JWH: INVOKED ALLEGORY
- From: TIMHRK@xxxxxxx (Tim Herrick)
- Date: 24 Jun 2006 07:58:19 -0700
JWH is a great Dylan record, and it seems the consensus is that it just
makes that list.
Well, it’s not an oftt-played dylan record by moi, but I recently found it
on my CD player. One of the pleasures of loving music and having an ample
collection is playing a CD after several years and rediscovering it.
But I come not to expound upon its uniqueness, but its influence. The term
Americana has somehow become in vogue, and it’s an apt descriptive term. But
there’s something a little more going on here. First there’s allegory. Oh
sure, allergory’s been around since the written word, but the sort of story
songs of the folk music tradition, particulary those of say, Woody Gutherie
(Pretty Boy Floyd, for instance), sure there are allergorical elements, but it’s
really a narrative song about a particular person.
JWH is different. The title track is a sort of story about an outlaw,
however mythical. But, it also invokes a 19th century America, “all along the
telegraph,” and has the zinger epigrams “never known to hurt an honest man.”
But it can also be taken as a poetic allergory about America or being true to
a moral code (or in fact, both). It is not as specific a song as Pretty Boy
Floyd, or as vague a song as Robert Johnson’s Hellhound on My Tail The whole
record is filled with these epigrams, as well as characters. But let’s face
it, Frankie Lee or Judas Priest or The Drifter play on a less surreal landscape
than say, Highway 61 Revisted, certainly allegorical, but God Said to
Abraham Kill Me A Son! Shoot, even Memphis Blues again finds Shakespeare and
Senators and Generals. In JWH, Dylan begins to take the same sort of invoked
allergory and paints more specific stories, even if the stories are not as specific
as Pretty Boy Floyd, or Joey.
The Grateful Dead, The Band, John Fogerty and to a lesser extent, Late
period Byrds, Allman Brothers, and some of the other 70s era “country rock”
bands, took this same sort of approach, invoking an allergory and painted
wordscapes of a sort of 19th century American west or south or mythic place that
looked at broken promises and aspirations. While the hisotrical record were not
as important to records of say Tom Petty and Bruce Springteen as well as
others, they sort of did the same thing, especially Bruce. In Nebraska, for
instance, a song like Atlantic City (they blew up the chicken man in philly last
night), tells a story, but it is an invoked allegroy. It is neither strict
allegory, or a strict narrative. It’s really become part of song writing that
we really don’t notice it as much. JWH was sort of the first song collections
to do this. There are stories, but the stroies are not that specific (what is
along the watchtower, there is a lonsome hobo, and we see the character, but
it’s like Do Re Me, where we travel to california. Yet, they aren’t
exactly true allegory, in that, there isn’t a lot of symbolism to interpret.
Invoked Allegory.
Hey, I just made up this term. Seems to work.
.
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