Black lives matter

Rock music, up until 1965, was a teenage music, pure and simple. It avoided all serious subject matter, was focussed on young love, and aimed at an audience of teenagers – with few exceptions.

Bob Dylan, almost single handedly changed all that. Following in the Woody Guthrie tradition, who, in his early development, he based his whole act and persona on, he wrote songs about serious issues – war, civil rights, the rabid right wing John Birch Society, Ku Klux Klan, and racism. He was a Greenwich Village Folk Singer and part of a group who were doing similar serious songs – Buffy St Marie, Phil Ochs and Peter Lafarge. Folk music was a more serious, intellectual music aimed at an older more intelligent, if alternative, audience. The establishment derisively called them Protest Songs. They liked to label things and make them safe. It seemed that Folk and Rock had little in common – right up until Dylan broke through into the charts and became a phenomenon and the Byrds demonstrated that his poetic lyrics and adult themes could be translated into Rock. His impact was then enormous. He changed the way bands like the Beatles wrote songs and suddenly Rock music grew up and started tackling issues and experimenting with form. They were propelled out of the nifty two and a half minute single with verse chorus and middle eight.  Anything went.

In his early days he tried to sound like his hero Woody and scoured the newspapers for subjects to write songs about. Hollis Brown was about a black farmer who in despair shot his family and killed himself. In times of austerity everybody suffered. But with inherent racism it was the blacks who suffered more.

Later Bob was to taunt Phil Ochs, accusing him of being just a journalist. Well there was some truth in that. They were both writing songs that were journalism. This is one of them. But it did not take Dylan long to move out of ‘Protest’ into a more complex, poetic style, while Phil took a bit longer.

This song is early Dylan. It records the tragedy of the poor black farmer. There is a bit of Bob’s poetic imagery and a fairly straightforward repeating set of stanzas. Quite simple when compared to his later works. It sets out to tell the story.

In this moment where the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement is growing, this song has renewed resonance.

“Ballad Of Hollis Brown”