"All because his face was brown.." - Aspects of racism in Bob Dylan's early lyrics

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

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1. Introduction

Few phenomena shook and transformed the American public in the 20 ^th 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aimed at segregating blacks and nicknamed after a stereotypical black character of 19 ^th century minstrel shows, were repealed.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,

¹ cf. FEAGIN 1995: 11

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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 1960s ² , 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 fundraiser ⁴ . 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 name ⁵ , in a song of his own ⁶ .

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.

² cf. Hentoff, Nat. Playboy Interview: Bob Dylan. Playboy Magazine, Feb. 1966. 04.09.05 .

³ cf. FEAGIN 1995: 3

⁴ cf. de Moraes, Lisa. Kanye West’s Torrent of Criticism, Live on NBC. Washington Post, Sept. 3 ^rd , 2005.

06.09.05 .

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.

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The second question is, since Dylan tried to describe the phenomenon based on “true stories”, whether the results of this analysis match with those of current sociological research as represented by John R. Feagin. These are the questions to be discussed after an analysis of two of Dylan’s songs dealing with “White Racism” and dating from the era in question.

2. Oxford Town

In 1962, James Meredith enrolled at the University of Mississippi at Oxford, Mississippi. He was the first ever black student to do so ⁹ . When he actually tried to attend classes, he was denied access to the classroom. Federal troops were sent in to enforce the desegregation recently passed into legislation and two people were killed in the resulting riots. The following year, Bob Dylan released his second album, The freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, which contained Oxford Town, a song the lyrics of which can be read as commenting on these events.

2.1 Structural analysis and interpretation of Oxford Town

Communication in the lyrics of Oxford Town is carried out by an explicit narrator who addresses an explicit lyrical you. However, this explicitness is only apparent in two of the six ¹⁰ verses, verses 3 and 4 ¹¹ . The lyrical I seems to be a protester, possibly white and from the North, who has come to Mississippi with his “gal” and her son to take part in a Civil rights march. This is suggested by them having been “met with a tear gas bomb” in line 14. Civil rights marches like the ones led by Martin Luther King, jr., and frequently joined by white protesters from the North who had travelled hundreds of miles to take part, were often broken up by police units using brutal force, police dogs and armoured vehicles ¹² . The language used is simple and characterized by short sentences and the use of slang words (“ain’t”, “gal”). This, in combination with the simple structure, the equally simple rhyme scheme and the song’s title is reminiscent of traditional folk ballads. Compared to a large part of Dylan’s

⁹ cf. Cummings, Robert. MWP: James Meredith. Oct. 1997. 18.09.05 .

¹⁰ All observations made in this paper are based on the lyrics as published on the poet’s official homepage at . The recorded version of Oxford Town as released on The freewheelin’ Bob Dylan lacks the sixth verse, which is a repetition of the first.

¹¹ Arguably, the respective last lines of the first and last verses are implying an “I”, but these lines are by no means unambiguous and could also be supplemented with any other personal pronoun.

¹² cf. the relevant descriptions in: McNair, Joseph D. Racism: The Most Pernicious of All The “Isms”. 1998, rev.

2004. 15.09.05 .

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