhaps the first interracial ‘hit’ in a wilder version by Wynonie Harris (1915-1969). The fact that the dancing lyrics were a thinly veiled reference to sex was no longer news to anyone, and those in the know were only increasing in number.

The new style of music and dance, with Brown as one of its founders, was emerging from a blend of rhythm and blues, jazz, ragtime, cowboy songs, country blues, and folk songs. Radio disk jockey Alan Freed (1921-1965) monitored the developments in the northern state of Ohio with his radio show, The Rock and Roll Party. He reached both a large and varied audience, and the term ‘rock ‘n’ roll’ slowly entered the vernacular.

continued: Dylan and Us, Beyond America: 3. Love, Dancing, Sex, Sadness, TR-63 – part 2

Wouter’s book is only available in Dutch for now:

Dylan en wij zonder Amerika, Wouter van Oorschot | 9789044655179 | Boeken | bol

Previously, we published:

 We will publish more chapters from it in English on Untold Dylan in the coming weeks

 

 

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *