Let Us Now Praise Little Men

FOLK SINGERS

There he stands, and who can believe him? Black corduroy cap, green corduroy shirt, blue corduroy pants. Hard-lick guitar, whooping harmonica, skinny little voice. Beardless chin, shaggy sideburns, porcelain pussycat eyes. At 22, he looks 14, and his accent belongs to a jive Nebraskan, or maybe a Brooklyn hillbilly. He is a dime-store philosopher, a drugstore cowboy, a men's room conversationalist. And when he describes his young life, he declares himself dumfounded at the spectacle. "With my thumb out, my eyes asleep, my hat turned up an' my head turned on," says Bob Dylan, "I's driftin' and learnin' new lessons."

Something Unique. There is something faintly ridiculous about such a citybilly, yet Dylan is the newest hero of an art that has made a fetish out of authenticity. Last week he was on the road again, having survived a crucial audience of aficionados at the Monterey Folk Festival, competing with such champions of folk-and fakelore as The Weavers, Bill Monroe, Mance Lipscomb, and Peter, Paul and Mary. Nearly everyone sang better, and The Weavers drew more applause. But Bob Dylan was there with three of his songs, and when he sang them, a crowd of 5,200 rewarded him with earnest and ardent applause.

At its very best, his voice sounds as if it were drifting over the walls of a tuberculosis sanitarium--but that's part of the charm. Sometimes he lapses into a scrawny Presleyan growl, and sometimes his voice simply sinks into silence beneath the pile-driver chords he plays on his guitar. But he has something unique to say, and he says it in songs of his own invention that are the best songs of their style since Woody Guthrie's.

Kneed in the Guts. Dylan was born in Duluth but spent most of his youth in Hibbing, Minn. He started playing the guitar when he was ten, he says, adding that "the only trouble with playin' guitar is that you can't get the cheerleader girls." He ran away from home at 10, 12, 13, IS, 151) 17 and 18; he was, as he says, "caught an' brought back all but once." In his self-portrait in verse, My Life in a Stolen Minute, he recalls the events of his youth:

I started smoking at eleven years old an' only stopped once to catch my breath . . .

I fell hard for an actress girl who kneed me in the guts . . .

/ rode freight trains for kicks

An' got beat up for laughs.

A couple of years ago, he made a pilgrimage to New York to visit Woody Guthrie, his spiritual leader, lying ill of Huntington's chorea. Seeing Guthrie and sleeping in the subways became his twin pleasures, and he began to sing for money in Greenwich Village coffeehouses. "Man, I could whip anybody. I was at the high point of my life from seein' Woody. He ain't a folk singer--he's a genius genius genius genius."

Whole Lost Crowd. By careful standards, Dylan ain't a folk singer either, and he may not even be a genius genius. An atmosphere of the ersatz surrounds him, and his citified fans have an unhappy tendency to drop their g's when praisin' him --but only because they cannot resist imitatin' him.

But his mannerisms matter far less than the value of his honest complaints. He is an advocate of little men, and if he remains one himself, it only enriches the ring of his lyrics--as in his best song, Blowin' in the Wind, an anthem for the whole lost crowd he speaks for:

How many ears must one man have

Before he can hear people cry?

How many deaths will it take 'til he knows

That too many people have died?

The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind,

The answer is blowin' in the wind.

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