Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen
Fachbereich 05 – Sprache, Literatur, Kultur
Hausarbeit im Proseminar “Pop & Poetry”
SS 05, 2. Semester

"All because his face was brown.." - Aspects of Racism in
Bob Dylan′s Early Lyrics

by: Tobias Gabel

Table of contents

1. Introduction  3

2. Oxford Town 5

2.1 Structural analysis and interpretation of Oxford Town 5

3. Only a pawn in their game  7

3.1 Structural analysis and interpretation of Only a pawn in their game  7

4. Comparison of Oxford Town and Only a pawn in their game, conclusion, and outlook 10

5. List of works cited 14

5.1 Songs analysed in the paper  14
5.2 Books cited 14
5.3 Online resources cited  14

White racism can be viewed as the socially organized set of attitudes,
ideas, and practices that deny African Americans and other people of
color the dignity, opportunities, freedoms, and rewards that this nation
offers white Americans.
(FEAGIN 1995: 7)
How many years can some people exist/before they’re allowed to be free?
(Bob Dylan, Blowin’ in the wind)

1. Introduction

Few phenomena shook and transformed the American public in the 20th century like the one labelled “White racism” by American sociologist Joe R. Feagin in his 1995 book White racism: the basics. Since the 1890s, racial relations in the United States had become worse. During the early decades of the century, lynchings of black Americans, most of them occurring in the South, sometimes averaged 150 a year, with many cases going unreported.¹ In addition to these terrible outbursts of violence, virtually all blacks had to deal with “everyday discrimination” when it came to employment, housing, education and other sectors of daily life. This racist segregation was sanctioned in most cases by legislation. Towards the middle of the century, the situation for Americans of African descent seemed to get better as a number of those so-called “Jim Crow laws”, statutes aimed at segregating blacks and nicknamed after a stereotypical black character of 19th century minstrel shows, were repealed. As the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and other Civil Rights groups slowly made progress, racism more and more entered the consciousness of the general public. In the United States, Racism, especially “White Racism” directed toward blacks, had always been the subject of “literature proper”, be it prosaic or poetic in nature (Harriet Beecher Stowe and Phyllis Wheatley come to mind as prime exponents of both divisions). It had also been treated extensively in (black) popular song, and not very surprisingly given its acuteness, it now broke into the pop mainstream via the singer/songwriter scene emerging from college campuses all over the country. Many of those songs dealing with the racist discrimination of blacks written in the early 1960s were fuelled by, and, at the same time, fuelling the then thriving Civil Rights movement. “Protest singers” like Pete Seeger, Phil Ochs, and Joan Baez, who saw themselves in the tradition of politically conscious folk singers like Woody Guthrie, denounced what not only they, but a large fraction of the population, especially in the Northern states of the Union, deemed scandalous: the legally sanctioned segregation of black citizens in the Southern United States. Among the bards supporting the Civil Rights movement through song, Bob Dylan is widely recognized to be the most important.

Although he soon distanced himself from his overtly political stance of the first half of the 1960s², Bob Dylan’s songs became nothing short of anthems for the Civil Rights movement and many others who felt that “the times” were, indeed, “a-changin’”. The songs treated in this paper remain powerful accounts of injustice still topical today, as racism in the US is seen by many to be on the rise once more.³ Moreover, popular culture, and popular music in particular, is again focusing on the topic as well, one headline-making example being rap shooting star Kanye West’s infamous statement, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people”, at a recent, live-on-TV hurricane fundraiser⁴. Interestingly enough, West mentions Emmett Till, whose death was branded into the memory of the American public not least by the Bob Dylan song of the same name⁵, in a song of his own⁶. Out of the twenty-three songs published on Dylan’s first two “real”⁷ albums The freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963) and The times they are a-changin’ (1964), almost one quarter deal with racism. Most of these songs take cue from actual events, his perhaps most wellknown song Blowin’ in the wind being the exception that proves the rule. Taking into consideration the amount of attention paid to the issue of racism in Bob Dylan’s early work, and the fact that most of this anti-racist material is based on real events, or as Dylan himself put it during a concert at New York’s Philharmonic Hall on Halloween, 1964, “taken out of the newspapers, and nothing has been changed”⁸, two questions arise. The first is whether there are different aspects of racism being treated in the lyrics of those songs or if the same general statement about racism is repeated again and again, just because that was “the thing to do” at the time. If there are different aspects, it will be tried to identify those.

[...]

1 cf. FEAGIN 1995: 11

2 cf. Hentoff, Nat. Playboy Interview: Bob Dylan. Playboy Magazine, Feb. 1966. 04.09.05 <http://www.interferenza.com/bcs/interw/66-jan.htm>.

3 cf. FEAGIN 1995: 3

4 cf. de Moraes, Lisa. Kanye West’s Torrent of Criticism, Live on NBC. Washington Post, Sept. 3rd, 2005. 06.09.05 <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/03/AR2005090300165.html>.

5 The death of Emmett Till, unreleased outtake from the 1963 The freewheelin’ Bob Dylan sessions

6 Through the wire. On: Kanye West. The College Dropout. Roc-A-Fella, 2004.

7 His eponymously titled debut album, released in 1962, contained almost exclusively covers of blues standards.

8 Only to add sarcastically, “Except the words.” This announcement can be found on: Bob Dylan. The Bootleg Series Volume 6. Live 1964. Concert at Philharmonic Hall. Sony Music, 2004.