Wonder what Joe would have said about “Bobby” winning the Nobel.
Joe is bluesman and Crawford native Big Joe Williams, and Bobby is, of course, the most recent recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Bob Dylan.
That’s what Big Joe called Dylan: Bobby. Back in the 60s, in the Greenwich Village folk scene, Dylan was a kid from the Midwest in desperate need of street cred. He hung out with and set in on sessions with Joe.
In fact, says Blewett Thomas, Dylan’s first commercial recordings were with Joe. Dylan played harmonica and accompanied Joe on vocals in a blues compilation put out by Spivey Records in 1962.
Thomas, an attorney, blues musicologist and collector, sought out and then befriended the bluesman after reading a story about him in this newspaper in 1975. Joe had returned home to Crawford five years earlier after being diagnosed with diabetes. In Crawford, Joe lived in a trailer on Sugar Hill Road until his death in 1982.
Thomas, who was then farming family land near Weyerhaeuser, chauffeured Joe to gigs including a 1979 appearance at the New Orleans Jazz and Festival.
On a July afternoon in 1978, I went along with Thomas, Axel Kuestner and Joe to Northport, Alabama, to visit Johnny Shines, another aging bluesman. The two men laughed and reminisced about long-ago gigs and long-dead musicians. Shines had toured extensively with blues legend Robert Johnson.
Exactly where and when Dylan and Big Joe first met is unclear. Dylan, nee, Robert Allen Zimmerman of Hibbing, Minnesota, has provided biographers conflicting stories about his early years. One version has it Dylan ran away to join the circus.
Pete Seeger introducing Dylan at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival said: “He said he (Dylan) ran away from home 17 times and got brought back 16 times.”
Joe’s account of their first meeting, as told to Thomas, confirms Dylan’s circus story. Joe said he first met Dylan in St. Louis in 1957. Dylan would have been around 16 at the time and had come to town with a traveling circus, according to Joe.
“You’re too young to be a musician,” Joe said he told Dylan. “I sent him back home to his daddy and told him, ‘When you get older, come look for me.'”
In the fall of 1978, Thomas took Williams to Jackson where Dylan was playing a concert. The two musicians had last been together in 1963.
“They immediately ushered us backstage,” said Thomas. At Williams urging, Dylan spent intermission chatting with Thomas and two friends who had come along for the ride.
“He was very open,” said Thomas. “We talked about older musicians.”
Dylan and Thomas exchanged letters after the Jackson encounter.
Some have grumbled Dylan is not a fitting recipient of the Nobel.
Realizing the decision could be controversial, the secretary of the Nobel committee, Sara Danius, said, “I came to realize that we still read Homer and Sappho from ancient Greece, and they were writing 2,500 years ago,” she said. “They were meant to be performed, often together with instruments, but they have survived, and survived incredibly well, on the book page. We enjoy [their] poetry, and I think Bob Dylan deserves to be read as a poet.”
Another Dylan defender mentioned the “bardic tradition.” A comparison with the Bard is apt. If it can be said America has a Shakespeare, then surely it is Bob Dylan, who occupies his own strata in the universe of songwriters.
Though, Dylan’s words are best conveyed when sung in his nasal, sandpaper voice and accompanied by instrumentation, his kaleidoscopic lyrics hold up on the printed page.
Take me on a trip upon your magic swirling ship
My senses have been stripped
My hands can’t feel to grip
My toes too numb to step
Wait only for my boot heels to be wandering
I’m ready to go anywhere, I’m ready for to fade
Into my own parade
Cast your dancing spell my way, I promise to go under it.
— from “Mr. Tambourine Man”
For more than half a century Bob Dylan has been casting his “dancing spell.” As one of millions around the globe who have been under that spell, my first thought on hearing the news was, what took them so long?
As for Big Joe, I think he would have smiled and repeated what he once told Blewett Thomas: “I trained him to be a star.”
Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.
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