An illustration of the historical past of blues music would look a little bit like a meteorological chart, with facilities of stylistic innovation marked with concentric strains and the route of affect with arrows. At its middle could be the blues birthplace, the Mississippi Delta, an enormous tract of fertile cotton-growing floor. There could be Freeway 51, the place bluesmen joined the Nice Migration of African-Individuals north, plugged in and created Chicago Blues, and Freeway 61, which hyperlinks the Mississippi Delta to Duluth, Minnesota: the birthplace of Bob Dylan.

As an adolescent, Dylan first heard the blues of Muddy Waters and B.B. King coming by means of the radio stations of the American South within the Nineteen Fifties. “Freeway 61… begins about the place I got here from,” he wrote in Chronicles Quantity One, acknowledging the Blues Street’s affect on his music and its place in his mythology. “I all the time felt like I’d began on it, all the time had been on it, and will go anyplace from it.” On the title monitor of his album Freeway 61 Revisited, he unforgettably reimagined the well-known American highway to say one thing concerning the state of the nation in 1965.

For a nation whose course was so influenced by the Enlightenment preferrred of particular person liberty, roads, and rivers have lengthy appealed to the American literary and musical creativeness. Within the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the Mississippi River (working for many of its course alongside Freeway 61) represents Huckleberry’s journey in the direction of larger self-knowledge, liberating himself from racial prejudice. In Woody Guthrie‘s “Blowing Down This Street”, the highway represents the optimistic seek for a greater world away from the Mud Bowl. One other prototype hippie, Jack Kerouac, noticed America’s freeway as a method to accumulate enriching experiences and an emblem of particular person freedom. However within the Mississippi Delta, with its historical past of cotton plantation slavery, Jim Crow legal guidelines and segregation, job insecurity, poverty, juke joints, and tumbledown shacks, the American highway turned one thing far bleaker.

So little is understood about a number of the Mississippi Delta bluesmen that myths have grown to fill the gaps, most notably in Robert Johnson‘s fabled transaction with the satan on the crossroads. In actuality, many lived between barrelhouses, prisons, and plantations. Johnson himself lived a footloose life hopping freight trains from Texas to Canada searching for an viewers to play to. Blind Willy McTell ran away from dwelling to hitch the carnival in his adolescence. By 1940, he was discovered busking exterior a fast-food joint. Son Home frolicked in jail for manslaughter earlier than he was found by Paramount in 1930.

The image of the Delta bluesman rising from the music is of a lonesome drifter, down on his luck, normally as a result of his lady has badly handled him; a person who wakes as much as discover all he has is gone, who seems perpetually on the verge of hanging his head and crying, who all the time has “has rambling on his thoughts”. For these rolling stones, the freeway doesn’t promise a life-changing journey or freedom; it’s the solely technique of escape from a life gone unsuitable.

From the Twenties, small sketched illustrations of blues historical past started to be crammed out; new arrows had been drawn to point its extending affect. Labels recognizing the business potential despatched cellular recording models south to make early scratchy recordings of nation bluesmen. Within the Nineteen Thirties, Alan and John Lomax drove by means of the Mississippi Delta with an enormous recording machine within the again, inserting Muddy Waters within the Library of Congress for the primary time. Made on roadsides, in low cost resort rooms, and penitentiaries, these recordings led to a growth in nation blues; at his recording studio on Union Avenue, Sam Phillips recorded B.B. King and Howlin’ Wolf within the Nineteen Fifties.

Ultimately, the music would affect British bands just like the Yardbirds, the Animals and the Rolling Stones, Cream, Fleetwood Mac, and Led Zeppelin, and in America, Canned Warmth, Johnny Winter and Santana. After coming to prominence on the Greenwich Village coffeehouse circuit, Dylan lined no fewer than 5 blue songs on his debut album, together with Curtis Jones’ “Freeway 51”. 

When Bob Dylan got here to file Freeway 61 Revisited in 1965, America was a spot of huge social and political turbulence. The draft for the Vietnam Conflict had already fuelled anti-war sentiments, and college students had been burning their draft playing cards. Following the Cuban Missile Disaster of 1962, the specter of nuclear annihilation appeared very actual. In the identical yr, Dylan arrived at Columbia Studios to file the album; Malcolm X had been assassinated, Martin Luther King had led the Selma March, and the Los Angeles district of Watts had become flames in rioting, which resulted in 34 deaths. America in the midst of the Sixties was a far much less sure place than it had been ten years earlier when Rosa Parks sparked the civil rights motion by refusing to surrender her bus seat.

The primary hippie commune, Drop Metropolis, might need promised a social paradise, and LSD might need provided enlightenment, however how would the hippie utopia play out, and what occurred after you had “damaged by means of to the opposite aspect”? “The place do all these highways go now that we’re free?” Leonard Cohen sang in 1967’s “Tales of the Avenue”. The Doorways‘ “The Finish” instructed the counterculture’s liberation was only a dystopia whose roads led nowhere. Jim Morrison’s reverb-drenched voice implores the listener to experience the freeway west {that a} bus is asking, however the driver has no concept the place everyone seems to be heading.

The black-and-white pictures of the Freeway 61 Revisited recording periods present Bob Dylan carrying RayBan sun shades, his face adorned in cigarette smoke with a harmonica holder hanging from his neck. To file the album title monitor, Dylan eliminated his blues harp and changed it with a toy whistle. When the instrument opens the music, it feels like a police automotive siren beginning up because it drives by means of America in turmoil. The music adopted a blues music’s 12-bar construction, given a rock edge by Mike Bloomfield’s ringing slide guitar.

Dylan’s highway is one thing of a primary. This isn’t the bluesmen’s freeway of escape or Huckleberry Finn’s journey in the direction of self-knowledge; it’s not Woody Guthrie’s seek for a greater world or Jack Kerouac’s exhilarating pursuit of particular person freedom. It’s a phantasmagorical place, a vacation spot in itself. Whether or not it was the affect of the Beats, the Symbolist poets, or LSD, Dylan’s lyrics of 1965 had turn out to be extra imagist, fragmented, and surreal. His Freeway 61 is a dumping floor for shoe strings and damaged telephones, the place God asks Abraham to kill him a son, any son. It’s, we would moderately speculate, a metaphor for America in 1965: a mindless place of shopper waste and, amid the Vietnam Conflict, an ethical wasteland the place God doesn’t want to check Abraham’s religion, however solely see a younger man useless. 

Most poignantly, Bob Dylan offers over a verse to 2 of the best Mississippi Delta bluesmen: ‘Georgia Sam’ aka Blind Willy McTell and “poor Howard”, a pseudonym for Lead Stomach. They’re concerned in a determined dialog. Blind Willy McTell’s nostril is bleeding, he can’t get any cash from welfare, and he wants to flee from unnamed issue. He asks Leadbelly the place he ought to go and is informed there is just one place: Freeway 61. Nothing had modified, the lyrics counsel. Regardless of the decade-long wrestle for higher civil rights, the Blues Freeway remained the one technique of escape for African-Individuals from a troubled world.

The ultimate verse completes the image of a up to date America gone unsuitable. We study that Bob Dylan’s Freeway 61 is the place a gambler is attempting to begin the subsequent world struggle. Following Lead Stomach’s recommendation, Blind Willy McTell will arrive there quickly. Maybe it’s a reference to the draft for Vietnam, the place African Individuals fought for a rustic that had stored them impoverished and disenfranchised.

There’s a poignant footnote to Dylan’s return to Freeway 61. In the identical yr as he recorded his file, on the similar Columbia Studios, growing older Delta bluesman Son Home, now sick and an alcoholic, he recorded the album Father of Folks Blues, bringing his music to a broader viewers. Listening to the outdated subject recordings after which that state-of-the-art recording is like watching an outdated sketch turn out to be a colour {photograph}. Capturing the laborious lives of African Individuals within the Mississippi Delta and launched amidst the flames and tear gasoline of the civil rights wrestle, it’s a quietly highly effective protest album all of its personal. Dylan undoubtedly would have agreed. He incessantly acknowledged his debt to the Mississippi Delta bluesmen. In Chronicles Quantity One, he described listening to Robert Johnson in Greenwich Village for the primary time: “From the primary observe, the vibrations from the loudspeaker made my hair rise up”.

“I all the time felt like I’d began on it,” Bob Dylan had mentioned of “Freeway 61”. “I all the time had been on it and will go anyplace from it.” The blues could be woven by means of his work for many years to come back. His masterpiece of 1997, Time Out of Thoughts, was a musical reimagining of the Mississippi Delta blues. In 2006’s Trendy Instances, Dylan lined the Delta blues customary “Rollin’ and Tumblin’”, beforehand recorded by Robert Johnson, John Lee Hooker, and Muddy Waters. 

In 1956, President Eisenhower signed the Federal-Help Freeway Act, which started America’s new Interstate Freeway System. However while the time period interstate turned a synonym for freeway, the brand new nomenclature by no means took maintain in American music. The freeway was far too steeped in lore for that. Tom Cochrane titled his sophomore album Life Is a Freeway in 1991, and Corey Kent’s Highways was launched in 2021. However the highway would by no means once more sound as loaded with authentically weary feeling because it did within the Mississippi Delta blues, nor ever bear a extra spectacular reinvention as on Bob Dylan’s Freeway 61 Revisited.

REFERENCES

Dylan, Bob. “Chronicles: Quantity One.” Simon & Schuster UK, 2005.

Williamson, Nigel. “The Tough Information to the Blues.” Tough Guides, 2007.

McNally, Dennis. “On Freeway 61: Music, Race and the Evolution of Cultural Freedom.” Counterpoint, 2014.

Guesdon, Jean-Michel; Margotin, Philippe. “Bob Dylan All of the Songs: The Story Behind Each Monitor” Black Canine & Leventhal Publishers Inc, 2015.

Heylin, Clinton. “Behind the Shades: The twentieth Anniversary Version.” Faber & Faber, 2011.