Our friend Sean Curnyn at the blog Right Wing Bob comments on Princeton University’s event on Monday, “Pickers, Pop Fronters, and Them ‘Talkin John Birch Paranoid Blues’: A Meditation on Music and Politics.”
The genesis for the get-together was Lauren Weiner’s fascinating and entertaining article (in the forthcoming [January 2010] issue of First Things ) called “Where Have All the Lefties Gone?” . . . Her article traces some of the history of various folk revivals in the United States and the efforts to turn the songs and the whole genre towards the goal of promoting, well, Marxist revolution. Her talk was very much centered on the same themes as her piece. One of her most interesting observations was on the way in which the whole effort finally gained its greatest traction by becoming focused on anti-anti-communism (in the wake of events in the 1950s related to the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Senate investigations of Joseph McCarthy).
We’re also privileged to read Curnyn’s own thoughts on how Bob Dylan—the namesake of his blog and on whom he’s an expert—fared among the liberal folk trends:
Dylan’s song “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues” had to get a mention in this context and did. One observation I would make myself about Dylan is this: Even while he was flirting with these themes and entertaining his left-wing friends and audiences, he also in some way seemed to be looking right through the transparency of it all. It might be summed up by a verse of “I Shall Be Free No 10”:Now, I’m liberal, but to a degree
I want ev’rybody to be free
But if you think that I’ll let Barry Goldwater
Move in next door and marry my daughter
You must think I’m crazy!
I wouldn’t let him do it for all the farms in Cuba .Those so inclined would hear that as a slam on the Republican Goldwater. Yet, the humor is double-edged and, to me, the sharper edge is the one that has the intolerant “liberal” as the real clown. (And obviously that’s underlined all the more by Bob’s statement in his memoir Chronicles that his “favorite politician” during his early time in the Village was none other than Barry Goldwater.)
And don’t miss the part about how Curnyn, in speaking with Cornell West at the event, learned how the title of West’s book was derived from an encounter with Bob Dylan. Read on.
