the burden that would be envy, were it not that the song goes free from it.
Song to Woody had acknowledged something without sounding as though this were only conceding or admitting, let alone grudgingly admitting:
Hey, Woody Guthrie, but I know that you know
All the things that I’m a-sayin’ an’ a-many times more
That I’m saying and that I’m singing. It may cost a singer a good deal to say this unenviously about another singer, but the cost is gladly paid by a solvent artist, for it is not so much paid as repaid, and is a debt of honour. And gratitude doesn’t run to ingratiation. The refrain of Blind Willie McTell is likewise happy to do some acknowledging. The earlier “I know that you know” becomes this:
And I know no one can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell
This might sound negative, know no (no, no), but then that is how to convey that nothing could be more positive. Or more compacted (I know that no one can, and I know no one who can). Gratitude is called upon and called for, as it is in the warning voice (O . . . no . . . know . . . know . . . no) above Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost:
Sleep on,
Blest pair; and O yet happiest if ye seek
No happier state, and know to know no more.
(IV, 773–5)
After Guthrie in Dylan’s creative life, though before Guthrie historically, there comes – welcomed – a new arrival who is a newer rival. The rivalry has its chivalry.
BLIND WILLIE McTELL
Seen the arrow on the doorpost
Saying, this land is condemned
All the way from New Orleans
To Jerusalem
I traveled through East Texas
Where many martyrs fell
And I know no one can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell
Well, I heard that hoot owl singing
As they were taking down the tents
The stars above the barren trees
Was his only audience
Them charcoal gypsy maidens
Can strut their feathers well
But nobody can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell
See them big plantations burning
Hear the cracking of the whips
Smell that sweet magnolia blooming
See the ghosts of slavery ships
I can hear them tribes a-moaning
Hear the undertaker’s bell
Nobody can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell
There’s a woman by the river
With some fine young handsome man
He’s dressed up like a squire
Bootlegged whiskey in his hand
There’s a chain gang on the highway
I can hear them rebels yell
And I know no one can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell
Well, God is in his heaven
And we all want what’s his
But power and greed and corruptible seed
Seem to be all that there is
I’m gazing out the window
Of the St. James Hotel
And I know no one can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell
There is a road that runs for twenty years from the one travelling song, Song to Woody, to the other, Blind Willie McTell. Take, for instance, Dylan’s sequence “This land is”, moving on to “from New Orleans / To Jerusalem”. Guthrie didn’t own the franchise on this sequence of words, but it has a way of summoning him. This Land is Your Land was his.93
The land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York island
Dylan puts his own grim spin on this by having the phrase “This land is” be consummated not by “your land” but by “condemned”. It is a withering word, once you think of how much it might compact: “condemned” as blamed, censured, judicially sentenced, doomed by fate to some condition, pronounced officially to be unfit for use (we often hear of a house as being condemned, but a land?), or – and this is an odd twist – just the opposite, not unfit for use but so fit for use that the government claims the right to take it over: to pronounce judicially (land etc.) as converted or convertible to public use. (“The condemnation of private lands for a highway, a railroad, a public park, etc.”) All these might be seething in the word “condemned”, and so perhaps – since the train of thought is “Seen the arrow on the doorpost / Saying, this land is condemned” – might be the application to “a door or window: to close or block up”. Henry James, Portrait of a Lady: “the door that had been condemned, and that was fastened by bolts”.
“This land” was all the more Woody Guthrie’s because not his alone. Behind it there is an inheritance that is respected in Blind Willie McTell, too. The phrase “this land” has its own substantial entry in Cruden’s Concordance to the Bible, and the phrase’s being more than a casual pointer in Dylan’s song will be clear if we recall the word in whose company “this land” repeatedly appears in the Bible: “Unto thy seed will I give this land” (Genesis 12:7, repeated in 24:7); “Unto thy seed have I given this land” (Genesis 15:18); “I will multiply your seed as the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have spoken of I will give unto your seed” (Exodus 32:13). “The stars” rise in Dylan’s second verse, but the song then bides its time, and it is not until the final verse that “this land” meets the word that is sown so often in its vicinity: “seed”.
But power and greed and corruptible seed
Seem to be all that there is
The indeflectible internal rhyme greed / seed then has “seed” succeeded immediately by “Seem” rounding the corner of the line, and this with a two-edged effect, compounding the insistence (clinched by this assonance and consonance) and yet at the same time mitigating it. For to give emphasis
