Another sad anniversary passed recently. On February 3, 1959, rock and roll pioneers Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and “The Big Bopper” J. P. Richardson were all killed (along with pilot Roger Peterson) in a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa. The event became known as “The Day the Music Died” after Don McLean memorialized it in his 1971 song “American Pie.” While the anniversary passes every year, every so often they put us in a reflective mood. This year’s anniversary observance came on the heels of my 2-part article on the tragic death of Hattie Carroll, a subject that serrated Bob Dylan’s soul.
It turns out the Clear Lake plane crash had an equal impact on him, but for this one, Dylan had a front-row seat. On January 31, 1959, 18-year-old Robert Allen Zimmerman was in the crowd when Buddy Holly brought his ill-fated “Winter Dance Party” tour to Dylan’s Duluth Minnesota hometown. Holly, Valens, and the Big Bopper (along with Waylon Jennings and Dion and the Belmonts) came to the National Guard Armory in that city nine days into a grueling 24-date barnstorming tour of small ballrooms and theatres of the midwest in the dead of winter. While the tour was scheduled to go as far south as Chicago, Cincinnati, and Louisville, it did not include any Indiana stops.
In June 2017, after being honored with the Nobel Prize for Literature, the famously enigmatic Dylan reflected on his earliest influences. As you may imagine, Dylan singled out three books specifically: Moby Dick, All Quiet on the Western Front, and The Odyssey before reflecting on Buddy Holly and how that night started him on his musical journey. “If I was to go back to the dawning of it all, I guess I’d have to start with Buddy Holly. Buddy died when I was about 18 and he was 22. From the moment I first heard him, I felt akin. I felt related like he was an older brother. I even thought I resembled him.” Dylan continued, “Buddy played the music that I loved, the music I grew up on country western, rock and roll, and rhythm and blues. Three separate strands of music that he intertwined and infused into one genre. One brand. And Buddy wrote songs, songs that had beautiful melodies and imaginative verses. And he sang great, sang in more than a few voices. He was the archetype, everything I wasn’t and wanted to be.”
“I saw him only but once, and that was a few days before he was gone,” Dylan recalled. “I had to travel a hundred miles to get to see him play, and I wasn’t disappointed. He was powerful and electrifying and had a commanding presence. I was only six feet away. He was mesmerizing. I watched his face, his hands, the way he tapped his foot, his big black glasses, the eyes behind the glasses, the way he held his guitar, the way he stood, his neat suit. Everything about him. He looked older than 22. Something about him seemed permanent, and he filled me with conviction.”
Even though it happened 57 years prior, Dylan remembered the experience of standing a few feet away and making eye contact with Holly like it was yesterday. And of course, he described it exactly as you would expect: Bob Dylan style: “Then, out of the blue, the most uncanny thing happened,” said Dylan. “He looked me right straight dead in the eye, and he transmitted something. Something I didn’t know what. And it gave me the chills.” Three days after locking eyes with his musical idol, Buddy Holly was dead. Holly’s death caused Dylan to reflect on his own mortality at such a young age, stripping away the confidence of youth and beginning the complicated relationship between Dylan and death that would resonate in his songwriting for the rest of his career. Throughout his career, Dylan covered many of Holly’s songs: “Gotta Travel On,” “Not Fade Away,” “Heartbeat,” and others.
On his 1997 triple Grammy-winning album Time Out of Mind Dylan sings “When the last rays of daylight go down / Buddy, you’re old no more” on “Standing in the Doorway.” Dylan said he could feel the late rocker’s presence while making the album. In a 1999 interview, Dylan said, “I don’t really recall exactly what I said about Buddy Holly, but while we were recording, every place I turned there was Buddy Holly. It was one of those things. Every place you turned. You walked down a hallway and you heard Buddy Holly records like ‘That’ll Be the Day.’ Then you’d get in the car to go over to the studio and ‘Rave On’ would be playing. Then you’d walk into this studio and someone’s playing a cassette of ‘It’s So Easy.’” Dylan continued, “And this would happen day after day after day. Phrases of Buddy Holly songs would just come out of nowhere. It was spooky, but after we recorded and left, it stayed in our minds. Well, Buddy Holly’s spirit must have been someplace, hastening this record.” When it won Album of the Year in 1998, Dylan said, “I just have some sort of feeling that he [Holly] was, I don’t know how or why, but I know he was with us all the time we were making this record in some kind of way.”
Dylan later described what happened a day or two after the plane crash when someone gave him a copy of an obscure 12-string guitarist from Louisiana named Huddy Lead Belly. It was of the 1940 song “Cotton Fields” (also known as “In Them Old Cotton Fields Back Home”). Dylan said, “I think it was a day or two after that that his plane went down. And somebody-somebody I’d never seen before-handed me a Leadbelly record with the song ‘Cotton Fields’ on it. And that record changed my life right then and there. Transported me into a world I’d never known. It was like an explosion went off. Like I’d been walking in darkness and all of a sudden the darkness was illuminated. It was like somebody laid hands on me. I must have played that record a hundred times.” Lead Belly led to more influential artists like Robert Johnson, John Lee Hooker, and others in folk and blues, country, and jazz.
Songwriter Kris Kristofferson once described his friend Johnny Cash as being “a walking contradiction, partly fact, partly fiction” but that verse could easily be applied to Bob Dylan, especially when one considers that Cash was another of Dylan’s acknowledged influences. Over the years, Dylan has acknowledged other influences, and, like Cash, some are more obvious than others. Dylan’s Jewish Russian immigrant parents were fond of the Grand Ole Opry show on WSM radio. WSM broadcasts originated in Brentwood, Tennessee, and featured a unique 808-foot tall “Diamond” shaped tower that allowed the radio station to broadcast to forty states and hundreds of largely rural and small-town audiences. To this day, the WSM Tower is the oldest surviving intact example of this type of radio tower in the world.
In the early 1950s, Dylan listened to the Grand Ole Opry radio show and heard the songs of Hank Williams for the first time. In his 2004 book, Dylan wrote: “The first time I heard Hank [Williams]he was singing on the Grand Ole Opry…Roy Acuff, who MC’d the program was referred to by the announcer as ‘The King of Country Music.’ Someone would always be introduced as ‘the next governor of Tennessee’ and the show advertised dog food and sold plans for old-age pensions. Hank sang ‘Move It On Over,’ a song about living in the doghouse and it struck me really funny. He also sang spirituals like ‘When God Comes and Gathers His Jewels’ and ‘Are you Walking and a-Talking for the Lord.’ The sound of his voice went through me like an electric rod and I managed to get a hold of a few of his 78s-’Baby We’re Really In Love’ and ‘Honky Tonkin’’ and ‘Lost Highway ‘-and I played them endlessly.”
Dylan continued, “They called him a ‘hillbilly singer,’ but I didn’t know what that was. Homer and Jethro were more like what I thought a hillbilly was. Hank was no burr head. There was nothing clownish about him. Even at a young age, I identified fully with him. I didn’t have to experience anything that Hank did to know what he was singing about. I’d never seen a robin weep, but could imagine it and it made me sad. When he sang ‘the news is out all over town,’ I knew what news that was, even though I didn’t know. The first chance I got, I was going to go to the dance and wear out my shoes too. I’d learn later that Hank had died in the backseat of a car on New Year’s Day, kept my fingers crossed, hoped it wasn’t true. But it was true. It was like a great tree had fallen. Hearing about Hank’s death caught me squarely on the shoulder. The silence of outer space never seemed so loud. Intuitively I knew, though, that his voice would never drop out of sight or fade away-a voice like a beautiful horn.”
“Much later, I’d discover that Hank had been in tremendous pain all of his life, suffered from severe spinal problems-that the pain must have been torturous. In light of that, it’s all the more astonishing to hear his records. It’s almost like he defied the laws of gravity. The Luke the Drifter record, I just about wore out. That’s the one where he sings and recites parables, like the Beatitudes. I could listen to the Luke the Drifter record all day and drift away myself, become totally convinced in the goodness of man. When I hear Hank sing, all movement ceases. The slightest whisper seems sacrilege. In time, I became aware that in Hank’s recorded songs were the archetype rules of poetic songwriting. The architectural forms are like marble pillars and they had to be there. Even his words-all of his syllables are divided up so they make perfect mathematical sense. You can learn a lot about the structure of songwriting by listening to his records, and I listened to them a lot and had them internalized. In a few years’ time, Robert Shelton, the folk and jazz critic for the New York Times, would review one of my performances and would say something like ‘resembling a cross between a choirboy and a beatnik…he breaks all the rules in songwriting, except that of having something to say”. The rules, whether Shelton knew it or not, were Hank’s rules, but it wasn’t like I ever meant to break them. It’s just that what I was trying to express was beyond the circle.”
Next Week: The Genesis of Bob Dylan, Part 2
Al Hunter is the author of the “Haunted Indianapolis” and co-author of the “Haunted Irvington” and “Indiana National Road” book series. His newest books are “Bumps in the Night. Stories from the Weekly View,” “Irvington Haunts. The Tour Guide,” and “The Mystery of the H.H. Holmes Collection.” Contact Al directly at Huntvault@aol.com or become a friend on Facebook.
