The Roving Gambler at Scenic Newport

Bob Dylan made his first appearance at the Newport Folk Festival in late July 1963. Peter, Paul and Mary had hit it big with their recording of "Blowin' in the Wind," but they deferred to the new prodigy of the folk revival. Dylan closed his evening concert onstage with Joan Baez, Theodore Bikel, Pete Seeger, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee's Freedom Singers (including the later-to-be famous Bernice Johnson), and Peter, Paul, and Mary, in a hand-clasping formation singing "We Shall Overcome."

Dylan was featured in 1963 not only as a singer and songwriter, but as the author of an epistolary prose-poem that was printed in the festival's program. "For Dave Glover," composed in the dropped-consonant vernacular Dylan favored at the time, was a catching-up letter to a Minneapolis friend -- part reminiscence, part apology (for what, Dylan never said), and part complaint about the false labels and dogmatic authenticity of the folk-song purists. The writer couldn't sing "Barbara Allen" or "John Johannah" any more; he must, he declared, sing "Seven Curses" and "Don't Think Twice," befitting the "COMPLICATED CIRCLE" of his own time, so different from Woody Guthrie's 1930's. But neither did Dylan renounce those older songs, because without them the new ones he could sing would not exist. Music not busy being born is busy dying, and the writer had to wager on himself and sing for himself and for his friends and his day; yet neither would he disown the heritage that folk-song purists also wanted to preserve:

An I got nothin but homage an holy thinkin for the ol songs and
stories
But now there's me an you

Back at Newport two years later, Dylan would pay notorious homage to the holy old tune "Down on Penny's Farm," and give it another life, by changing Penny's name to Maggie, plugging it all in to a primitive sound system, and describing wholly new arcs of complication that nobody, not Pete Seeger, not Joan Baez, and maybe not even Dylan himself, fully understood. Yet faint portents of that explosive emotional paradox of old and new -- of the collision between holy thinking and Bob Dylan's irrepressible eye -- had turned up in Newport in 1963, in "For Dave Glover." And the complicated circles returned to Newport, like a little whirlwind, when Dylan finally showed up again, almost forty years later.

Mississippi John Hurt, Newport Folk Festival 1965

Some notes on Bob Dylan, the 2002 Newport Folk Festival, and the modern folk process:

In advance of the 2002 festival, the New York Times (among others) wondered if Dylan would hit the stage the same way he did in 1965, playing electric, and maybe even playing "Maggie's Farm." Although Dylan did, of course, play rock 'n' roll during his set, he did not play "Maggie's Farm;" and sticking to his usual current concert format, he opened with an acoustic number, "The Roving Gambler." Not everybody in the audience recognized the song, but by playing it, whether by accident or design, Dylan made a point.

In September 1963, shortly after "For Dave Glover" appeared at Newport, Glover, better known to listeners as Tony "Little Sun" Glover, traveled to New York to record his second album of blues, rags and hollers with his fellow Minneapolis folkies "Spider" John Koerner and Dave "Snaker" Ray. Among the songs they recorded was Koerner's one-man, rap-prefaced version of "Duncan and Brady," a folk-revival standard about a pair of gamblers, recorded earlier (and done straight) by Dave Van Ronk. Koerner would repeat his fractured version of the song (described aptly by Dave Ray as "hyper Zen") at the same Newport Folk Festival where Dylan played "Maggie's Farm." Koerner, Ray, and Glover would continue to team up, in various combinations, over the next thirty-five years. In 1986, with Glover assisting on harp, Koerner released a solo album which included another gambler song, "The Roving Gambler," descended from an ancient English tune.

"The Roving Gambler" had been a favorite in Minneapolis's Dinkytown folk-song circles since the late-1950's. (An 18-year-old Bob Dylan sang a version into a tape-recorder at his friend Karen Wallace's apartment in May 1960.) It was first recorded commercially, as far as anyone knows, in 1930, by a popular cowboy singer, Carson Robinson. Woody Guthrie's sidekick Cisco Houston also sang it, as did the Stanley Brothers, as did, years later, Marty Robbins, Jim Reeves, Frankie Laine ("High Noon," "Rawhide"), Ramblin' Jack Elliott, the actor Robert Mitchum, and Arlo Guthrie, among dozens of others. Alan Lomax included a transcription of "The Roving Gambler" in his definitive 1960 collection, Folk Songs of North America. And by then the song was enjoying another sort of revival in the American mass market. Tennessee Ernie Ford, of "Sixteen Tons" fame, hit the middle of the pop charts with his "Roving Gambler" in 1956. Two years later, the rock 'n' rolling Everly Brothers included a slow, reflective version on an acoustic album of old standards called Songs Our Daddy Taught Us. And in early 1961, the commercially-successful mainstream folk performers The Brothers Four, second in renown only to the Kingston Trio, released a new album with yet another version of "The Roving Gambler," this one arranged by the group's bass player Bob Flick.

(The Brothers Four, though disdained in hip folk circles for their frat-house, crew-cut, white-bread style, were and are accomplished musicians, with a knack for recording great songs, old and new. Like Koerner, they came up with their own adaptation of "Duncan and Brady," which they called "Brady, Brady, Brady." In 1964, they were performing a strong version of the anti-war anthem "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" as well as Dylan's "Don't Think Twice." In May 1965, only weeks after Dylan recorded "Mr. Tambourine Man," the Brothers Four released their cover version, beating the Byrds by a month.)

In 1957, Andy Griffith starred in the Budd Schulberg-Elia Kazan film A Face in the Crowd, playing Lonesome Rhodes, a convicted hobo and country singer who, thanks to a shrewd producer (played by Patricia Neal) becomes a nationwide T.V. celebrity and reactionary demagogue -- a forerunner of Rush Limbaugh and Bob Roberts. Bob Dylan saw A Face In The Crowd, and, reportedly, was more shaken by it than by any film he'd seen since Rebel Without a Cause. At a crucial moment in the film, Griffith's character realizes he's going to make a fortune and starts singing an exuberant and menacing version of "The Roving Gambler."

On August 24, 1997, Bob Dylan -- who had cheated death weeks earlier and was now on the verge of releasing an album, Time Out Of Mind, that would reclaim his career -- played a concert in Vienna, Virginia. The songs included "The Roving Gambler," which Dylan and his new band had added to their set list a few months earlier. (They would eventually alternate it with "Duncan and Brady.") Three songs later, after "Blind Willie McTell," Dylan introduced his band and acknowledged the presence in the audience of one of the men "who unlocked the secrets of this kind of music," Alan Lomax. (At Newport, in 1965, Lomax along with Pete Seeger led the old guard that objected to the blasts of white-boy electricity, including Dylan's. Now all seemed forgiven.) Then, with a mischievous audible chuckle, Dylan and the band kicked into a roaring "Highway 61 Revisited," a consummate Dylan rocker of the kind that had so enraged Lomax in 1965. "This kind of music," indeed - except that "Highway 61" includes the following verse, with ominous undertones of both ancient folk music and "A Face in the Crowd":

Now the rovin' gambler he was very bored
He was tryin' to create a next world war
He found a promoter who nearly fell off the floor
He said I never engaged in this kind of thing before
But yes I think it can be very easily done
We'll just put some bleachers out in the sun
And have it on Highway 61.

On July 19, 2002, two weeks before what the New York Times would soon be hyping as Bob Dylan's triumphant return to Newport, Alan Lomax died. But something of his spirit, and that of the recently dead Dave Van Ronk, and also those of Tennessee Ernie Ford, Don and Phil Everly, Robert Mitchum, Lonesome Rhodes, and Tony Glover, hit the stage running when Dylan, in a cowboy hat, a fake beard, and a wig that made it seem, from five rows back, as if he'd sprouted enormous flowing orthodox Jewish ear locks, opened his set with the Brothers Four's arrangement of "The Roving Gambler."

Newport had changed mightily in forty years. Once an admixture of Gilded Age mansions and wharfside stripper bars, the place has been turned tourist-friendly, its waterfront crowded with up- and middle-scale bars and eateries, fake scrimshaw curio shops, and the inevitable Marriott. It is no longer Newport; it is "Scenic Newport," the direction signs say, which tells you how hard the developers have pushed.

The Folk Festival is different too. In 1963, the main concerts took place in town at Freebody Park, while the workshops sprawled out over the grounds of the Newport Casino (no gambling, but an old-line lawn-tennis club) and St. Michael's School, near the park. The crowds were huge (reaching upwards of 70,000 by the mid-1960's, which forced the promoters to move the event to a large field adjacent to the city); they were white, and young, and earnest; and many hundreds of those who came, not just the performers, played some sort of musical instrument, and had brought along their guitars, and harmonicas, and Jew's harps, and bongos. Back then, the Folk Festival was a place to jam and to learn new licks and to rub shoulders with other amateur musicians, as well as to hear the big- and not-so-big-time acts.

The 2002 Festival was much smaller -- about 15,000 persons over two days -- and, perched out at Fort Adams in Newport Harbor, harder to get to, at least if you lined up to take one of the water-taxis from town. About half of the crowd could have been at Newport forty years earlier. I counted only one family of blacks on the day I was there (that much was the same). Apart from a trailer set up to hawk Gibson guitars and a booth displaying hand-made dulcimers, there was not a single musical instrument in sight off-stage. This was an event for listening, not for playing.

A few prominent old-timers were in evidence. Near the front of the main stage, gray-haired David Gahr, one of the court photographers of the 1960's folk revival, waddled about, smiling, in an orange shirt and shorts, camera at the ready. Out among the craft booths, another well-known folkie and picture-taker, Dick Waterman, was selling his prints of young Dylan and Baez and folk festivals past, and telling an interviewer that the really important thing wouldn't be so much what Dylan chose to sing as what he might choose to say to acknowledge his return.

Mainly, there was Geoff Muldaur, in fine voice at a side-stage songwriter's group session. Muldaur, who must be around 60, looks younger than that, and in his chinos and running shoes he could be your friendly neighborhood CVS pharmacist, until he tenderly wails "Wild Ox Moan," and you realize that, more than ever, he is the real goods, and a beautiful deceptive slow-hand guitarist to boot. Way back when, Muldaur's gifts were hidden a bit by the more outlandish Jim Kweskin, and Fritz Richmond, and by the weird Mel Lyman (not to mention Muldaur's gorgeous then-wife Maria), and by the raucous thump of the Kweskin Jug Band. The man is a natural-born blues singer.

And at Newport, he also tended the flame. Apropos of something I've now forgotten, he told the little crowd packed beneath a tent that Dylan had once called him the female Carolyn Hester. "He DID," Muldaur said, when nobody responded, as if by emphasizing, he could explain to his audience who the formidable Carolyn Hester was and is and why, therefore, Dylan's long-forgotten (but not by Muldaur!) little put-down was also amusing. He announced he would sing Mississippi John Hurt's spelling song "Chicken," then asked if anybody'd heard of it, and a look of bemused perplexity crossed the face of the pleasant young performer seated beside him, Caroline Herring, herself Mississippi-born. "Back in 19-whatever, when Mississippi John Hurt was here, he'd just keeping doing this little thing," Muldaur said, then picked a moment on his guitar, "and we'd all collapse." The line raised a little light laughter. Things have changed.

There was more strong music on that first festival day, including some snappy harmonizing by the Austrialian trio The Waifs, and a set of Cajun Zydeco by Rosie Ledet, backed by what looked like half of her extended family. Louise Taylor sang an earthy rendition of her song "Dangerous;" and Bob Hillman presented a funny New Yorker's "drop dead" to the rest of the country, bringing back a touch of the old post-McCarthyite feeling that, for a couple of days a year, Newport was a weirdly subversive place.

But what wasn't there stood out as much as what was. How strange, amid the renewed success of old-timey music thanks to O, Brother, Where Art Thou, not to have more of it. No Alison Krauss, let alone no Ralph Stanley. Stranger still, no Handsome Family, no Anna Domino or Snakefarm (heck, Songs From My Funeral has been out three years already), nor any of the other hugely intelligent cracked balladeers who are remaking the folk and blues traditions in their own edgy mordant way. Maybe they'd have been just too much, just too strange. Maybe Newport is still playing it more than a little on the safe side.

In any case, a lot was left on the shoulders of the unsafe and unsound Bob Dylan. And he and his band turned in not the very best performance I've ever heard them play, a contrast to the previous night in Worcester, when they peeled more plaster off the peeling walls of a cavernous old vaudeville house-turned-concert arena. At Newport, some virus seemed to be running loose in Charlie Sexton's mic-ing set-up, which was distracting. The late-afternoon broiling open-air setting had the effect of dispersing the crowd's appreciation, so that unlike the response-blasts that arose in Worcester, it got to sounding almost silent between the songs.

But Dylan and the band still gave a singular show, criss-crossing the past and the present with what looked like a carefully-chosen collection from Dylan's songbook. "Maggie's Farm" might have struck him as too obvious -- but he pulled out a few things he rarely plays anymore that were of the same vintage, including "Subterranean Homesick Blues" and "Positively Fourth Street." At times, it really was July 1965 again, except played with much tighter chops than the barely-rehearsed Paul Butterfield back-up players back then, and in wholly new arrangements.

But things didn't stay semi-nostalgic for long. Just as he does night after night on the road, Dylan took his audience on a tour of the traditions he has been making his own for forty years and more, including whole chunks of American music -- rockabilly ("Summer Days"), political song ("The Times They Are A-Changin'), slide-guitar blues ("Cry A While") -- that had barely showed up during the rest of the festivities.

The most musically powerful and poignant moment came after the regular set ended with "Leopard-skin Pill-box Hat," as the unshadowy sun, just starting to set, turned the great granite stonework of Fort Adams from gray to amber. Dylan, his fake locks damp now, looking more like one of the diminutive Russian aviators from the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup, came back with the band for the encore, and lit into the one of the most joyous versions of "Not Fade Away" I have ever heard, in the Grateful Dead's arrangement. The ghosts of Buddy Holly and Jerry Garcia started chasing the ghosts of Mississippi John Hurt and Son House and Clarence Ashley, all conjured up by the Prospero on-stage, all back in Newport.

At one point, while going through the ritual of introducing the band, Dylan paused for half a second, looking as if he just might say something to mark the occasion, as if the words were coming to him, like Dick Waterman had thought would happen. If he was to say anything, he would say it now; and for a moment, beneath his get-up, Dylan seemed to be thinking it over.

But instead he smiled and twitched, and went back to playing, letting his masked theatrical speak for itself, an entire festival in just one act.

Sean Wilentz teaches history at Princeton University and is historian-in-residence at bobdylan.com