WRITTEN IN MY SOUL, FROM ME TO YOU

Woody Guthrie was too far gone to be the mentor that Dylan may have envisioned during his trek to New York. In the absence of that Dylan allowed Guthrie’s music to help shape his early works for another generation, even though Dylan may have preferred to appeal to a previous generation with those first recordings.

In any student-mentor relationship there comes a point where the education ceases and you take what you’ve learned and it becomes a part of what you are. In some cases, it becomes apparent that the student has surpassed the mentor or at the very least equaled him. You learn something and take it to new places driven by your own will and no one else’s. It’s not conceit, it’s just that evolutionary process at work. The lesson has only been worthwhile when you acknowledge that you had help finding the path that told you which fork in the road was yours.

The point at which I think Dylan, in his own way, finally paid his final debt to Guthrie was in the song “George Jackson.” The single he issued in two versions to protest the killing of the black, prison activist in 1971. Guthrie had romanticized the exploits of the depression era outlaw Pretty Boy Floyd in verse. In his song Guthrie gave Floyd the type of stature that Jesse James had received in song decades before. It’s a fine line trying to convince people that a murderer is a modern day Robin Hood. “Pretty Boy Floyd” and “Jesse James” while not exactly historical documents still make for great songs that have certainly endured.

Dylan was not thinking campfire sing-a-long with his song “George Jackson.” Someone contemporary and all too real was dead. The anger and the delivery of the song were in stark contrast to what he had been recording the past few albums. And in this instant Dylan and Guthrie converge and part ways at the same time. The twain had finally met, and if from this point on Dylan had no direction home, then so be it.

Consider the words of the mentor from “Pretty Boy Floyd.”

“Yes, as through this world I've wandered
I've seen lots of funny men;
Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen.”

About as profound as any of his seminal lyrics. Now watch how Dylan acknowledges the debt he owes Guthrie by saying essentially the same thing while staying true to his own character.

“Sometimes I think this whole world
Is one big prison yard.
Some of us are prisoners
The rest of us are guards.”

The torch is passed in the span of a single verse and the circle stays unbroken yet again.