Dylan and Cash and the Nashville Cats

Art by Jon Langford

I'm blogging about this exhibit that opened last Friday because I like both Dylan and Cash - and because I like the above image by artist and musician Jon Langford. You can read about this era when rock and country 'first' met in Alan Light's "'Dylan, Cash and the Nashville Cats,' an Unlikely Alliance of Rock and Country" (NYT, March 27, 2015):

The era is documented in "Dylan, Cash and the Nashville Cats: A New Music City," an ambitious exhibition that opened this week at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. The show points to three primary forces behind the migration to the Music Row studios: Bob Dylan's journey here to record the "Blonde on Blonde" album in 1966; the ABC television series "The Johnny Cash Show," which filmed at the Ryman Auditorium from 1969 until 1971; and an extraordinary group of session musicians informally known as the "Nashville Cats," who played in one form or fashion on virtually all of these recordings, including albums by Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, Linda Ronstadt, Simon and Garfunkel, and three of the four Beatles.

Yet, some people still think Country Music is limited to rednecks and hillbillies! Of course, I did use to watch a lot of Porter Wagoner back in my hillbilly days.

Well, get back, honky cat . . .

Dylan on Cash . . . Or?

Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan

Google Images

I came across some lines yesterday, written by Dylan about Cash:

Johnny didn't have a piercing yell, but ten thousand years of culture fell from him. He could have been a cave dweller. He sounds like he's at the edge of the fire, or in the deep snow, or in a ghostly forest, the coolness of conscious obvious strength, full tilt and vibrant with danger.

I was so impressed by this description that I followed it up to find the context, which proved to be Dylan's Chronicles: Volume One, in which Dylan was talking about his own song "Man in the Long Black Coat" on the 1989 album Oh Mercy, which he recorded with Daniel Lanois, comparing it to Cash's "I Walk the Line":

I wasn't sure that we had recorded any historical tunes like what he [i.e., Lanois] had wanted, but I was thinking that we might have gotten close with these last two [i.e., "Shooting Star" and "Man in the Long Black Coat"]. "Man in the Long Black Coat" was the real facts. In some kind of weird way, I thought of it as my "Walk the Line," a song I'd always considered to be up there at the top, one of the most mysterious and revolutionary of all time, a song that makes an attack on your most vulnerable spots, sharp words from a master.

I'd always thought that Sun Records and Sam Phillips himself had created the most crucial, uplifting and powerful records ever made. Next to Sam's records, all the rest sounded fruity. On Sun Records, the artists were singing for their lives and sounded like they were coming from the most mysterious place on the planet. No justice for them. They were so strong, can send you up a wall. If you were walking away and looked back at them, you could be turned into stone. Johnny Cash's records were no exception, but they weren't what you expected. Johnny didn't have a piercing yell, but ten thousand years of culture fell from him. He could have been a cave dweller. He sounds like he's at the edge of the fire, or in the deep snow, or in a ghostly forest, the coolness of conscious obvious strength, full tilt and vibrant with danger. "I keep a close watch on this heart of mine." Indeed. I must have recited those lines to myself a million times. Johnny's voice was so big, it made the world grow small, unusually low pitched -- dark and booming, and he had the right band to match him, the rippling rhyhm and cadence of click-clack. Words that were the rule of law and backed by the power of God. When I first heard "I Walk the Line" so many years earlier, it sounded like a voice calling out, "What are you doing there, boy?" I was trying to keep my eyes wide opened, too. (pages 216-217)

In looking around the internet for this passage in full, I noticed that several sites had remarked that Dylan was quoting from various sources in penning his memoirs. To be precise . . . quoting without quotation marks. Plagiarism! Or is it? There's too much of such copying for Dylan to have been trying to deceive anybody. Or to put it another way, Dylan's was no dishonest deception, it was forthright deception -- Dylan living outside the law but being honest. A trickster. In an article "Bob Charlatan: Deconstructing Dylan's Chronicles: Volume One" for the New Haven Review (Issue 6, 2010, pages 71-83), Scott Warmuth argues that "Bob Dylan . . . has embraced camouflage to an astounding degree, in a book that is meticulously fabricated, with one surface concealing another, from cover to cover" (page 71). For instance, the lines that had so impressed me:

Johnny didn't have a piercing yell, but ten thousand years of culture fell from him. He could have been a cave dweller. He sounds like he's at the edge of the fire, or in the deep snow, or in a ghostly forest, the coolness of conscious obvious strength, full tilt and vibrant with danger.

Warmuth notes that:

Almost every word there comes from [Jack] London's story "The Son of the Wolf," cut, pasted, recast.

Click on that short story. You can search for the sources of Dylan's phrasings. His copying. As Dylan might have said, "Only those in the music business would understand that." And read Warmuth's entire article -- it's only thirteen pages, and has much of interest to relate about Dylan's tricky literary language that leads us deep in wandering mazes lost, unacknowledged.

David Lynn Jones

David Lynn Jones

"Mixed Emotions"

(Image from Amazon.com)

I'm not finished with Blumenberg, not by a long shot, but abstract thought, despite its aeyrie heights, can get a bit heavy, perhaps from the thin air up near the aetherial realms where eagles and epicycles still wheel about in their majestic circles. Today, I'm bringing it all down to earth and back home -- or maybe back to earth and down home, 'cause I'm posting on a country musician from my neck of the woods (not Porter Wagoner this time). David Lynn Jones, whose photo you see above, grew up in the tiny Ozark village of Bexar, Arkansas, around where my own maternal Grandfather Perryman did many, many years earlier. Jones, whose father was a farmer and mother a preacher (if I recall), was born a few years before me -- in 1950 if we can believe Answers.com (but that site usually borrows from Wikipedia) -- so I didn't hang out with him, but he was a nephew of my step-Grandfather Archie Dillinger and sang at Grandpa Archie's funeral (or so I'm told, for I was living abroad at the time), and like Archie and me, Jones is part Cherokee. I don't recall ever meeting Jones, who would be about seven years my senior, until we were both grown men and my my brother John, who was pastoring a church in Viola, Arkansas, introduced us after a Sunday sermon. Jones seemed like a humble fellow despite his good looks and musical talent, and he must have settled down a lot from his youth, for I recall hearing a lot of wild stories that would seem to cast him as someone in the mold of such Outlaw Country Musicians as Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson, or Jerry Jeff Walker. My wife Sun-Ae met him as well back when she was still my fiancée, and at our country wedding in an abandoned old church on a country road not far from Bexar, we played his song "Nightingale Waltz" immediately after the (in)formal ceremony. I like what music of his that I've listened to, but I haven't heard much of it because it's difficult to find the albums despite his 1986 hit "Living in the Promiseland," which was covered by Willie Nelson and went quickly to number one on the country charts. For a few photographs of Jones, go to one or more of the following websites:

Ron Newcomer's Celebrity Photos: David Lynn Jones (as a young man) Amazon.com Site: Wood, Wind and Stone Image (from 1989) Michael Buffalo Smith, "2006 Americana Music Conference and Awards," Swampland.com (for a recent photo of an older Jones)

For the interested and intrigued, here's David Lynn Jones singing a song about his grown-up little sister, "Bonnie Jean." UPDATE: Larry Saidman has asked that I link this blog entry to a more recent entry on David Lynn Jones, and as I told him: "Sure, I can link to that blog entry of June 6th, 2008: 'David Lynn Jones: here in our hearts, too.' At that entry, I've linked to David Lynn's My Space site, where he sings his song 'Here in My Heart.'"

UPDATE as of December 2020:

Below are over 200 comments in what became an investigation of identity theft, with this blog entry playing an important role through comments that set some of us off in search of the real David Lynn Jones - was he living in Mountain Home, Arkansas, or Cave City, Arkansas?

When you reach the 200th comment, you'll have to click on the link "newer" to read comments 201 and up.

For greater ease, here is that link now.