TWO

TIME IS LONGER THAN ROPE

Inside Big Pink, “Lo and Behold!” opens on the rails, the first notes on the piano setting the wheels in motion, the singer with one foot on the platform and the other foot on the train as it pulls out within the basement walls. It’s the summer of 1967, a couple of months into fooling with old tunes, moving across a common landscape, new songs now coming in a rush; three decades later, you can still hear Garth Hudson snap the switch.

He clicks on the tape recorder for the second take of the afternoon. They’d been pressing the first time through the number, the piano, bass, and acoustic guitar piling the rhythm up at the end of a phrase, the feel of a mind changing cramped by a tight vocal, the actor’s mask not settling into the singer’s skin, the singer improvising a last line out of frustration: “We’re all gonna go to sleep!” Now Hudson turns back to his organ to catch up with the hard, hesitating count already locked in as a theme by the piano. Almost subliminally, he rolls the piano’s one-step-forward, one-step-back into a better beat. The doubt and trepidation that mark the borders of the song aren’t lessened, but the territory within is singing with energy, the uncertainty that a moment before said fear now saying who cares. Now the rhythm is a chase after pleasure that once it’s caught its chase lets it loose for the pleasure of chasing it down again; with every chorus Bob Dylan and Richard Manuel lift their voices and then abandon them, stranding their words right at the edge of a cliff, suspending the sound in dead silence until the next verse begins. It’s a stark, shuddering effect, the pleasure cut like a heater in a cheap hotel turning itself off; you stick in a coin, it starts up again.

The hesitation in the song is now dramatized, something to see, and also hiding inside the beat, a second song only the singer will recognize. Nevertheless the music has gained an irresistible momentum, a lift off the ground. This is a train you want to board, which may be a mixed blessing—like so many trains in American song, from Casey Jones’s 638 to the sixteen-coach cannonball in the Carter Family’s “Worried Man Blues,” it’s a train that could be easier to get on than to get off.

The train runs smoothly even as the rhythm pulls against itself: first stop San Antonio, Texas, next stop Pittsburgh, PA, a side trip to Tennessee, then back to Pittsburgh—you don’t say. No wonder there’s a kind of stammer in half the claims the singer makes. “I never felt so good,” he tells us of the journey’s start, relaxing into the memory. In the next instant the coachman asks him for his ticket, no problem, he’s got a ticket, then for his name.

His name? He’s not supposed to have to tell his name. Suddenly all his confidence is gone, as if the seat holding his back has fallen away like the chorus giving up its last word. Now he is faced with a demand that goes just past the endlessly rehearsed gestures of fellowship and distance, acknowledgment and evasion, presentation and disappearance, that in 1835, in Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville caught as the very stuff of a democratic walk down the street of the American small town—“that same small town in each of us,” as Don Henley could still imagine in 1989, in “The End of the Innocence.” The video for the song was a montage re-creating photographs Robert Frank, from Switzerland, made in the mid-1950s, in Hoboken, New Jersey, Jay, New York, Iuka, Mississippi, Blackfoot, Idaho, Butte, Montana: insistently silent photographs, without movement within their borders, of individuals stranded in their own commonwealth. “I came home with good intentions / About five or six years ago,” Elvis Presley sang in 1969 in an unreleased version of “Stranger in My Own Home Town.” It was a blues song: “But my home town won’t accept me / I just don’t feel welcome here no more.” He was recording in his hometown of Memphis for the first time in fourteen years—the town’s most famous son, still scorned, still an embarrassment—but in the song he wasn’t home yet. Singing slowly, as if he’d lived the story many times before, he rewrote the tune as he sang:

I’m going back down to Memphis

I’m gonna start driving that motherfucking truck again …

All them cocksuckers stopped being friendly

But you can’t keep a hard prick down

The man on the train is here too—without this voice. All his rehearsed gestures—they were supposed to be those of surrendering a ticket and nothing more. This is an encounter in which the presumption of moral equality between one party and another guarantees that they can exchange moral goods—a ticket fairly purchased, fair value in return—without truly meeting: without asking who the other really is. It’s a form of citizens’ respect, a democratic deference, an American invention: that is why, in 1831, with Andrew Jackson in the White House trailing his campaign banner “LET THE PEOPLE RULE,” Tocqueville responded to it. But the coachman has broken the rules. He has violated the presumption of equality and assumed a posture of authority; for no reason the man who felt so good can tell, the coachman has asked for too much. Who are you? Whatever the singer brought onto the train turns up worthless. His name? “I give it to him right away,” Dylan sings, hurry and bafflement in his voice, then the hurry bleeding out, the bafflement joined with regret: “And I hung my head in shame.”

From a country of thousand-mile vistas in the first line of the first verse, the man who as we met him there was filled with anticipation has by the end of the verse arrived in a country of hideouts and himself become a creature of guilt. With the verse over and the moving train now a trap, a mystery train, Manuel doubles Dylan from the other side of the room, his voice heavy, Dylan’s straining; barely audible in Dylan’s corner, Rick Danko adds a high echo.

Lo and behold!

Lo and behold!

Looking for my

Lo and behold

Get me out of here, my dear man!

Hoisting himself onto the train, settling into his seat, the singer wasn’t merely confident, he was cocksure. “And he asked me my name,” the singer remembers; as he spins the incident back, he can feel how he’d pulled away, and underneath the worry that’s how he sings it, a cold half smile on his face, his fish-eye all over the coachman’s mug. “And he—” “—asked me my name.” For as long as that little pause holds, with the pause weighting the last word, the singer is still telling this story, writing its script, acting it out; with an edge of amusement he retains his mask, holding his name like a poker player holding his cards to his vest. My name? Perhaps you’re lacking one yourself? Yes, that’s what he should have said! Too bad it’s too late. “And he—”

Over the bright, playful pulse of the organ and piano, the former now swirling, sometimes leaping behind the latter, that pause suspends the story and the music with it, even as the music goes on. It’s a perfect moment. The singer drags his breath across his tongue as if his fingers are caressing a gun. Now he’s Clint Eastwood in A Fistful of Dollars. Serape on his shoulders, leather hat on his head, cheroot stuck in his face, the singer squints at the coachman, deadpan, until he sees that the coachman has turned into Billy the Kid, with Billy ramming his last words, “¿Quién es? ¿Quién es?” into the throat of the Man with No Name. By the time the singer gets to “my name” his knees are water. The coachman looks down at him, waiting. The singer says his name: Nobody.

One step forward, one step back: from within its rhythms of melody and speech, the first verse of “Lo and Behold!” makes a story as shapely and complete as one of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales of humiliation and withdrawal (“The Shaker Bridal,” say, or “The Minister’s Black Veil”) and as casually doomstruck as one of Melville’s fables of embarkment, most economically the first chapter of The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, titled “A mute goes aboard a boat on the Mississippi” (a chapter where there is no dialogue, only hand-lettered signs proceeding from “Charity thinketh no evil” to “NO TRUST”). Still, the song hums along, from stop to stop, the train running from station to station, each succeeding verse promising a new adventure but never quite realizing it. The singer meets a woman on the next leg of his journey, but they fall into obscene banter (“What’s the matter, Molly dear? What’s the matter with your mound?”), and she hands him a dismissal as finished as the one he felt in the coachman’s evil question (“What’s it to ya, Moby Dick?”). Big deals turn into little dreams. A herd of moose the singer buys his girl becomes a truck he thinks he might pick up in Tennessee. “Gonna save my money and rip it up,” he says hopefully, another trucker on his mind and maybe laughing at his conceit; the way the singer makes the words, ripping it up might as well be sweeping the floor. Every verse is full of fill-in-the-gaps, no tale holds and neither does the taleteller’s voice—line to line, syllable to syllable, Dylan goes from eager to disgusted, smug to wary, prophetic to intrigued, bragging to couldn’t-care-less. Soon it’s as if all the openness in the song—the prospect of great novelties and thrills that at first seemed to be its subject—has been sucked up by the rhythm, pushing forward in a manner that all too quickly seems as blocked as it is swift: predetermined, inexorable, circular, a route that ultimately has nowhere to go but back to Pittsburgh.

The chorus goes in another direction. Self-mocking, it is always yearning, even desperate, the sound of a man who wants to take off his mask and shout. But throughout every story told in “Lo and Behold!,” in and out of every verse, there is really only one voice, and that voice is the mask itself: “a portable heirloom,” Constance Rourke wrote in 1931 in American Humor: A Study of the National Character, “handed down by the pioneer.” A hundred years after Tocqueville’s arrival in the new United States, Rourke was looking into the face of the Yankee pedlar, the original traveling salesman, the confidence man, though the words that replaced this appellation, “con man,” also took away its meaning: what the confidence man sells, proffering his calico and patent medicine, his aluminum siding and asbestos insulation, his Amway dealerships and breast implants, is confidence. He looks you right in the face; his betrays no doubt, no greed, no fear, shame least of all. Rourke wrote:

In a primitive world crowded with pitfalls the unchanging, unaverted countenance had been a safeguard, preventing revelations of surprise, anger, or dismay. The mask had otherwise become habitual among the older Puritans as their more expressive or risible feelings were sunk beneath the surface. Governor Bradford encouraged its use on a considerable scale, urging certain gay spirits to enjoy themselves in secret, if they must be convivial. No doubt the mask would prove useful in a country where the Puritan was still a power and the risks of pioneering by no means over.

But it was not only risible feelings that were hidden, and the mask was not merely a disguise. Sometimes it was as if the mask could protect those who might gaze upon the real face of whoever wore it from awful sights—or even that the mask was a kind of defense against the mirror, protecting the wearer from his or her own face. “There is a gift held back,” Perry Miller wrote in 1949 of the great Puritan preacher Jonathan Edwards, “an aboriginal and monolithic power” who in 1740 rang his words down the Connecticut Valley as the Great Awakening blew through him like a storm. “The way he delivered his sermons is enough to confirm the suspicion that there was an occult secret in them: no display, no inflection, no consideration of the audience.” As “Edwards delivered his revival sermons—for example the goriest, the one at Enfield that goes by the title ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God’ and is all that most people nowadays associate with his name,” Miller wrote, “the people yelled and shrieked, they rolled in the aisles, they crowded up to the pulpit and begged him to stop, they cried for mercy,” but “Mr. Edwards,” one congregant remembered, “looked straight forward”; another said “he looked on the bell rope,” hanging from the roof at the far end of the church, “until he looked it off.” Setting down the words of those who heard Edwards, the scholar can look back two centuries and see clearly, but he wants most of all to reach back, to remove the minister’s false face, to find out if it is false, if there is something or nothing behind it.

Edwards’s mask too was handed down. It traveled from 1740 in New England to Memphis in 1968, where it was assumed one last time by Martin Luther King, Jr., as he preached in a church on the last night of his life. His voice rose and fell, the cadences of his speech making stairways for his words to climb, balconies from which they might plunge like spurned lovers. Like Moses, King said, he had gone “up to the mountain,” and he had “seen the Promised Land,” even if god would not permit him to cross over: “I may not get there with you, but I want you to know that we as a people will get to the Promised Land. So I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.” “As he spoke,” Lawrence Wright recalled in his memoir In the New World, “with that curiously impassive face of his, which was always like a mask of resignation, the congregation began to moan and cry out.”

The mask passed from Edwards to King as if on a stream within a river, the gift of one divine to another, King’s visions of justice with their source in Edwards’s Awakening. Dissolving the earthly boundaries that separated the elect from the reprobate, Edwards forced his listeners to experience the thrill and terror of confronting God directly. Now, in fellowship, each congregant was Abraham and Moses, made to choose between God and Isaac, the right and the Golden Calf; each was obligated to begin the story again from the beginning, in his or her own heart. Speaking as one who came down from the mountain with the Ten Commandments in one arm, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution in the other, King demanded that his listeners do the same; the mask was a bond between preachers who had reason to fear that the passions they sought to guide them toward righteousness might consume them.

“It was certainly a weird performance,” Miller wrote of Edwards, and Wright was saying something similar about King. In 1968 people appeared in public not masked but convulsed with rage and fright. The mask was an occult secret no one had the time to decode, and the tumult was so great it seemed that all ancestors lived in another country, that the Puritans and their like had been altogether banished. It wasn’t so in 1949, when Miller wrote. Again the Puritans seemed to rule, under new names but with no less power. As enemies of the people—those to whom such suspect words as “communist,” “fellow traveler,” or, so strangely, “premature antifascist” adhered—were taken from their homes and workplaces and exposed to all, many believed that the Puritans’ witch trials were taking place before their very eyes, the centuries collapsed into each other. The frontier too persisted, a country within each citizen if it was anywhere; by this time the mask was all-American, and it had a new name: cool. James Dean wore it perfectly in Rebel Without a Cause, where teenagers fought duels in the empty spaces surrounding the new suburban landscape; sitting in the audience, a twelve-year-old Randy Newman received the mask and tried to put it on. “The goal when I was a teenager was to be without affect, to have a masklike face,” he said in 1995. “A lot of people I know never came out of it, and I barely did.”

Discovered by Rourke as an eighteenth-century heirloom, the mask is what in the nineteenth century came to be called the deadpan, the poker face: precisely what the coachman wipes off the rider’s face. The mask hides the voice no less than the face, and the voice it makes you might call Yankee Midwestern, though it is also Appalachian, mountain-still, a speech made as much of silences as of words, and the silence is the edge. So what? says the voice; it is dulled, unimpressed, as Rourke says unsurprised. Those who use this voice claim they can’t be surprised even by the weather—that is, by God—and that’s their claim on life, why they expect you to listen to them, regardless of whether what they’re saying makes sense. The voice is flat: so flat that with the slightest inflection it can say anything, imply anything, while seeming to do no more than pass the time.

This is the sound of bluesman Frank Hutchison, who Bob Dylan would return to in 1993 for the version of “Stack A Lee” he offered on World Gone Wrong (“a romance tale without the cupidity,” Dylan wrote); it is the sound of drugstore speech in Hibbing, Minnesota, in 1949; it’s the sound of William Burroughs waiting out a blizzard in a depot fifty miles north of Wichita. “Yes, that’s ol’ junkie Bill, over by the stove there, just whittlin’ on his penis,” says the stationmaster, while Bill mumbles to himself:

… the buyer has a steady connection: the man within, you might say, or so he thinks. I’ll just set in my room, he says: Fuck ’em all, squares on both sides; I am the only complete man in the industry. But a yen comes on him like a great black wind, through the bones … The buyer had lost his human citizenship, and was in consequence a creature without species, and a menace to the narcotics industry, at all levels …

If you listen to Burroughs as he read these words into a tape recorder in Paris in 1965, what you hear is prairie-flat and Babbitt-plain, a world conspiracy lined out in the modest tones of a small businessman describing a small job. Just beneath the surface, or played back in memory, it’s all music—“Fuck ’em all” expanding into a great curl, “Fuck ’em awwwlllll,” then the q in “squares” rounding, nearly flipping the word on its back—and simultaneously an anthropological document, no exile’s art statement but a field recording, “American Vernacular, Kansas/Missouri (Science Fiction).” “The humorous story is American, the comic story is English, the witty story is French,” Mark Twain wrote in “How to Tell a Story.” “The humorous story depends for its effect upon the manner of telling; the comic story and the witty story upon the matter.… The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it.” That is Bob Dylan all through the basement tapes, and most precisely, as if in summation of both manner and matter, in “Lo and Behold!”; that is Burroughs on Call Me Burroughs, his Ishmael’s album of Naked Lunch readings that was a talisman of cool in Greenwich Village in the mid-1960s—and, cast as blues on a lap slide guitar, that was Frank Hutchison. On the old-timey lps and precious 78s of the folk revival, he was an even cooler talisman, to some.

It’s Hutchison who Dylan takes for granted in “Lo and Behold!”—the speaker who Dylan, with intent or more likely without it, takes as a first principle. Hutchison’s drifting, blasted, dead-drunk pieces are little exercises in sardonicism that by the end of a tune can lock a grin on the singer’s face like tetanus; his songs lie behind the masked voice in “Lo and Behold!” as a tiny tradition of their own notes and phrases, winks and nods, not as something to best or transcend but as something to burrow into, to find what stories the tradition could have told but didn’t.

Born in 1897, Frank Hutchison came from Logan County in southern West Virginia, near the Kentucky border. Logan had been anti-Union—for that matter, after West Virginia’s pro-Union secession from Virginia in 1863, it was more or less anti–West Virginia, part of the rough, once-isolated inner frontier known as “the interior”; in the 1880s the territory was infamous throughout the nation as the home ground of the Hatfield side of the Hatfield-McCoy feud. There were few slaves in Logan before the Civil War and until the coal boom of 1910 not many black families after it; as a small boy Hutchison tagged behind a visiting black laborer—one Henry Vaughn, perhaps, residents told folklorists in the 1960s—drawn by the sound of the man’s guitar. When Hutchison reached his late teens he went to work in the coal mines like everybody else, lucky to stay mainly on the surface, cooking and hammering nails—the farms and hunt forests of his parents’ youth were just family stories. He married and settled in the small coal town of Ethel, in the shadow of Blair Mountain; before too long he made his living mostly as a musician, occasionally doubling as a blackface comedian. He recorded for the first time in 1926, for the last time in 1929, after which the Depression killed off such marginal enterprises as phonograph records for the blues and hillbilly trade; best remembered for “The Train that Carried the Girl from Town,” Hutchison died in 1945, in Dayton, Ohio, disappointed and out of place. He had angel’s fingers, and the voice of a man who’s seen it all and loves more than anything to think back, facedown in a memory, in Rosanne Cash’s phrase, as if some overlooked opportunity for revenge or solace might be found. More than anything there is in his music a detachment that goes beyond words, into a realm where only sound can follow, a loosening of ties that is so odd, and so strong, it leads one to ask not only what goes into a piece of music, but also a more intense version of the same question: what can you hear in it?

“Dylan manifests a profound awareness of the war and how it is affecting all of us,” Jon Landau wrote in the spring of 1968, reviewing John Wesley Harding, the album Dylan recorded with Nashville musicians in the fall of 1967, when the basement afternoons were all but played out; the record was a quiet morality play, a sort of Puritan western. As Landau wrote, the country was about to split in half over the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, over race riots, political riots, police riots, a national election, the abattoir of Vietnam; listening to an album that ended with a love song that rhymed “moon” with “spoon,” Landau, like so many American GIs in the year to come, heard the war. “This doesn’t mean that I think any of the particular songs are about the war or that any of the songs are protests over it,” he said (“How do you know,” Dylan would ask an interviewer in the summer of 1968, “that I’m not, as you say, for the war?”). “All I mean to say,” Landau wrote, “is that Dylan has felt the war, that there is an awareness of it contained within the mood of the album as a whole”—and something similar may lurk within Frank Hutchison’s music in the same way, as an occulted social drama. Hutchison’s music was made, after all, in the aftermath of a civil war in his own county: the West Virginia Mine War of 1920 and 1921. Hutchison lived dead center.

On January 30, 1920, John L. Lewis, the new president of the United Mine Workers of America, came to southern West Virginia to announce a drive to unionize the coal fields across the southern Appalachians. Miners there were tools, discarded when they broke or wore out. They were paid in scrip and kept in debt; with their families they lived in company housing. Injured miners were fired and evicted along with their wives and children, the widows and orphans of the hundreds of miners who each year died beneath West Virginia ground, and anyone who spoke the word “union.” The hills were soon full of tent colonies housing striking miners and their families. In Matewan, in Mingo County, just over the line to the west of Logan, Mayor C. C. Testerman and Police Chief Sid Hatfield, an orphan raised by the once-mass-murdering Hatfield clan, aligned themselves with the strikers and guarded union meetings against company assassins; on May 19, 1920, they attempted to stop agents of the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency from carrying out a new round of evictions. Hatfield was awaiting the arrival of warrants for the arrest of the detectives when Al Felts, a head of the agency, backed by twelve of his men, confronted Hatfield and Testerman with a warrant of his own—a phony warrant. When the facedown was over, Felts, his brother, five other detectives, the mayor, and two miners were dead in the streets, and the train carrying Hatfield’s warrants arrived. Hatfield stood over Felts’s body with a warrant in his hand. “Now, you son of a bitch,” he said, “I’ll serve it on you.” In February of the next year Hatfield and twenty-two other Matewan men went on trial for Felts’s murder; after almost six weeks, during which the presidency passed from Woodrow Wilson to Warren G. Harding, all of the defendants were acquitted. In July Hatfield was arrested on charges of harassing nonunion miners. It was a setup; when Hatfield arrived at the courthouse for arraignment, Baldwin-Felts detectives shot him down in broad daylight.

By this time Logan County was a state within a state: a police state. With Mingo terrorized, Logan sheriff Don Chafin barred union representatives even from entering his territory and deputized hundreds of company men to enforce a cordon sanitaire. Enraged by Hatfield’s assassination, thousands of armed strikers, now pushed to the east, determined to seize Mingo. “No armed mob will cross Logan County,” Chafin announced; defying their national union, the swiftly growing miners’ army, led by such local union officers as Frank Keeney, Walter Allen, and Billy Blizzard, made to drive Chafin himself out of Logan. Chafin organized his own army of detectives, coal guards, American Legionnaires, and businessmen. By August 31 at least ten thousand men—and perhaps as many as twenty thousand—were firing across the ten-mile front line that snaked across the forbidding twin peaks of Blair Mountain. As Lon Savage noted in Thunder in the Mountains, “George Washington had fewer soldiers at the Battle of Trenton, the engagement which changed the course of the American Revolution.”

The miners thought the Battle of Blair Mountain was as much a protest as a rebellion: a call to wake the nation to the fact that the Constitution was no law in Logan County. Instead President Harding sent Federal troops against the miners, and General Billy Mitchell of the Army Air Service, who had led air battles over France in the First World War, tried to bomb them. (“Gas,” Mitchell said. “You understand we wouldn’t try to kill these people at first.”) Mitchell’s squadron crashed, but the miners, many of them veterans of the same war that made Mitchell a national hero, would not fight their national government, and surrendered their arms. Expecting protection, they were arrested by the hundreds; Frank Keeney, Walter Allen, and Billy Blizzard were charged with treason. Keeney was never prosecuted; Allen was convicted, jumped bail, and disappeared; Billy Blizzard, tried in the same courthouse where John Brown was convicted of treason in 1859, was acquitted—as was the man who led Sid Hatfield’s assassins, tried in the same courthouse Hatfield was entering when he was killed. The border held; there was no union organizing in Logan until 1933, when Franklin D. Roosevelt became president.

In Night Comes to the Cumberlands, a study of the ruin of the Appalachians, Harry Caudill noted that as late as the early 1960s, the oldest residents of the coal fields still recalled “with pleasure W. J. Horsley, T. P. Trigg, E. B. Moon, John C. C. Mayo and a score of others, and nostalgically reminisce about their tours of the isolated backcountry.” Full of wonderful stories of strange doings and faraway places, their faces cracked with open smiles seldom seen in a land where the pioneer’s mask was rarely lifted, speaking a foreign tongue of flattery and praise, these were the men hired in the mid-1880s and 1890s by northern coal companies to buy up the mineral rights held by the hardscrabble hunter-farmers of the southern mountains. Constance Rourke sighted their Yankee ancestor “at the latter end of the eighteenth century … descending a steep red road into a fertile Carolina valley … In the end he invaded every house. Everyone bought. The Negroes came up from their cabins to watch his driving pantomime and hear his slow, high talk. Staying the night at a tavern, he traded the landlord out of bed and breakfast, and left with most of the money in the settlement.” His seller’s mask reversed for a buyer’s, the confidence man reappeared a hundred years later; the result was the same. In Caudill’s words:

With every convincing appearance of complete sincerity the coal buyer would spend hours admiring the mountaineer’s horse and gazing over a worm-rail fence in rapt approbation of his razorback hogs while compliments were dropped on every phase of his host’s accomplishments. He marveled at the ample contents of the mountaineer’s smokehouse and savored the rich flavor of the good woman’s apple butter and other preserved delicacies, while he assured her that no dainty to be found in the big city confectionaries was half so tasty. He ate the rough “grub” she prepared for him, and happily slept in the softest featherbed the cabin afforded. After such a visit he and “the man of the house” would get down to business.

It was mask against mask, and the smile won. Having secured the absolute right to extract whatever might lie beneath the farmer’s ground, the buyers often left the putative owners of century-old land patents only the right to pay taxes. In most cases the buyers paid fifty cents for an acre of land that three decades later might produce twenty thousand tons of coal—and after that, nothing living, the buyer’s signature and the farmer’s mask having sealed an agreement by which the inner frontier of freeholders was opened to serfdom. “A new standard of morals is set up amidst the confusion,” Emma Bell Miles wrote in 1905 in The Spirit of the Mountains:

This people who have no servant class are constantly made to feel themselves inferior to the newcomers, and so fall into servility … Too late the mountaineer realizes that he has sold his birthright for a mess of potage. He has become a day laborer … Need these razors be used to cut grindstones? Must this free folk who are in many ways the truest Americans of America be brought under the yoke of caste division, to the degradation of all their finer qualities, merely for the lack of the right work to do?

The buyers, Caudill reported with bitter wonder—gazing, as he wrote, upon a landscape reshaped by half a century of deep-mining and strip mining—could almost have been from another planet, they were so charming, making friends for life, even if the mountain people, or their children, one day awoke to find that their land and their history was no longer theirs, signed away, literally unwritten—and the buyers, who could have offered cards reading “Charity thinketh no evil” when they arrived and left others reading “NO TRUST” when they departed, never came back.

This is where the West Virginia Mine War began, before many who were part of it were even born—and one can perhaps hear a memory of these transactions, and a witnessing to war and surrender, in Frank Hutchison’s unwavering detachment, in his distanced, worn-down, shaggy-dog blues, where the voice of the confidence man reappears so naturally, bereft as always of anxiety or surprise. In the shadow play of public happenstance and private regret, a great public disaster speaks the language of merely solitary unhappiness, not rage but guilt. That is the mask of shame unwritten history forces those who have lived it to assume. But here a single artist may come out of a time and place shared with many and offer a version of that time and place no one else could have made or even wished for. Others, perhaps enough to make the artist’s living, may respond; much later, others may chance upon and follow the artist’s clues. Thus the artist’s work, commonplace and trivial on its face, may be charged with a power no intention could create and no particular geography or lifespan can enclose: the burning sensation produced when an individual attempts to resolve the circumstance of his or her life. Fashioning the sort of aesthetic artifact that dissolves into eccentricity or ethnography as soon as written history is pressed upon it, the artist may succeed in passing on the barest hint of a forgotten story and, blind to its source, the full weight of the impulse to tell it. That is how old stories turn into new stories; that is how stories get told.

“All right, boys, this is Frank Hutchison, settin’ back in the Union Square Hotel, just gettin’ right on good red liquor,” he announced in “K.C. Blues”; it wasn’t a typical sentiment. Hutchison liked to fade a note away from a theme, a word off of its phrase, to let his music go like smoke into the air. It’s a typical blues technique, indicating the presence of something too dark or obvious to say out loud, though with Hutchison it doesn’t feel like technique. It feels like musing, philosophy, his idea of revelation: the revelation that the meaning of any incident of love or money will always elude whoever wants it most, the fool who thought to ask. A high, thin bottleneck sound rises up in “Cannon Ball Blues,” as if ready to escape the resignation the song describes so mordantly, then as if it isn’t worth the effort. The back-and-forth tug-of-war the piano runs through “Lo and Behold!” is close to what Hutchison’s music is about—a tired, so-what, whatever, never-mind refusal to wait around for the punch line to the joke everyone calls life combined with a willingness to wait around forever in the vague hope the joke might be on someone else. In the long, drawn-out “Worried Blues”—at times it almost seems to stop, so besotted with the pointlessness of it all—big notes slide up the strings, circling around and around, until sorrow fades into laughter, laughter into regret, regret into the oblivion of a six-day drunk, not a single word pressed harder than any other, everything as far from peaks and valleys as the patterns one makes tracing a finger in dust.

When I leave here

Just hang crêpe on your door

When I leave here

Just hang crêpe on your door

I won’t be dead

Just won’t be here no more

If you don’t think that’s funny, you’re in the wrong country—or the wrong bar, not the bar Hutchison calls up in song after song with his trademark gather-round, bringing the boys together for one more drink before they head home to the joke that has no punch line. Small, prickling high notes are the pins and needles of Hutchison’s worried blues, which

Make you b’lieve the world is upside down

They make you b’lieve, the world is upside down

I’ve traveled this world

Boys, it’s all around

“All ay-round,” he sings, treasuring the word, thinking it through, and it’s this expiring tone—the tone of one who won’t be dead, just gone—that allows Dylan in his turn to tell the most extravagant, half-cracked stories in “Lo and Behold!”: to tell them as if there’s no detail, no emotion, that can’t be taken back, because with this tone whatever might sound uncertain, silly, or hysterical can as easily leave you wondering if you heard anything at all. “Now, I come in on a Ferris wheel,” Dylan opens the last verse of the song, a hint of delight in his voice (why not, after coming up with an entrance worthy of Pecos Bill?), “and boys, I sure was slick. I come in like a ton of bricks, laid a few tricks on ’em”—and whatever delight there was dies with the drift of the language from the grand to the ordinary. You can imagine a man getting off a train with the flair and glamour of someone riding into town on a Ferris wheel; for that matter, the line is sung so matter-of-factly you can imagine someone riding into town on a Ferris wheel. Though you’re framing the shot—the singer on his Ferris wheel like a cowboy on his horse—before Dylan is halfway through his next line, it’s only the life in the image that pushes at the dulled voice, which is suspicious before it is interested, can’t-fool-me before it’s whatta-you-got; by the fourth line the mask is back in place, if it was ever off. “Goin’ back to Pittsburgh,” Dylan says to finish the verse, in the most elegantly, happily self-erasing lyric of his writing life, the joke finally complete, not that he won’t embellish it. “Goin’ back to Pittsburgh, count up to thirty,” he says. “Round that horn and ride that herd. Gonna thread up.” Got anything better you want to do? Well, then, might as well thread up. He’ll go back to Pittsburgh if that’s where the train is going.

All well and good, except that this journey—starting up eager with every verse, arriving nowhere soon enough—is only half of the song. Pressing against the masked face of its traveler is the plea of the chorus, the voice there breaking through the mask, for a moment disregarding its fatalism, its fear, its placid refusal to acknowledge the notion that there might be new things under the sun, its Appalachian aura of having seen everything twice: in the verses, the ethnomusicological message is if a man as still in his soul as Frank Hutchison doesn’t know, what hope is there for you? “Gonna thread up,” says the journey-man, perhaps disgusted, perhaps satisfied, perhaps satisfied nothing has broken his expectation of disgust. “Lo and behold!” says the tripled voice of his traveling companion, his Doppelgänger: “Looking for my lo and behold.” With every chorus, the mask is stripped from the journey-man’s face with a comic, frustrated, finally liberated demand for a new apprehension, a sighting of whatever has never been seen in those things that are seen every day, a demand for revelations in the face of a mask meant to deny them. Where is his lo and behold? Why won’t the promised, perfect land reveal itself? Moment to moment he has glimpsed it; why won’t it hold still so he can see it plain?

Retrieving the rhythm in the stopped moment after each chorus is done, the piano and organ gaily chug the piece on its way. Caught up in the pleasure of the motion, you need notice nothing more. The rhythm has such pull it is itself the listener’s lo and behold—but the singer, caught up in his story, doesn’t hear the music. He has joined that “long procession of dull-looking, unlikely oracles,” as Rourke wrote of her masked ancestors, her avatars of the American mind and voice, preachers and yarn-spinners, schoolteachers and salesmen, the forgotten presidents who served through most of the nineteenth century but Lincoln too, perhaps yarn-spinner Lincoln most of all. It may not be the role the singer wanted, but he is an oracle in spite of himself, his mask a shield against his own desires, a clue to their enormity.

Just as the most delicate and intense of the basement tapes songs are like a play about the old American mask and the basement itself a theater for its ritual assumption, removal, and replacement, “Lo and Behold!”—pulling back and forth between adventures in nothingness and a cry to hear the truth or tell it—is a summation of the whole haphazard, instinctive basement project. All too aware of how silly its chorus sounds—“Get me out of here, my dear man!”—the song is a demand less for deliverance than for visions, an insistence that the singer and the musicians around him deserve nothing less, even if visions must be found in the most obvious, everyday facts, in a stumble through the most commonplace traditions, the faces everyone pulls, the songs everyone once sang, now cracked like nuts and shuffled like cards. “I found myself, a vacant seat, and I … put down my hat,” the singer says on his way out of Pittsburgh, the first I free and unburdened, the second seemingly carrying all through the next line, a hesitation so deep it reverses all meaning and deflects all blame, then a pause before put as the hat goes down that’s deeper still, weighted with a deliberateness that carries an acceptance of whatever the consequences of the act may be.

A new nation, reclaimed in this song as if the country were still new, still unsettled, is in this wariness, this holding back, these sly and careful shadings. But in the basement the country was still new and the Puritan and the pioneer anything but ancient history. Memories were still flesh. Puritans had filled the halls in 1965 and ’66, demanding purity before anything else; their pioneer, they thought, had left his community behind because he heard the call of gold. “Time is longer than rope” runs an old saying. In the basement the Puritan and the pioneer were roped together, if only in the emerging fantasies of the music—the sort of music-led, almost abstract fantasies within which will or even bodies are nothing and unbidden signs the whole of life. As spectral actors, the Puritan and the pioneer found themselves in the towns and uncleared forests present on the basement floor. Though this is a landscape where few dare trust anyone else and each doubts his or her own self most of all, it is also on the traverse of this territory, out of fear or the wish for love that fear can bring, that the Puritan climbs down from the pioneer’s back, here that the pioneer bucks the Puritan off, after which for an untimed moment at least as long as the rope that binds them they continue west or double back in step, every now and then with visions hanging in the sky before them, Judgment Day or just weather they can’t tell.