eMusic Review 0
In his recent autobiography Chronicles, Vol. 1, Bob Dylan writes, "I envisioned myself recording for Folkways Records. That was the label that put out all the great records." It was from Folkways — the life's labor of founder Moses Asch now archived at the Smithsonian Institution as Smithsonian Folkways — that the erstwhile-surnamed Zimmerman discovered the charms of folk music, the peculiar plucks on Martin frets, the chords and sentiments that hung impossibly long like a pregnant pause that must have felt familiar to the Minnesota-bound boy, his world a perpetual sheet of white.
Woody Guthrie, the troubadour's troubadour, a man who traveled the country selling hardship the way others did balms and tonics, was the first to grab Dylan by the ear. "My life had never been the same since I'd first heard Woody on a record player in Minneapolis a few years earlier," he writes in Chronicles. "When I first heard him it was like a million megaton bomb was dropped." And so Dylan proceeded to drop the bomb on us — "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" both more specific and allegoric than Woody dared, the "darling young one" being Dylan speaking to himself through Woody, the boy… read more »
