Podcasts about marshall dillon

Like a rock supergroup or Voltron, four comics superstars have come together to bring you a brand new story in a brand new world! That's right, we've got the whole gang -- Jimmy Palmiotti, Amanda Conner, Brian Pulido, and Billy Tucci -- talking about their currently Kickstarting project, The Deadly Trio: Doomsayer. We talk about how the four pals met, the characters they each created, how they co-wrote issue #1, all those variant covers, and the rest of the creative team, including artist Adrianna Melo, colorist Giuliano Peratelli, and letterer Marshall Dillon. It's a smorgasbord of fun!Check out and back The Deadly Trio #1 here: http://kck.st/4fDqeD3. Support the show

Gunsmoke | (011) Never Pester Chester | Broadcast: July 5, 1952Plot: Two Texas cowboys drag Chester behind a horse for fun, almost killing him. Marshal Dillon brings in the cowboys...without his guns. The script was used on the Gunsmoke television series on November 16, 1957. A couple of cowboys have had a bit too much to drink and are harassing the ladies on the high street. Chester goes to ask them politely to leave the ladies alone as they don't want any trouble. But trouble is what they are going to get from Marshall Dillon after they rope Chester and drag him out of town.: : : : :My other podcast channels include: MYSTERY x SUSPENSE -- SCI FI x HORROR -- COMEDY x FUNNY HA HA -- VARIETY X ARMED FORCES -- THE COMPLETE ORSON WELLESSubscribing is free and you'll receive new post notifications. Also, if you have a moment, please give a 4-5 star rating and/or write a 1-2 sentence positive review on your preferred service -- that would help me a lot.Thank you for your support.https://otr.duane.media | Instagram @duane.otr

Long As I Live-Doc has been shot and Marshall Dillon is forced to operate on him to save his life Ugly- Bruno Thayer is ugly- so ugly that the townsfolk of Dodge form a mob to save his life. Marshall Dillon stands in the way.

The Story in this Episode is entitled "Piecemeal." It was created by Cullen Bunn, Szymon Kudranski, Marshall Dillon and published as a one-shot by Aftershock.The story you've heard this week is created by love and unofficial by nature. It is adapted and narrated by me, Anthony Pollock, where I bring horror comics and graphic novels to the audio realm. My Kind Of Weird is not associated with any live message boards. To submit your story or to recommend one, send it to mkowpodcast@gmail.comCredits:Produced by Andy SmithTheme by Clement PanchoutSFX and Atmosphere by Daniel McGivernOther Places My Kind Of Weird calls home:If you've enjoyed today's episode and you'd like to support the creators and this show then use this link to pick it up.Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/mykindofweird1/Website - https://www.mykindofweird.netInstagram - https://www.instagram.com/mykindofweird_Twitter/X - https://twitter.com/mykindofweird_ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

National Blueberry cheesecake day.  Entertainment from 1957.  1st family to drive across US, 1st settler & Native Indian war, Ellis Island ruled to be in New Jersey.  Todays birthdays - Al Jolson, John Wayne, Peggy Lee, James Arness, Stevie Nicks, Hank Williams Jr., Pam Grier, Bobcat Goldthwait, Lenny Kravitz, Helena Bonham Carter, Matt Stone, Lauryn Hill.  Eddie Albert died.Intro - Pour some sugar on me - Def Leppard   http://defleppard.com/Blueberry cheesecake - Younmin feat hardiiAll shook up - Elvis PresleyGone - Ferlin HuskyBirthdays - In da club - 50 Cent   http://50cent.com/Swanee - Al JolsonFever - Peggy LeeGunsmoke TV themeEdge of Seventeen - Stevie NicksBorn to boogie - Hank Williams jrAmerican woman - Lenny KravitzSouth Park TV themeDoo Wop (that thing0 - Lauryn HillExit - Its not love - Dokken    http://dokken.net/Follow Jeff Stampka on Facebook 

This month we're joined by Lyla Abukhodair, Manny Eisele, Marshall Dillon, and Rob Runnels of Duluth based band Baharat to discuss their upcoming album, Lyla's new market/deli Falastin opening this Spring in the New London Cafe building, collaborating on creative work, and more!

I attended Saraland Elementary school as a young boy. Every year, we had a Fall Festival to raise money, complete with a cake walk, bobbing for apples, and we even had a small enclosure for a makeshift jail. The fifth graders were in charge of the jail. I looked forward to being a fifth grader for two or three years. Finally, I was old enough, and the teacher gave usbadges and told us we had the authority to arrest everyone. The convicts would have to pay 10 cents to be released.I knew what to wear to the festival, because we had western shows on TV, like Gun Smoke and The Lone Ranger. Complete with dungarees, a cowboy hat and a red kerchief, I may havelooked like Opie Taylor, but I felt like “Dead Eye Timmy” going to the OK Corral. When I arrived at the school with my family, I was ready to make my first arrest. I saw a few teenagers walking down the sidewalk, and I sauntered up to them and said, “You are under arrest. I am taking you to jail.” They laughed, and one of them said, “You're not taking me anywhere.” I realized this was not going to be easy. I looked at those big boys and felt more like Barney Fife than Marshall Dillon. I soon discovered grandparents were much easier to arrest. You see, I was dressed like a sheriff, had a badge and had been told I could arrest anyone, but one crucial fact remained…I was not a sheriff. The Christian walk can be the same way. We can attend church, say religious cliches and even believe them ourselves, but authentic Christianityis only found in a life lived for Jesus.

Back In The Saddle with Gene Autry, The Lone Ranger, Marshall Dillon, Country AND Western. A discussion of Western Music, the Singing Cowboys, The Great Western Movies and TV Show Theme Songs, and The Cowboy Code. Join Chris Wainscott and Jim O'Malley on a journey through the Old West and those thrilling days of yesteryear.https://www.patreon.com/user?u=81625843

Gunsmoke starring William Conrad, originally broadcast October 7, 1956, The Gambler. A riverboat gambler named Jim Ascombe comes to Dodge to kill Jim Cass...why? Also Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, originally broadcast October 7, 1952 with guest Jane Wyman. Dean, Jerry, and Jane do an abbreviated version of “Gone With The Wind”. Visit my web page - http://www.classicradio.streamWe receive no revenue from YouTube. If you enjoy our shows, listen via the links on our web page or if you're so inclined, Buy me a coffee! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/wyattcoxelAHeard on almost 100 radio stations from coast to coast. Classic Radio Theater features great radio programs that warmed the hearts of millions for the better part of the 20th century. Host Wyatt Cox brings the best of radio classics back to life with both the passion of a long-time (as in more than half a century) fan and the heart of a forty-year newsman. But more than just “playing the hits”, Wyatt supplements the first hour of each day's show with historical information on the day and date in history including audio that takes you back to World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. FDR, Eisenhower, JFK, Reagan, Carter, Nixon, LBJ. It's a true slice of life from not just radio's past, but America's past.Wyatt produces 21 hours a week of freshly minted Classic Radio Theater presentations each week, and each day's broadcast is timely and entertaining!

In the Case of the Crooked Wheel, the owner of a casino has Michael Shayne come to investigate an apparent case of fraud at his casino.Original Air Date: 1947In Mark Dillon Goes to Gougeye, the wife of a casino owner has Marshall Dillon travel to the town of Gougeye, where she fears rumors of a crooked wheel will lead to her husband getting hung.Audition Date: June 11, 1949Support the show monthly at patreon.greatdetectives.netSupport the show on a one-time basis at http://support.greatdetectives.net.Mail a donation to: Adam Graham, PO Box 15913, Boise, Idaho 83715Take the listener survey at http://survey.greatdetectives.netGive us a call at 208-991-4783Follow us on Instagram at http://instagram.com/greatdetectivesFollow us on Twitter @radiodetectives

In the Case of the Crooked Wheel, the owner of a casino has Michael Shayne come to investigate an apparent case of fraud at his casino.Original Air Date: 1947In Mark Dillon Goes to Gougeye, the wife of a casino owner has Marshall Dillon travel to the town of Gougeye, where she fears rumors of a crooked wheel will lead to her husband getting hung.Audition Date: June 11, 1949Support the show monthly at patreon.greatdetectives.netSupport the show on a one-time basis at http://support.greatdetectives.net.Mail a donation to: Adam Graham, PO Box 15913, Boise, Idaho 83715Take the listener survey at http://survey.greatdetectives.netGive us a call at 208-991-4783Follow us on Instagram at http://instagram.com/greatdetectivesFollow us on Twitter @radiodetectives

We start off tonight with another episode of “Gunsmoke.”  Here, a mysterious couple shoot four other strangers in town, sending Marshall Dillon and Chester after them all around the West.   Then, on “The Kraft Music Hall,” Bing Crosby is joined by actor Keenan Wynn for lots of World War II-era laughs and songs. Episodes Gunsmoke March 21, 1953 “Pussy Cats" 1:34 The Kraft Music Hall July 13, 1944 Guest:  Keenan Wynn 31:39

Kansas. It's the original home of the Winchester's if you're a fan of the TV series, Supernatural. Dorothy was from Kansas. It's been home to Presidents and Presidential hopefuls. It was home to Marshall Dillon, Doc, Festus and Miss Kitty...Wyatt Earp donned a badge here, too. For me, it was one of the places we found ourselves over and over again as we traversed the country last year. In this episode, I share a few memorable moments and some personal insights shared in what became known as the RV Side Chat. This is me, channelling Mike Rowe...lol. Let's go back to Kansas - An Indian Rider Radio, SpecialIndian Motorcycle of Oklahoma CityBoot Hill Museum, Dodge City, KSDwight Eisenhower Presidential Museum, Abilene, KSKansas Motorcycle Museum    Our YouTube Video: Click HereA Future Author's DiaryHost Andrew Holsapple has a passion for becoming a best-selling author. Tune in each...Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify Pod ChatWhat's new in podcasting and who's going to make it happen.Listen on: Apple Podcasts SpotifyPATREON - SUPPORT THE SHOWBuzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched! Start for FREEThrottle Addikt Ulta-cool, retro garage style wear for the discriminating biker. PROMO CODE IRR20226D Helmets Cutting edge protection technology -. PROMO CODE IRR2021Lloyd'z Garage & IMC Charlotte The Industry leader for Indian Motorcycle performance cams, big bore kits and MOREDisclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.Support the show

Episode 65 aired July 18, 1953 on CBS Radio Network. Gunsmoke, the radio series, aired from April 26, 1952 until June 18, 1961 on CBS. It starred William Conrad as Marshal Matt Dillon. Hattie throws in with two men to kill her husband and then sell his ranch for the money. Yorky Kelley sees the men ride off with his father and trails them till his horse breaks a leg. On the prairie Yorky finds Marshall Dillon and asks for his help finding his Pa.

Connect and Follow: https://linktr.ee/cowboyclassicsCowboy Classics Old Time Radio WesternsGun SmokeThe radio version ran from 1952 to 1961 and is commonly regarded as one of the finest radio dramas. The television version ran from 1955 to 1975 and is the longest-running primetime drama and the second-longest-running prime time fictional program in U.S. television history,The radio version ran from 1952 to 1961 and is commonly regarded as one of the finest radio dramas of all time.Gun Smoke, Ep# 22 – ShakespearPlotA good story about a deranged Shakespearean actor who murders during a heatwave in Kansas. It was the dust; the heat in Dodge City was bad enough, but the dust out on the plains was unbearable. The sun was a blazing red round chip in the sky, and a man's sweat never had a chance to evaporate. It was dust-blotted and dried. Doc, Chester, and Marshall Dillon had ridden ten miles out to old man Gore's place because he had a problem with one of the hands who had gone crazy on the liquor and was shooting up the cattle.*Support the channel**Merch:*social media:*Follow me on Instagram:*Follow me on Facebook:https://linktr.ee/cowboyclassics*Our Affiliates Partners:Check out Health Ranger Store LINKS: https://linktr.ee/cowboyclassicsThis post/video contains affiliate links, which means that I may receive a commission if you make a purchase using these links. #westerns # wildwest #otr #oldtimeradioSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/cowboy-classics-old-time-radio-westerns-podcast/exclusive-contentAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Gunsmoke starring William Conrad, originally broadcast February 13, 1954, The Killer. Crego is a cowardly killer who's very particular about whom he shoots. Also Part 1 of the Five Part Yours Truly Johnny Dollar story The Qui Bono Matter, originally broadcast February 13, 1956. Who benefits? Not the killer in the case! Two bullets in a man's heart and a $100,000 payoff.

Zach as Nas travel to the Wild West to discuss one of the longest running television shows to ever air! James Arness stars as the stoic Marshall Dillon, who works hard to keep Dodge City free of corporate capitalists. Come for the frontier shootouts, but stick around for Miss Kitty's excellent hairdos and calming demeanor. Sponsored by dust, desert sand, and other sweaty western things.

Fecha de Grabación: Domingo 4 de julio de 2021Algunas de las noticias y temas comentados:Hace unos meses apareció Zoop, una nueva plataforma de crowdsourcing que ofrece servicios especializados para autores de cómics.Respondemos preguntas de los auditores.¡...Y muchísimo más!Comentario de cómics:The Bequest, cómic escrito por Tim Seeley, con arte de Freddie Williams II, color de Jeremy Colwell y rótulos de Marshall Dillon. (Aftershock Comics)Loki, cómic escrito por Daniel Kibblesmith, con arte de Oscar Bazaldua y Andy Macdonald. (Marvel Comics). Friend of the Devil, novela gráfica escrita por Ed Brubaker, con arte de Sean Phillips y color de Jacob Phillips. Segunda entrega de Reckless. (Image Comics).Comentario de Cine:The Tomorrow War, película dirigida Chris McKay y protagonizada por Chris Pratt, Yvonne Strahovski, Edwin Hodge y Sam Richardson (Amazon Prime Video)Pueden escuchar el Podcast en este reproductor.Descarga Directa MP3 (Usar botón derecho del mouse y opción "guardar enlace como"). Peso: 122,5 MB; Calidad: 128 Kbps.El episodio tiene una duración de 02:13:02.Recuerden que ya está otra vez activa nuestra campaña en Patreon. Cada episodio del podcast se publica ahí al menos 24 horas antes que a través de los canales habituales, y cada mes grabamos un especial temático que es exclusivo de esta plataforma. Puedes sumarte a nuestros patreoncinadores™ con aportaciones desde 1 dólar al mes, y no existe un mínimo de tiempo para mantener su suscripción.También puedes encontrar nuestro podcast en los siguientes agregadores y servicios especializados:Comicverso en SpotifyComicverso en iVooxComicverso en Apple PodcastsComicverso en Google PodcastsComicverso en Amazon MusicComicverso en Archive.orgComicverso en I Heart RadioComicverso en Overcast.fmComicverso en Pocket CastsComicverso en RadioPublicComicverso en CastBox.fm¿Usas alguna app o servicio que no tiene a Comicverso? En la barra lateral está el feed del podcast, mismo que puedes agregar al servicio de tu preferencia.Nos interesa conocer opiniones y críticas para seguir mejorando. Si te gusta nuestro trabajo, por favor ayúdanos compartiendo el enlace a esta entrada, cuéntale a tus amigos sobre nuestro Podcast, y recomiéndalo a quien creas que pueda interesarle. Hasta pronto.Deja tus comentarios o escríbenos directamente a comicverso@gmail.com

Hannah Tolman is concerned that her father is going to get himself killed and wants Marshall Dillon to save his skin by placing him in jail. Jed won’t tell Dillon who is trying to kill him but he has an idea it could have something to do with Vic Tolman, his own son who is wanted for robbery and murder who just got out of jail last week. Duration: 29:18 Starring: William Conrad Broadcast Date: 9th August 1952

Shortly after CBS debuted Frontier Gentleman in February of 1958, a second new western show, Luke Slaughter of Tombstone, debuted on Sunday February 23rd, 1958 at 2PM eastern time. Sam Buffington starred in the title role, with a vocal quality in line with William Conrad’s Marshall Dillon of Gunsmoke and Raymond Burr’s Captain Lee Quince of Fort Laramie. Buffington was only 26, and a relative stranger to American audiences. Born in Swansea, MA on October 12th, 1931, he was balding and husky, with a big mustache. He had the physicality of a man much older than his age, which lent itself to portraying an Arizona cavalryman turned cattleman. He’d found Hollywood western work in television for network shows like Tales of Wells Fargo, Maverick, and Cheyenne. The series was produced and directed by William N. Robson, who’d stuck by radio from its earliest days to its waning moments in the late 1950s. Tom Hanley expanded his abilities to include script writing. On Slaughter, he doubled as editorial supervisor, while also laying sound patterns with Ray Kemper and Bill James. Although CBS ad sales managed to get the May 4th, 1958 episode sponsored by O’Brien Paints, finding regular sponsorship for a Sunday at 2PM western with little name value was impossible. CBS cancelled the show after just sixteen episodes. The last Luke Slaughter of Tombstone aired on June 15th.

Marshall Dillon stops by to visit Johnny Dollar!

Gunsmoke starring William Conrad, originally broadcast March 20, 1954, Old Friend. After trying to bribe Marshal Dillon, a gambler named Ben Corder hires Toque Morlan to kill Matt! Also Fibber McGee and Molly, originally broadcast March 20, 1956, What Has Three Arms, One Leg, no Head, and Jingles.

A series of murders of men who have been lucky while gambling leads Marshal Dillon to a most unusual killer. Jones’s had been spending time in Dodge City buying supplies and food before he was found laying near his wagon, the horse still hitched, stabbed to death and the three thousand dollars he was carrying was missing. This was the third stabbing in the last two months and Marshall Dillon suspected it was the same killer.

Best Old Time Radio Podcast with Bob Bro Thursday, February 18, 2021 - OTR Westerns Gunsmoke - "Dooley Surrenders" Poor, pathetic Emmett Dooley is a mouse of a human being. And now he is absolutely convinced that he has killed a man. What is he to do? Of course -- he should turn himself into the law and accept his punishment. And so he approaches Marshall Dillon to make his confession. After questioning Dooley, however, Matt is convinced something isn't quite right. Dooley's story just doesn't make sense. So Matt ventures out to find out the real story... Pretty good character study about survival of the fittest in the old west. Featuring: William Conrad, Parley Baer, Howard McNear, Georgia Ellis, James Nusser, Vic Perrin, Harry Bartell. Original Air Date: September 13, 1954 on CBS

Best Old Time Radio Podcast with Bob Bro Thursday, December 17, 2020 - OTR Westerns Gunsmoke - "How to Kill a Friend" When two gamblers arrive in Dodge City they send word to Marshall Dillon they would like to talk to him. It seems they run a crooked card game and it's their routine in each new town to find the person in charge and then cut him in on their profits. When Dillon advises them to get out of town, they determine the Marshall must die. But they hire a paid killer to do the job, imagine their surprise when learn their assassin is an old friend of Matt's. Featuring: William Conrad, Parley Baer, Howard McNear, Georgia Ellis, John Dehner, Lawrence Dobkin, Harry Bartell Original Air Date: October 3, 1953 on CBS To hear more of the best old time radio programs, visit our website: https://bestoldtimeradio.com Contact: Bob@bestoldtimeradio.com

Marshall Dillon and Chester meet beautiful Miss Colleen Tawny who tells them that she is destitute. She is an orphan and her aunt recently died leaving her all alone in the world. Then she put her baggage down and lost all her possessions and money. Matt tells her that they will help her out for a few nights but suspects that with her charm and innocent beauty she ‘s going to bring trouble. Duration: 21:04 Starring: William Conrad, Parley Baer, Georgia Ellis, Howard McNear Broadcast Date: 3rd March 1957

  Episode ninety-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Song To Woody” by Bob Dylan, and at the Greenwich Village folk scene of the early sixties. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.   Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Sherry” by the Four Seasons. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. This might not be available in the US, due to the number of Woody Guthrie songs in a row. Dylan’s first album is in the public domain in Europe, so a variety of reissues of it exist. An interesting and cheap one is this, which pairs it (and a non-album single by Dylan) with two Carolyn Hester albums which give a snapshot of the Greenwich Village scene, on one of which Dylan plays harmonica. The Harry Smith Anthology is also now public domain, and can be freely downloaded from archive.org.  I have used *many* books for this episode, most of which I will also be using for future episodes on Dylan: The Mayor of MacDougal Street by Dave Van Ronk and Elijah Wald is the fascinating and funny autobiography of Dylan’s mentor in his Greenwich Village period. Escaping the Delta by Elijah Wald is the definitive book on Robert Johnson. Information on Woody Guthrie comes from Ramblin’ Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie by Ed Cray. Chronicles Volume 1 by Bob Dylan is a partial, highly inaccurate, but thoroughly readable autobiography. Bob Dylan: All The Songs by Phillipe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon is a song-by-song look at every song Dylan ever wrote, as is Revolution in the Air, by Clinton Heylin. Heylin also wrote the most comprehensive and accurate biography of Dylan, Behind the Shades. I’ve also used Robert Shelton’s No Direction Home, which is less accurate, but which is written by someone who knew Dylan.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   1962 is the year when the sixties really started, and in the next few episodes we will see the first proper appearances of several of the musicians who would go on to make the decade what it was. By two weeks from now, when we get to episode one hundred and the end of the second year of the podcast, the stage will be set for us to look at that most mythologised of decades. And so today, we’re going to take our first look at one of the most important of the sixties musicians, the only songwriter ever to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, a man who influenced every single performer and songwriter for at least the next decade, and whose work inspired a whole subgenre, albeit one he had little but contempt for. We’re going to look at his first album, and at a song he wrote to his greatest influence. And we’re also going to look at how his career intersected with someone we talked about way back in the very first episode of this podcast. Today we’re going to look at Bob Dylan, and at “Song to Woody”: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, “Song to Woody”] This episode is going to be a little different from several of the other episodes we’ve had recently. At the time he made his first album, Dylan was not the accomplished artist he quickly became, but a minor performer whose first record only contained two original songs. But he was from a tradition that we’ve looked at only in passing before. We’ve barely looked at the American folk music tradition, and largely ignored the musicians who were major figures in it, because those figures only really enter into rock and roll in a real way starting with Dylan. So as part of this episode, we’re going to have very brief, capsule, looks at a number of other musicians we’ve not touched on before. I’ll only be giving enough background for these people so you can get a flavour of them — in future episodes when we look at the folk and folk-rock scenes, we’ll also fill in some more of the background of these artists. That also means this episode is going to run a little long, just because there’s a lot to get through. Bob Dylan was born Robert Zimmerman in the Minnesota Iron Range, an area of the US that was just beginning a slow descent into poverty, as the country suddenly needed a lot less metal after the end of World War II. He was born in Duluth, but moved to Hibbing, a much smaller town, when he was very young. As a kid, he was fascinated with music that sounded a little odd. He was first captivated by Johnnie Ray — and incidentally, Clinton Heylin, in his biography of Dylan, thinks that this must be wrong, and “Dylan has surely mixed up his names” and must be thinking of Johnny Ace, because “Ray’s main period of chart success” was 1956-58. Heylin’s books are usually very, very well researched, but here he’s showing his parochialism. Johnnie Ray’s biggest *UK* hits were in 1956-8, but in the US his biggest hits came in 1951, and he had a string of hits in the very early fifties.  Ray’s hits, like “Cry”, were produced by Mitch Miller, and were on Columbia records: [Excerpt: Johnnie Ray, “Cry”] Shortly after his infatuation with Ray’s music, he fell for the music of Hank Williams in a big way, and became obsessed with Williams’ songwriting: [Excerpt: Hank Williams, “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”] He also became a fan of another Hank, Hank Snow, the country singer who had been managed by Colonel Tom Parker, and through Snow he became aware of the songs of Jimmie Rodgers, who Snow frequently covered, and who Snow admired enough that Snow’s son was named Jimmie Rodgers Snow.  But he soon also became a big fan of rhythm and blues and rock and roll. He taught himself to play rudimentary piano in a Little Richard style, and his ambition, as quoted in his high school yearbook, was to join Little Richard’s band. He was enough of a fan of rock and roll music that he went to see Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper on the penultimate date of their ill-fated tour. He later claimed to have seen a halo over Holly’s head during the performance. His first brush with fame came indirectly as a result of that tour. A singer from Fargo, North Dakota, named Bobby Vee, was drafted in to cover for Holly at the show that Holly had been travelling to when he died. Vee sounded a little like Holly, if you didn’t listen too closely, and he had a minor local hit with a song called “Suzy Baby”: [Excerpt: Bobby Vee, “Suzy Baby”] Dylan joined Vee’s band for a short while under the stage name Elston Gunn, playing the piano, though he was apparently not very good (he could only play in C, according to some sources I’ve read), and he didn’t stay in Vee’s band very long. But while he was in Vee’s band, he would tell friends and relatives that he *was* Bobby Vee, and at least some people believed him. Vee would go on to have a career as one of the wave of Bobbies that swarmed all over American Bandstand in the late fifties and early sixties, with records like “Rubber Ball”: [Excerpt: Bobby Vee, “Rubber Ball”] While Dylan made his name with a very different kind of music, he would always argue that Vee deserved rather more respect than he usually got, and that there was some merit to his music. But it wasn’t until he went to university in Minneapolis that Robert Zimmerman became Bob Dylan, and changed everything about his life. As many people do when they go to university, he reinvented himself — he took on a new name, which has variously been quoted as having been inspired by Marshall Dillon from the TV series Gunsmoke and by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. He stopped studying, and devoted his time to music and chasing women. And he also took on a new musical style. The way he tells it, he had an epiphany in a record shop listening booth, listening to an album by the folk singer Odetta. Odetta was an astonishing singer who combined elements of folk, country, and blues with an opera-trained voice, and Dylan was probably listening to her first album, which was largely traditional folk songs, plus one song each by Lead Belly and Jimmie Rodgers: [Excerpt: Odetta, “Muleskinner Blues”] Dylan had soon sold his electric guitar and bought an acoustic, and he immediately learned all of Odetta’s repertoire and started performing her songs, and Lead Belly’s, with a friend, “Spider” John Koerner, who would later become a fairly well-known folk blues musician in his own right: [Excerpt: Ray, Koerner, and Glover, “Hangman”] And then, at a coffee-shop, he got talking with a friend of his, Flo Castner, and she invited him to come round to her brother’s apartment, which was nearby, because she thought he might be interested in some of the music her brother had. Dylan discovered two albums at Lyn Castner’s house that day that would change his life. The first, and the less important to him in the short term, is one we’ve talked about before — he heard the Spirituals to Swing album, the record of the 1938 Carnegie Hall concerts that we talked about back in the first few episodes of the podcast: [Excerpt: Big Joe Turner & Pete Johnson, “It’s Alright, Baby”] That album impressed him, but it was the other record he heard that day that changed everything for him immediately. It was a collection of recordings by Woody Guthrie. Guthrie is someone we’ve only mentioned in passing so far, but he was pivotal in the development of American folk music in the 1940s, and in particular he was important in the politicisation of that music. In the 1930s, there wasn’t really a distinction made between country music and folk — that distinction is one that only really came later — and Guthrie had started out as a country singer, singing songs inspired by the Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers, and other 1920s greats. For most of his early twenties he’d bummed around Oklahoma and Texas doing odd jobs as a sign painter, psychic, faith healer, and whatever else he could pick up a little money for. But then in 1936 he’d travelled out to California in search of work. When there, he’d hooked up with a cousin, Jack Guthrie, who was a Western singer, performing the kind of Western Swing that would later become rockabilly. We don’t have any recordings of Jack from this early, but when you listen to him in the forties, you can hear the kind of hard-edged California Western Swing that would influence most of the white artists we looked at in the first year or so of the podcast: [Excerpt: Jack Guthrie, “Oakie Boogie”] Woody and Jack weren’t musically compatible — this was when country and western were seen as very, very different genres, rather than being lumped into one — but they worked together for a while. Jack was the lead singer and guitarist, and Woody was his comedy sidekick, backing vocalist, and harmonica player. They performed with a group called the Beverly Hillbillies and got their own radio show, The Oakie and Woody Show, but it wasn’t successful, and Jack decided to give up the show. Woody continued with a friend, Maxine Crissman, who performed as “Lefty Lou From Old Mizzou”. The Woody and Lefty act became hugely popular, but Lefty eventually also quit, due to her health failing, and while at the time she seems to have been regarded as the major talent in the duo, her leaving the act was indirectly the best thing that ever happened to Guthrie. The radio station they were performing on was owned by a fairly left-wing businessman who had connections with the radical left faction of the Democratic Party (and in California in the thirties that could be quite radical, somewhere close to today’s Democratic Socialists of America), and when Lefty quit the act, the owner of the station gave Guthrie another job — the owner also ran a left-wing newspaper, and since Guthrie was from Oklahoma, maybe he would be interested in writing some columns about the plight of the Okie migrants?  Guthrie went and spent time with those people, and his shock at the poverty they were living in and the discrimination they were suffering seems to have radicalised him. He started hanging round with members of the Communist Party, though he apparently never joined — he wasn’t all that interested in Marxist theory or the party line, he just wanted to take the side of the victims against the bullies, and he saw the Communists as doing that. He was, though, enough of a fellow traveller that when World War II started he took the initial Communist line of it being a capitalist’s fight that socialists should have no part of (a line which was held until Russia joined the war, at which point it became a crusade against the evils of fascism). His employer was a more resolute anti-fascist, and so Guthrie lost his newspaper job, and he decided to move across the country to New York, where he hooked up with a group of left-wing intellectuals and folk singers, centring on Alan Lomax, Pete Seeger, and Lead Belly. It was this environment, centred in Almanac House in Greenwich Village, that spawned the Almanac Singers and later the Weavers, who we talked about a few episodes back. And Guthrie had been the most important of all of them. Guthrie was a folk performer — a big chunk of his repertoire was old songs like “Ida Red”, “Stackolee”, and “Who’s Going to Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet?” – but he also wrote songs himself, taking the forms of old folk and country songs, and reworking the lyrics — and sometimes, but not always, the music — creating songs that dealt with events that were happening at the time. There were songs about famous outlaws, recast as Robin Hood type figures: [Excerpt: Woody Guthrie, “Pretty Boy Floyd”] There were talking blues with comedy lyrics: [Excerpt: Woody Guthrie, “Talking Fishing Blues”] There were the famous Dust Bowl Ballads, about the dust storms that had caused so much destruction and hardship in the west: [Excerpt: Woody Guthrie, “The Great Dust Storm”] And of course, there was “This Land is Your Land”, a radical song about how private property is immoral and unnatural, which has been taken up as an anthem by people who would despise everything that Guthrie stood for: [Excerpt: Woody Guthrie, “This Land is Your Land”] It’s not certain which records by Guthrie Dylan heard that day — he talks about it in his autobiography, but the songs he talks about weren’t ones that were on the same album, and he seems to just be naming a handful of Guthrie’s songs. What is certain is that Dylan reacted to this music in a visceral way. He decided that he had to *become* Woody Guthrie, and took on Guthrie’s playing and singing style, even his accent. However, he soon modulated that slightly, when a friend told him that he might as well give up — Ramblin’ Jack Elliot was already doing the Guthrie-imitation thing. Elliot, like Dylan, was a middle-class Jewish man who had reinvented himself as a Woody Guthrie copy — in this case, Elliot Adnopoz, the son of a surgeon, had become Ramblin’ Jack the singing cowboy, and had been an apprentice of Guthrie, living with him and learning everything from him, before going over to Britain, where his status as an actual authentic American had meant he was one of the major figures in the British folk scene and the related skiffle scene. Alan Lomax, who had moved to the UK temporarily to escape the anti-Communist witch hunts, had got Elliot a contract with Topic Records, a folk label that had started out as part of the Workers’ Music Association, which as you can probably tell from the name was affiliated with the Communist Party of Great Britain. There he’d recorded an album of Guthrie songs, which Dylan’s acquaintance played for him: [Excerpt: Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, “1913 Massacre”] Dylan was shocked that there was someone out there doing the same thing, but then he just took on aspects of Elliot’s persona as well as Guthrie’s. He was going to be the next Woody Guthrie, and that meant inhabiting his persona utterly, and giving his whole repertoire over to Guthrie songs. He was also, though, making tentative efforts at writing his own songs, too. One which we only have as a lyric was written to a girlfriend, and was set to the same tune we just heard — Guthrie’s “1913 Massacre”. The lyrics were things like “Hey, hey Bonny, I’m singing to you now/The song I’m singing is the best I know how” Incidentally, the woman that was written for is yet another person in the story who now has a different name — she became a moderately successful actor, appearing in episodes of Star Trek and Gunsmoke, and changed her name to Jahanara Romney shortly after her marriage to the hippie peace activist Wavy Gravy (which isn’t Mr. Gravy’s birth name either). Their son, whose birth name was Howdy Do-Good Gravy Tomahawk Truckstop Romney, also changed his name later on, you’ll be unsurprised to hear. Dylan by this point was feeling as constrained by the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul as he had earlier by the small town Hibbing. In January 1961, he decided he was going to go to New York, and while he was there he was going to go and meet Woody Guthrie in person. Guthrie was, by this time, severely ill — he had Huntington’s disease, a truly awful genetic disorder that had also killed his mother. Huntington’s causes dementia, spasmodic movements, a loss of control of the body, and a ton of other mental and physical symptoms. Guthrie had been in a psychiatric hospital since 1956, and was only let out every Sunday to see family at a friend’s house.  Bob Dylan quickly became friendly with Guthrie, visiting him regularly in the hospital to play Guthrie’s own songs for him, and occasionally joining him on the family visits on Sundays. He only spent a few months doing this — Dylan has always been someone who moved on quickly, and Guthrie also moved towards the end of 1961, to a new hospital closer to his family, but these visits had a profound effect on the young man. When not visiting Guthrie, Dylan was spending his time in Greenwich Village, the Bohemian centre of New York. The Village at that time was a hotbed of artists and radicals, with people like the poet Allen Ginsberg, the street musician Moondog, and Tiny Tim, a ukulele player who sang Rudy Vallee songs in falsetto, all part of the scene. It was also the centre of what was becoming the second great folk revival. That revival had been started in 1952, when the most important bootleg ever was released, Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music: [Excerpt: Blind Lemon Jefferson, “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean”] Harry Smith was a record collector, experimental filmmaker, and follower of the occultist Aleister Crowley. His greatest work seems at least in part to have been created as a magickal work, with album covers designed by himself full of esoteric symbolism. Smith had a huge collection of old 78 records — all of them things that had been issued commercially in the late 1920s and early thirties, when the record industry had been in a temporary boom before the depression. Many of these records had been very popular in the twenties, but by 1952 even the most popular acts, like Blind Lemon Jefferson or the Carter Family, were largely forgotten. So Smith and Moe Asch, the owner of Folkways Records, took advantage of the new medium, the long-playing album, and put together a six-album set of these recordings, not bothering with trivialities like copyright even though, again, most of these had been recorded for major labels only twenty or so years earlier — but at this time there was not really such a thing as a market for back catalogue, and none of the record labels involved seem to have protested. Smith’s collection was an idiosyncratic one, based around his own tastes. It ran the gamut from hard blues: [Excerpt: Joe Williams’ Washboard Blues Singers, “Baby Please Don’t Go”] To the Carter Family’s country recordings of old ballads that date back centuries: [Excerpt: The Carter Family, “Black Jack Davey”] To gospel: [Excerpt: Sister Clara Hudmon, “Stand By Me”] But put together in one place, these records suggested the existence of a uniquely American roots music tradition, one that encompassed all these genres, and Smith’s Anthology became the favourite music of the same type of people who in the UK around the same time were becoming skifflers — many of them radical leftists who had been part of the US equivalent of the trad jazz movement (who were known as “mouldy figs”) and were attracted by the idea of an authentic music of the working man. The Harry Smith Anthology became the core repertoire for every American folk musician of the fifties, the seed around which the whole movement crystallised. Every folkie knew every single song on those records. Those folkies had started playing at coffee shops in Greenwich Village, places that were known as basket houses, because they didn’t charge for entry or pay the artists, but the performers could pass a basket and split whatever the audience decided to donate.  Originally, the folk musicians were not especially popular, and in fact they were booked for that reason. The main entertainment for those coffee shops was poetry, and the audience for poetry would mostly buy a single coffee and make it last all night. The folkies were booked to come on between the poets and play a few songs to make the audience clear out to make room for a new audience to come and buy new coffees. However, some of the people got good enough that they actually started to get their own audiences, and within a short time the roles were reversed, with the poets coming on to clear out the folk audience. Dylan’s first gigs were on this circuit, playing on bills put together by Fred Neil, a musician who was at this point mostly playing blues songs but who within a few years would write some of the great classics of the sixties singer-songwriter genre: [Excerpt: Fred Neil, “Everybody’s Talkin'”] By the time Dylan hit the scene, there were quite a few very good musicians in the Village, and the folk scene had grown to the point that there were multiple factions. There were the Stalinists, who had coalesced around Pete Seeger, the elder statesman of the scene, and who played a mixture of summer-camp singalong music and topical songs about news events. There were the Zionists, who were singing things like “Hava Nagilah”. There were bluegrass players, and there were the two groups that most attracted Dylan — those who sang old folk ballads, and those who sang the blues. Those latter two groups tended to cluster together, because they were smaller than the other groups, and also because of their own political views — while all of the scene were leftists, the blues and ballad singers tended either to be vaguely apolitical, or to be anarchists and Trotskyites rather than Stalinists. But they had a deeper philosophical disagreement with the Stalinists — Seeger’s camp thought that the quality of a song was secondary to the social good it could do, while the blues and ballad singers held that the important thing was the music, and any political or social good was a nice byproduct. There was a huge amount of infighting between these small groups — the narcissism of small differences — but there was one place they would all hang out. The Folklore Centre was a record and bookshop owned by a man named Izzy Young, and it was where you would go to buy every new book, to buy and sell copies of the zines that were published, and to hang out and find out who the new musicians on the scene were.  And it was at the Folklore Centre that Dylan met Dave Van Ronk: [Excerpt: Dave Van Ronk, “Cocaine Blues”] Van Ronk was the most important musician in the blues and ballads group of folkies, and was politically an anarchist who, through his connection with the Schachtmanites (a fringe-left group who were more Trotskyite than the Trotskyites, and whose views sometimes shaded into anarchism) was becoming converted to Marxism. A physically massive man, he’d started out as a traditional jazz guitarist and banjo player, but had slowly moved on into the folk side of things through his love of blues singers like Bessie Smith and folk-blues artists like Lead Belly. Van Ronk had learned a great deal from Rev. Gary Davis, a blind gospel-blues singer whose technique Van Ronk had studied: [Excerpt: Rev. Gary Davis, “Death Don’t Have No Mercy”] Van Ronk was one of the few people on the Village scene who was a native New Yorker, though he was from Queens rather than the Village, and he was someone who had already made a few records that Dylan had heard, mostly of the standard repertoire: [Excerpt: Dave Van Ronk, “See That My Grave is Kept Clean”] Dylan consciously sought him out as the person to imitate on the scene, and he was soon regularly sleeping on Van Ronk’s couch and being managed for a brief time by Van Ronk’s wife. Once again, Dylan was learning everything he could from the people he was around — but he had a much bigger ambition than anyone else on the scene. A lot of the people on that scene have been very bitter over the years about Dylan, but Van Ronk, who did more for Dylan than anyone else on the scene, never really was — the two stopped being close once he was no more use to Dylan, as so often happened, but they remained friendly, because Van Ronk was secure enough in himself and his own abilities that he didn’t need the validation of being important to the big star. Van Ronk was an important mentor to him for a crucial period of six months or so, and Dylan always acknowledged that, just as Van Ronk always acknowledged Dylan’s talent. And that talent, at least at first, was a performing talent rather than a songwriting one. Dylan was writing songs by now, but hardly any, and when he did perform them, he was not acknowledging them. His first truly successful song, a song about nuclear war, “Let Me Die in my Footsteps”, he would introduce as a Weavers song: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, “Let Me Die in my Footsteps”] For the most part, his repertoire was still only Woody Guthrie songs, but people were amazed by his personal charisma, his humour — one comparison you see time and again when people talk about his early performances is Charlie Chaplin — and his singing. There are so many jokes about Dylan’s vocals that this sounds like a joke, but among the folk crowd, his phrasing in particular — as influenced by the R&B records he grew up listening to as by Guthrie — was considered utterly astonishing. Dylan started publishing some of his song lyrics in Broadside, a magazine for new topical songs, and in other magazines like Sing Out! These were associated with the Communist side of the folk movement, and Dylan had a foot in both camps through his association with Guthrie and Guthrie’s friends. Through these people he got to know Suze Rotolo, a volunteer with the Congress of Racial Equality, who became his girlfriend, and her sister Carla, who was the assistant to Alan Lomax, who was now back from the UK, and the Rotolos played a part in Dylan’s big breakthrough.  The timeline that follows is a bit confused, but Carla Rotolo recorded some of the best Village folk singers, and wrote to John Hammond about the tape, mentioning Dylan in particular. At the same time, Hammond’s son John Hammond Jr, another musician on the circuit and a friend of Dylan’s, apparently mentioned Dylan to his father. Dylan was also working on Robert Shelton, the folk critic of the New York Times, who eventually gave Dylan a massive rave review for a support slot he’d played at Gerde’s Folk City. And the same day that review came out, eight days after Carla Rotolo’s letter, Dylan was in the recording studio with the folk singer Carolyn Hester, playing harmonica on a few of her tracks, and Hammond was the producer: [Excerpt: Carolyn Hester, “I’ll Fly Away”] Hammond had, of course, organised the Spirituals to Swing concerts which had influenced Dylan. And not only that, he’d been the person to discover Billie Holiday, and Count Basie. And Charlie Christian. He was now working for Columbia Records, where he’d just produced the first secular records for a promising new gospel singer who had decided to turn pop, named Aretha Franklin: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, “Today I Sing the Blues”] So Hammond was an important figure in many ways, and he had a lot of latitude at Columbia Records. He decided to sign Dylan, and even though Mitch Miller, Columbia’s head of A&R at the time, had no clue what Hammond saw in Dylan, Hammond’s track record was good enough that he was allowed to get on with it and put out an album. Hammond also gave Dylan an album to take home and listen to, a record which hadn’t come out yet, a reissue of some old blues records called “King of the Delta Blues Singers” by Robert Johnson: [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, “Crossroads Blues”] There has been a hell of a lot of mythology about Johnson over the years, so much so that it’s almost impossible to give anyone who’s heard of him at all an accurate impression of Johnson’s place in music history. One question I have been asked repeatedly since I started this podcast is “How come you didn’t start with Robert Johnson?”, and if you don’t know about him, you’ll get an idea of his general perception among music fans from the fact that I recently watched an episode of a science fiction TV series where our heroes had to go back in time to stop the villains from preventing Johnson from making his recordings, because by doing that they could stop rock and roll from ever existing. There’s a popular perception that Johnson was the most important blues musician of his generation, and that he was hugely influential on the development of blues and R&B, and it’s simply false. He *was* a truly great musician, and he *was* hugely influential — but he was influential on white musicians in the sixties, not black musicians in the thirties, forties, and fifties. In his lifetime, his best selling records sold around five thousand copies, which to put it in perspective is about the same number of people who’ve listened to some of my more popular podcast episodes. Johnson’s biographer Elijah Wald — a man who, like I do, has a huge respect for Johnson’s musicianship, has said “knowing about Johnson and Muddy Waters but not about Leroy Carr or Dinah Washington [is] like knowing about, say, the Sir Douglas Quintet but not knowing about the Beatles.” I’d agree, except that the Sir Douglas Quintet were much, much, bigger in the sixties than Robert Johnson was in the thirties. Johnson’s reputation comes entirely from that album that Hammond had handed Dylan. Hammond had been one of the tiny number of people who had actually listened to Johnson at the time he was performing. Indeed, Hammond had wanted to get Johnson to perform at the Spirituals to Swing concerts, only to find that Johnson had died only a short time earlier — they’d got Big Bill Broonzy to play in his place, and played a couple of Johnson’s records from the stage. That had, in fact, kickstarted Broonzy’s later second career as a folk-blues musician playing for largely white audiences, rather than as a proto-Chicago-blues performer playing for Black ones. Hammond’s friend Alan Lomax had also been a fan of Johnson — he’d gone to Mississippi later, to try to record Johnson, also without having realised that Johnson had died. But far from Johnson being the single most important blues musician of the thirties, as he is now portrayed in popular culture, if you’d asked most blues musicians or listeners about Robert Johnson in the twenty-three years between his death and the King of the Delta Blues Singers album coming out, most of them would have looked at you blankly, or maybe asked if you meant Lonnie Johnson, the much more famous musician who was a big inspiration for Robert. When King of the Delta Blues Singers came out, it changed all that, and made Robert Johnson into a totemic figure among white blues fans, and we’ll see over the next year or two a large number of very important musicians who took inspiration from him — and deservedly so. While the myth of Robert Johnson has almost no connection to the real man, his music demonstrated a remarkable musical mind — he was a versatile, skilled guitarist and arranger, and someone whose musical palette was far wider than his recorded legacy suggests — Ramblin’ Johnny Shines, who travelled with Johnson for a time, describes him as particularly enjoying playing songs like “Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby” and Jimmie Rodgers songs, and polkas, calling Johnson “a polka hound, man”. And even though in his handful of recording sessions he was asked only to play blues, you can still hear elements of that: [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, “They’re Red Hot”] But the music wasn’t the main thing that grabbed Dylan. Dylan played the album for Dave Van Ronk, who was unimpressed — musically, Johnson just didn’t seem very original to Van Ronk, who played Dylan records by Skip James, Leroy Carr, and others, showing Dylan where Johnson had picked up most of his musical ideas. And Dylan had to agree with him that Johnson didn’t sound particularly original in that context — but he also didn’t care, reasoning that many of the Woody Guthrie songs he loved were rewrites of old Carter Family songs, so if Johnson was rewriting Leroy Carr songs that was fair enough. What got to Dylan was Johnson’s performance style, but also his ability with words. Johnson had a very sparse, economical, lyrical style which connected with Dylan on a primordial level. Most of those who became fans of Johnson following the release of King of the Delta Blues Singers saw Johnson as an exotic and scary figure — the myth commonly told about him is that he sold his soul at a crossroads to the Devil in return for the ability to play the guitar, though that’s a myth that was originally told about a different Mississippi blues man called Tommy Johnson, and there’s no evidence that anyone thought that of him at the time — and so these later fans see his music as being haunted. Dylan instead seems to see Johnson as someone very like himself — in his autobiography, Chronicles, Dylan talks about Johnson being a bothersome kid who played harmonica, who was later taught a bit of guitar and then learned the rest of his music from records, rather than from live performers. Dylan’s version of Johnson is closer to the reality, as far as we know it, than the Johnson of legend is, and Dylan seems to have been delighted when he found out much later that the name of the musician who taught Johnson to play guitar was Ike Zimmerman. Dylan immediately tried to incorporate Johnson’s style into his own songwriting, and we’ll see the effects of that in future episodes. But that songwriting wouldn’t be seen much on his debut album. And nor would his Woody Guthrie repertoire. Instead, Dylan performed a set of traditional ballads and blues numbers, most of which he never performed live normally, and at least half of which were arrangements that Dylan copied wholesale from Dave Van Ronk. [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, “See That My Grave is Kept Clean”] The album was recorded quickly, in a couple of days. Hammond found Dylan incredibly difficult to work with, saying he had appalling mic technique, and for many of the songs Dylan refused to do a second take. There were only two originals on the album. One, “Talkin’ New York”, was a comedy talking blues about his early time in New York, very much in the style of Woody Guthrie’s talking blues songs. The other, “Song To Woody”, was a rewrite of his earlier “Song For Bonny”, which was itself a rewrite of Guthrie’s “1913 Massacre”. The song is a touching one, Dylan paying tribute to his single biggest influence: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, “Song to Woody”] Dylan was moving on, and he knew he was moving on, but he had to say goodbye. Dylan’s first album was not a success, and he became known within Columbia Records as “Hammond’s Folly”, but nor did it lose money, since it was recorded so quickly. It’s a record that Dylan and Hammond both later spoke poorly of, but it’s one I rather like, and one of the best things to come out of the Greenwich Village folk scene. But by the time it came out, Dylan’s artistic heart was already elsewhere, and when we come back to him in a couple of months, we’ll be seeing someone who had completely reinvented himself.  

  Episode ninety-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Song To Woody" by Bob Dylan, and at the Greenwich Village folk scene of the early sixties. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.   Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Sherry" by the Four Seasons. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. This might not be available in the US, due to the number of Woody Guthrie songs in a row. Dylan's first album is in the public domain in Europe, so a variety of reissues of it exist. An interesting and cheap one is this, which pairs it (and a non-album single by Dylan) with two Carolyn Hester albums which give a snapshot of the Greenwich Village scene, on one of which Dylan plays harmonica. The Harry Smith Anthology is also now public domain, and can be freely downloaded from archive.org.  I have used *many* books for this episode, most of which I will also be using for future episodes on Dylan: The Mayor of MacDougal Street by Dave Van Ronk and Elijah Wald is the fascinating and funny autobiography of Dylan's mentor in his Greenwich Village period. Escaping the Delta by Elijah Wald is the definitive book on Robert Johnson. Information on Woody Guthrie comes from Ramblin' Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie by Ed Cray. Chronicles Volume 1 by Bob Dylan is a partial, highly inaccurate, but thoroughly readable autobiography. Bob Dylan: All The Songs by Phillipe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon is a song-by-song look at every song Dylan ever wrote, as is Revolution in the Air, by Clinton Heylin. Heylin also wrote the most comprehensive and accurate biography of Dylan, Behind the Shades. I've also used Robert Shelton's No Direction Home, which is less accurate, but which is written by someone who knew Dylan.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   1962 is the year when the sixties really started, and in the next few episodes we will see the first proper appearances of several of the musicians who would go on to make the decade what it was. By two weeks from now, when we get to episode one hundred and the end of the second year of the podcast, the stage will be set for us to look at that most mythologised of decades. And so today, we're going to take our first look at one of the most important of the sixties musicians, the only songwriter ever to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, a man who influenced every single performer and songwriter for at least the next decade, and whose work inspired a whole subgenre, albeit one he had little but contempt for. We're going to look at his first album, and at a song he wrote to his greatest influence. And we're also going to look at how his career intersected with someone we talked about way back in the very first episode of this podcast. Today we're going to look at Bob Dylan, and at "Song to Woody": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Song to Woody"] This episode is going to be a little different from several of the other episodes we've had recently. At the time he made his first album, Dylan was not the accomplished artist he quickly became, but a minor performer whose first record only contained two original songs. But he was from a tradition that we've looked at only in passing before. We've barely looked at the American folk music tradition, and largely ignored the musicians who were major figures in it, because those figures only really enter into rock and roll in a real way starting with Dylan. So as part of this episode, we're going to have very brief, capsule, looks at a number of other musicians we've not touched on before. I'll only be giving enough background for these people so you can get a flavour of them -- in future episodes when we look at the folk and folk-rock scenes, we'll also fill in some more of the background of these artists. That also means this episode is going to run a little long, just because there's a lot to get through. Bob Dylan was born Robert Zimmerman in the Minnesota Iron Range, an area of the US that was just beginning a slow descent into poverty, as the country suddenly needed a lot less metal after the end of World War II. He was born in Duluth, but moved to Hibbing, a much smaller town, when he was very young. As a kid, he was fascinated with music that sounded a little odd. He was first captivated by Johnnie Ray -- and incidentally, Clinton Heylin, in his biography of Dylan, thinks that this must be wrong, and "Dylan has surely mixed up his names" and must be thinking of Johnny Ace, because "Ray’s main period of chart success" was 1956-58. Heylin's books are usually very, very well researched, but here he's showing his parochialism. Johnnie Ray's biggest *UK* hits were in 1956-8, but in the US his biggest hits came in 1951, and he had a string of hits in the very early fifties.  Ray's hits, like "Cry", were produced by Mitch Miller, and were on Columbia records: [Excerpt: Johnnie Ray, "Cry"] Shortly after his infatuation with Ray's music, he fell for the music of Hank Williams in a big way, and became obsessed with Williams' songwriting: [Excerpt: Hank Williams, "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry"] He also became a fan of another Hank, Hank Snow, the country singer who had been managed by Colonel Tom Parker, and through Snow he became aware of the songs of Jimmie Rodgers, who Snow frequently covered, and who Snow admired enough that Snow's son was named Jimmie Rodgers Snow.  But he soon also became a big fan of rhythm and blues and rock and roll. He taught himself to play rudimentary piano in a Little Richard style, and his ambition, as quoted in his high school yearbook, was to join Little Richard's band. He was enough of a fan of rock and roll music that he went to see Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper on the penultimate date of their ill-fated tour. He later claimed to have seen a halo over Holly's head during the performance. His first brush with fame came indirectly as a result of that tour. A singer from Fargo, North Dakota, named Bobby Vee, was drafted in to cover for Holly at the show that Holly had been travelling to when he died. Vee sounded a little like Holly, if you didn't listen too closely, and he had a minor local hit with a song called "Suzy Baby": [Excerpt: Bobby Vee, "Suzy Baby"] Dylan joined Vee's band for a short while under the stage name Elston Gunn, playing the piano, though he was apparently not very good (he could only play in C, according to some sources I've read), and he didn't stay in Vee's band very long. But while he was in Vee's band, he would tell friends and relatives that he *was* Bobby Vee, and at least some people believed him. Vee would go on to have a career as one of the wave of Bobbies that swarmed all over American Bandstand in the late fifties and early sixties, with records like "Rubber Ball": [Excerpt: Bobby Vee, "Rubber Ball"] While Dylan made his name with a very different kind of music, he would always argue that Vee deserved rather more respect than he usually got, and that there was some merit to his music. But it wasn't until he went to university in Minneapolis that Robert Zimmerman became Bob Dylan, and changed everything about his life. As many people do when they go to university, he reinvented himself -- he took on a new name, which has variously been quoted as having been inspired by Marshall Dillon from the TV series Gunsmoke and by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. He stopped studying, and devoted his time to music and chasing women. And he also took on a new musical style. The way he tells it, he had an epiphany in a record shop listening booth, listening to an album by the folk singer Odetta. Odetta was an astonishing singer who combined elements of folk, country, and blues with an opera-trained voice, and Dylan was probably listening to her first album, which was largely traditional folk songs, plus one song each by Lead Belly and Jimmie Rodgers: [Excerpt: Odetta, "Muleskinner Blues"] Dylan had soon sold his electric guitar and bought an acoustic, and he immediately learned all of Odetta's repertoire and started performing her songs, and Lead Belly's, with a friend, "Spider" John Koerner, who would later become a fairly well-known folk blues musician in his own right: [Excerpt: Ray, Koerner, and Glover, "Hangman"] And then, at a coffee-shop, he got talking with a friend of his, Flo Castner, and she invited him to come round to her brother's apartment, which was nearby, because she thought he might be interested in some of the music her brother had. Dylan discovered two albums at Lyn Castner's house that day that would change his life. The first, and the less important to him in the short term, is one we've talked about before -- he heard the Spirituals to Swing album, the record of the 1938 Carnegie Hall concerts that we talked about back in the first few episodes of the podcast: [Excerpt: Big Joe Turner & Pete Johnson, "It's Alright, Baby"] That album impressed him, but it was the other record he heard that day that changed everything for him immediately. It was a collection of recordings by Woody Guthrie. Guthrie is someone we've only mentioned in passing so far, but he was pivotal in the development of American folk music in the 1940s, and in particular he was important in the politicisation of that music. In the 1930s, there wasn't really a distinction made between country music and folk -- that distinction is one that only really came later -- and Guthrie had started out as a country singer, singing songs inspired by the Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers, and other 1920s greats. For most of his early twenties he'd bummed around Oklahoma and Texas doing odd jobs as a sign painter, psychic, faith healer, and whatever else he could pick up a little money for. But then in 1936 he'd travelled out to California in search of work. When there, he'd hooked up with a cousin, Jack Guthrie, who was a Western singer, performing the kind of Western Swing that would later become rockabilly. We don't have any recordings of Jack from this early, but when you listen to him in the forties, you can hear the kind of hard-edged California Western Swing that would influence most of the white artists we looked at in the first year or so of the podcast: [Excerpt: Jack Guthrie, "Oakie Boogie"] Woody and Jack weren't musically compatible -- this was when country and western were seen as very, very different genres, rather than being lumped into one -- but they worked together for a while. Jack was the lead singer and guitarist, and Woody was his comedy sidekick, backing vocalist, and harmonica player. They performed with a group called the Beverly Hillbillies and got their own radio show, The Oakie and Woody Show, but it wasn't successful, and Jack decided to give up the show. Woody continued with a friend, Maxine Crissman, who performed as "Lefty Lou From Old Mizzou". The Woody and Lefty act became hugely popular, but Lefty eventually also quit, due to her health failing, and while at the time she seems to have been regarded as the major talent in the duo, her leaving the act was indirectly the best thing that ever happened to Guthrie. The radio station they were performing on was owned by a fairly left-wing businessman who had connections with the radical left faction of the Democratic Party (and in California in the thirties that could be quite radical, somewhere close to today's Democratic Socialists of America), and when Lefty quit the act, the owner of the station gave Guthrie another job -- the owner also ran a left-wing newspaper, and since Guthrie was from Oklahoma, maybe he would be interested in writing some columns about the plight of the Okie migrants?  Guthrie went and spent time with those people, and his shock at the poverty they were living in and the discrimination they were suffering seems to have radicalised him. He started hanging round with members of the Communist Party, though he apparently never joined -- he wasn't all that interested in Marxist theory or the party line, he just wanted to take the side of the victims against the bullies, and he saw the Communists as doing that. He was, though, enough of a fellow traveller that when World War II started he took the initial Communist line of it being a capitalist's fight that socialists should have no part of (a line which was held until Russia joined the war, at which point it became a crusade against the evils of fascism). His employer was a more resolute anti-fascist, and so Guthrie lost his newspaper job, and he decided to move across the country to New York, where he hooked up with a group of left-wing intellectuals and folk singers, centring on Alan Lomax, Pete Seeger, and Lead Belly. It was this environment, centred in Almanac House in Greenwich Village, that spawned the Almanac Singers and later the Weavers, who we talked about a few episodes back. And Guthrie had been the most important of all of them. Guthrie was a folk performer -- a big chunk of his repertoire was old songs like "Ida Red", "Stackolee", and "Who's Going to Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet?" – but he also wrote songs himself, taking the forms of old folk and country songs, and reworking the lyrics -- and sometimes, but not always, the music -- creating songs that dealt with events that were happening at the time. There were songs about famous outlaws, recast as Robin Hood type figures: [Excerpt: Woody Guthrie, "Pretty Boy Floyd"] There were talking blues with comedy lyrics: [Excerpt: Woody Guthrie, "Talking Fishing Blues"] There were the famous Dust Bowl Ballads, about the dust storms that had caused so much destruction and hardship in the west: [Excerpt: Woody Guthrie, "The Great Dust Storm"] And of course, there was "This Land is Your Land", a radical song about how private property is immoral and unnatural, which has been taken up as an anthem by people who would despise everything that Guthrie stood for: [Excerpt: Woody Guthrie, "This Land is Your Land"] It's not certain which records by Guthrie Dylan heard that day -- he talks about it in his autobiography, but the songs he talks about weren't ones that were on the same album, and he seems to just be naming a handful of Guthrie's songs. What is certain is that Dylan reacted to this music in a visceral way. He decided that he had to *become* Woody Guthrie, and took on Guthrie's playing and singing style, even his accent. However, he soon modulated that slightly, when a friend told him that he might as well give up -- Ramblin' Jack Elliot was already doing the Guthrie-imitation thing. Elliot, like Dylan, was a middle-class Jewish man who had reinvented himself as a Woody Guthrie copy -- in this case, Elliot Adnopoz, the son of a surgeon, had become Ramblin' Jack the singing cowboy, and had been an apprentice of Guthrie, living with him and learning everything from him, before going over to Britain, where his status as an actual authentic American had meant he was one of the major figures in the British folk scene and the related skiffle scene. Alan Lomax, who had moved to the UK temporarily to escape the anti-Communist witch hunts, had got Elliot a contract with Topic Records, a folk label that had started out as part of the Workers' Music Association, which as you can probably tell from the name was affiliated with the Communist Party of Great Britain. There he'd recorded an album of Guthrie songs, which Dylan's acquaintance played for him: [Excerpt: Ramblin' Jack Elliot, "1913 Massacre"] Dylan was shocked that there was someone out there doing the same thing, but then he just took on aspects of Elliot's persona as well as Guthrie's. He was going to be the next Woody Guthrie, and that meant inhabiting his persona utterly, and giving his whole repertoire over to Guthrie songs. He was also, though, making tentative efforts at writing his own songs, too. One which we only have as a lyric was written to a girlfriend, and was set to the same tune we just heard -- Guthrie's "1913 Massacre". The lyrics were things like "Hey, hey Bonny, I’m singing to you now/The song I’m singing is the best I know how" Incidentally, the woman that was written for is yet another person in the story who now has a different name -- she became a moderately successful actor, appearing in episodes of Star Trek and Gunsmoke, and changed her name to Jahanara Romney shortly after her marriage to the hippie peace activist Wavy Gravy (which isn't Mr. Gravy's birth name either). Their son, whose birth name was Howdy Do-Good Gravy Tomahawk Truckstop Romney, also changed his name later on, you'll be unsurprised to hear. Dylan by this point was feeling as constrained by the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul as he had earlier by the small town Hibbing. In January 1961, he decided he was going to go to New York, and while he was there he was going to go and meet Woody Guthrie in person. Guthrie was, by this time, severely ill -- he had Huntington's disease, a truly awful genetic disorder that had also killed his mother. Huntington's causes dementia, spasmodic movements, a loss of control of the body, and a ton of other mental and physical symptoms. Guthrie had been in a psychiatric hospital since 1956, and was only let out every Sunday to see family at a friend's house.  Bob Dylan quickly became friendly with Guthrie, visiting him regularly in the hospital to play Guthrie's own songs for him, and occasionally joining him on the family visits on Sundays. He only spent a few months doing this -- Dylan has always been someone who moved on quickly, and Guthrie also moved towards the end of 1961, to a new hospital closer to his family, but these visits had a profound effect on the young man. When not visiting Guthrie, Dylan was spending his time in Greenwich Village, the Bohemian centre of New York. The Village at that time was a hotbed of artists and radicals, with people like the poet Allen Ginsberg, the street musician Moondog, and Tiny Tim, a ukulele player who sang Rudy Vallee songs in falsetto, all part of the scene. It was also the centre of what was becoming the second great folk revival. That revival had been started in 1952, when the most important bootleg ever was released, Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music: [Excerpt: Blind Lemon Jefferson, "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean"] Harry Smith was a record collector, experimental filmmaker, and follower of the occultist Aleister Crowley. His greatest work seems at least in part to have been created as a magickal work, with album covers designed by himself full of esoteric symbolism. Smith had a huge collection of old 78 records -- all of them things that had been issued commercially in the late 1920s and early thirties, when the record industry had been in a temporary boom before the depression. Many of these records had been very popular in the twenties, but by 1952 even the most popular acts, like Blind Lemon Jefferson or the Carter Family, were largely forgotten. So Smith and Moe Asch, the owner of Folkways Records, took advantage of the new medium, the long-playing album, and put together a six-album set of these recordings, not bothering with trivialities like copyright even though, again, most of these had been recorded for major labels only twenty or so years earlier -- but at this time there was not really such a thing as a market for back catalogue, and none of the record labels involved seem to have protested. Smith's collection was an idiosyncratic one, based around his own tastes. It ran the gamut from hard blues: [Excerpt: Joe Williams' Washboard Blues Singers, "Baby Please Don't Go"] To the Carter Family's country recordings of old ballads that date back centuries: [Excerpt: The Carter Family, "Black Jack Davey"] To gospel: [Excerpt: Sister Clara Hudmon, "Stand By Me"] But put together in one place, these records suggested the existence of a uniquely American roots music tradition, one that encompassed all these genres, and Smith's Anthology became the favourite music of the same type of people who in the UK around the same time were becoming skifflers -- many of them radical leftists who had been part of the US equivalent of the trad jazz movement (who were known as “mouldy figs”) and were attracted by the idea of an authentic music of the working man. The Harry Smith Anthology became the core repertoire for every American folk musician of the fifties, the seed around which the whole movement crystallised. Every folkie knew every single song on those records. Those folkies had started playing at coffee shops in Greenwich Village, places that were known as basket houses, because they didn't charge for entry or pay the artists, but the performers could pass a basket and split whatever the audience decided to donate.  Originally, the folk musicians were not especially popular, and in fact they were booked for that reason. The main entertainment for those coffee shops was poetry, and the audience for poetry would mostly buy a single coffee and make it last all night. The folkies were booked to come on between the poets and play a few songs to make the audience clear out to make room for a new audience to come and buy new coffees. However, some of the people got good enough that they actually started to get their own audiences, and within a short time the roles were reversed, with the poets coming on to clear out the folk audience. Dylan's first gigs were on this circuit, playing on bills put together by Fred Neil, a musician who was at this point mostly playing blues songs but who within a few years would write some of the great classics of the sixties singer-songwriter genre: [Excerpt: Fred Neil, "Everybody's Talkin'"] By the time Dylan hit the scene, there were quite a few very good musicians in the Village, and the folk scene had grown to the point that there were multiple factions. There were the Stalinists, who had coalesced around Pete Seeger, the elder statesman of the scene, and who played a mixture of summer-camp singalong music and topical songs about news events. There were the Zionists, who were singing things like "Hava Nagilah". There were bluegrass players, and there were the two groups that most attracted Dylan -- those who sang old folk ballads, and those who sang the blues. Those latter two groups tended to cluster together, because they were smaller than the other groups, and also because of their own political views -- while all of the scene were leftists, the blues and ballad singers tended either to be vaguely apolitical, or to be anarchists and Trotskyites rather than Stalinists. But they had a deeper philosophical disagreement with the Stalinists -- Seeger's camp thought that the quality of a song was secondary to the social good it could do, while the blues and ballad singers held that the important thing was the music, and any political or social good was a nice byproduct. There was a huge amount of infighting between these small groups -- the narcissism of small differences -- but there was one place they would all hang out. The Folklore Centre was a record and bookshop owned by a man named Izzy Young, and it was where you would go to buy every new book, to buy and sell copies of the zines that were published, and to hang out and find out who the new musicians on the scene were.  And it was at the Folklore Centre that Dylan met Dave Van Ronk: [Excerpt: Dave Van Ronk, "Cocaine Blues"] Van Ronk was the most important musician in the blues and ballads group of folkies, and was politically an anarchist who, through his connection with the Schachtmanites (a fringe-left group who were more Trotskyite than the Trotskyites, and whose views sometimes shaded into anarchism) was becoming converted to Marxism. A physically massive man, he'd started out as a traditional jazz guitarist and banjo player, but had slowly moved on into the folk side of things through his love of blues singers like Bessie Smith and folk-blues artists like Lead Belly. Van Ronk had learned a great deal from Rev. Gary Davis, a blind gospel-blues singer whose technique Van Ronk had studied: [Excerpt: Rev. Gary Davis, "Death Don't Have No Mercy"] Van Ronk was one of the few people on the Village scene who was a native New Yorker, though he was from Queens rather than the Village, and he was someone who had already made a few records that Dylan had heard, mostly of the standard repertoire: [Excerpt: Dave Van Ronk, "See That My Grave is Kept Clean"] Dylan consciously sought him out as the person to imitate on the scene, and he was soon regularly sleeping on Van Ronk's couch and being managed for a brief time by Van Ronk's wife. Once again, Dylan was learning everything he could from the people he was around -- but he had a much bigger ambition than anyone else on the scene. A lot of the people on that scene have been very bitter over the years about Dylan, but Van Ronk, who did more for Dylan than anyone else on the scene, never really was -- the two stopped being close once he was no more use to Dylan, as so often happened, but they remained friendly, because Van Ronk was secure enough in himself and his own abilities that he didn't need the validation of being important to the big star. Van Ronk was an important mentor to him for a crucial period of six months or so, and Dylan always acknowledged that, just as Van Ronk always acknowledged Dylan's talent. And that talent, at least at first, was a performing talent rather than a songwriting one. Dylan was writing songs by now, but hardly any, and when he did perform them, he was not acknowledging them. His first truly successful song, a song about nuclear war, "Let Me Die in my Footsteps", he would introduce as a Weavers song: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Let Me Die in my Footsteps"] For the most part, his repertoire was still only Woody Guthrie songs, but people were amazed by his personal charisma, his humour -- one comparison you see time and again when people talk about his early performances is Charlie Chaplin -- and his singing. There are so many jokes about Dylan's vocals that this sounds like a joke, but among the folk crowd, his phrasing in particular -- as influenced by the R&B records he grew up listening to as by Guthrie -- was considered utterly astonishing. Dylan started publishing some of his song lyrics in Broadside, a magazine for new topical songs, and in other magazines like Sing Out! These were associated with the Communist side of the folk movement, and Dylan had a foot in both camps through his association with Guthrie and Guthrie's friends. Through these people he got to know Suze Rotolo, a volunteer with the Congress of Racial Equality, who became his girlfriend, and her sister Carla, who was the assistant to Alan Lomax, who was now back from the UK, and the Rotolos played a part in Dylan's big breakthrough.  The timeline that follows is a bit confused, but Carla Rotolo recorded some of the best Village folk singers, and wrote to John Hammond about the tape, mentioning Dylan in particular. At the same time, Hammond's son John Hammond Jr, another musician on the circuit and a friend of Dylan's, apparently mentioned Dylan to his father. Dylan was also working on Robert Shelton, the folk critic of the New York Times, who eventually gave Dylan a massive rave review for a support slot he'd played at Gerde's Folk City. And the same day that review came out, eight days after Carla Rotolo's letter, Dylan was in the recording studio with the folk singer Carolyn Hester, playing harmonica on a few of her tracks, and Hammond was the producer: [Excerpt: Carolyn Hester, "I'll Fly Away"] Hammond had, of course, organised the Spirituals to Swing concerts which had influenced Dylan. And not only that, he'd been the person to discover Billie Holiday, and Count Basie. And Charlie Christian. He was now working for Columbia Records, where he'd just produced the first secular records for a promising new gospel singer who had decided to turn pop, named Aretha Franklin: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Today I Sing the Blues"] So Hammond was an important figure in many ways, and he had a lot of latitude at Columbia Records. He decided to sign Dylan, and even though Mitch Miller, Columbia's head of A&R at the time, had no clue what Hammond saw in Dylan, Hammond's track record was good enough that he was allowed to get on with it and put out an album. Hammond also gave Dylan an album to take home and listen to, a record which hadn't come out yet, a reissue of some old blues records called "King of the Delta Blues Singers" by Robert Johnson: [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, "Crossroads Blues"] There has been a hell of a lot of mythology about Johnson over the years, so much so that it's almost impossible to give anyone who's heard of him at all an accurate impression of Johnson's place in music history. One question I have been asked repeatedly since I started this podcast is "How come you didn't start with Robert Johnson?", and if you don't know about him, you'll get an idea of his general perception among music fans from the fact that I recently watched an episode of a science fiction TV series where our heroes had to go back in time to stop the villains from preventing Johnson from making his recordings, because by doing that they could stop rock and roll from ever existing. There's a popular perception that Johnson was the most important blues musician of his generation, and that he was hugely influential on the development of blues and R&B, and it's simply false. He *was* a truly great musician, and he *was* hugely influential -- but he was influential on white musicians in the sixties, not black musicians in the thirties, forties, and fifties. In his lifetime, his best selling records sold around five thousand copies, which to put it in perspective is about the same number of people who've listened to some of my more popular podcast episodes. Johnson's biographer Elijah Wald -- a man who, like I do, has a huge respect for Johnson's musicianship, has said "knowing about Johnson and Muddy Waters but not about Leroy Carr or Dinah Washington [is] like knowing about, say, the Sir Douglas Quintet but not knowing about the Beatles." I'd agree, except that the Sir Douglas Quintet were much, much, bigger in the sixties than Robert Johnson was in the thirties. Johnson's reputation comes entirely from that album that Hammond had handed Dylan. Hammond had been one of the tiny number of people who had actually listened to Johnson at the time he was performing. Indeed, Hammond had wanted to get Johnson to perform at the Spirituals to Swing concerts, only to find that Johnson had died only a short time earlier -- they'd got Big Bill Broonzy to play in his place, and played a couple of Johnson's records from the stage. That had, in fact, kickstarted Broonzy's later second career as a folk-blues musician playing for largely white audiences, rather than as a proto-Chicago-blues performer playing for Black ones. Hammond's friend Alan Lomax had also been a fan of Johnson -- he'd gone to Mississippi later, to try to record Johnson, also without having realised that Johnson had died. But far from Johnson being the single most important blues musician of the thirties, as he is now portrayed in popular culture, if you'd asked most blues musicians or listeners about Robert Johnson in the twenty-three years between his death and the King of the Delta Blues Singers album coming out, most of them would have looked at you blankly, or maybe asked if you meant Lonnie Johnson, the much more famous musician who was a big inspiration for Robert. When King of the Delta Blues Singers came out, it changed all that, and made Robert Johnson into a totemic figure among white blues fans, and we'll see over the next year or two a large number of very important musicians who took inspiration from him -- and deservedly so. While the myth of Robert Johnson has almost no connection to the real man, his music demonstrated a remarkable musical mind -- he was a versatile, skilled guitarist and arranger, and someone whose musical palette was far wider than his recorded legacy suggests -- Ramblin' Johnny Shines, who travelled with Johnson for a time, describes him as particularly enjoying playing songs like "Yes, Sir, That's My Baby" and Jimmie Rodgers songs, and polkas, calling Johnson "a polka hound, man". And even though in his handful of recording sessions he was asked only to play blues, you can still hear elements of that: [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, "They're Red Hot"] But the music wasn't the main thing that grabbed Dylan. Dylan played the album for Dave Van Ronk, who was unimpressed -- musically, Johnson just didn't seem very original to Van Ronk, who played Dylan records by Skip James, Leroy Carr, and others, showing Dylan where Johnson had picked up most of his musical ideas. And Dylan had to agree with him that Johnson didn't sound particularly original in that context -- but he also didn't care, reasoning that many of the Woody Guthrie songs he loved were rewrites of old Carter Family songs, so if Johnson was rewriting Leroy Carr songs that was fair enough. What got to Dylan was Johnson's performance style, but also his ability with words. Johnson had a very sparse, economical, lyrical style which connected with Dylan on a primordial level. Most of those who became fans of Johnson following the release of King of the Delta Blues Singers saw Johnson as an exotic and scary figure -- the myth commonly told about him is that he sold his soul at a crossroads to the Devil in return for the ability to play the guitar, though that's a myth that was originally told about a different Mississippi blues man called Tommy Johnson, and there's no evidence that anyone thought that of him at the time -- and so these later fans see his music as being haunted. Dylan instead seems to see Johnson as someone very like himself -- in his autobiography, Chronicles, Dylan talks about Johnson being a bothersome kid who played harmonica, who was later taught a bit of guitar and then learned the rest of his music from records, rather than from live performers. Dylan's version of Johnson is closer to the reality, as far as we know it, than the Johnson of legend is, and Dylan seems to have been delighted when he found out much later that the name of the musician who taught Johnson to play guitar was Ike Zimmerman. Dylan immediately tried to incorporate Johnson's style into his own songwriting, and we'll see the effects of that in future episodes. But that songwriting wouldn't be seen much on his debut album. And nor would his Woody Guthrie repertoire. Instead, Dylan performed a set of traditional ballads and blues numbers, most of which he never performed live normally, and at least half of which were arrangements that Dylan copied wholesale from Dave Van Ronk. [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, “See That My Grave is Kept Clean”] The album was recorded quickly, in a couple of days. Hammond found Dylan incredibly difficult to work with, saying he had appalling mic technique, and for many of the songs Dylan refused to do a second take. There were only two originals on the album. One, "Talkin' New York", was a comedy talking blues about his early time in New York, very much in the style of Woody Guthrie's talking blues songs. The other, "Song To Woody", was a rewrite of his earlier "Song For Bonny", which was itself a rewrite of Guthrie's "1913 Massacre". The song is a touching one, Dylan paying tribute to his single biggest influence: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Song to Woody"] Dylan was moving on, and he knew he was moving on, but he had to say goodbye. Dylan's first album was not a success, and he became known within Columbia Records as "Hammond's Folly", but nor did it lose money, since it was recorded so quickly. It's a record that Dylan and Hammond both later spoke poorly of, but it's one I rather like, and one of the best things to come out of the Greenwich Village folk scene. But by the time it came out, Dylan's artistic heart was already elsewhere, and when we come back to him in a couple of months, we'll be seeing someone who had completely reinvented himself.  

135: Just Another Fanboy - Killadelphia #1 This is the episode in which I talk about Killadelphia #1 by Rodney Barnes, Jason Shawn Alexander, Luis NCT, Marshall Dillon, and Greg Tumbarello.“SINS OF THE FATHER,” Part One Featuring the show-stopping talents of SPAWN series artist JASON SHAWN ALEXANDER and the writer behind such hit shows as Wutang: An American Saga, Marvel’s Runaways, and Starz’s American Gods—RODNEY BARNES. When a small-town beat cop comes home to bury his murdered father—the revered Philadelphia detective James Sangster Sr.—he begins to unravel a mystery that leads him down a path of horrors that will shake his beliefs to their core. The city that was once the symbol of liberty and freedom has fallen prey to corruption, poverty, unemployment, brutality… and vampires. Welcome to KILLADELPHIA.Published by Image Comics on November 27, 2019.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .More stuff:The theme song used in each episode is Night Drive by The Oldfield Victory. Find them and their music at theoldfieldvictory.bandcamp.comWant to help support the show? You can do that in a number of ways:First, just spread the word. Tell a friend, tell two friends, tell your father, mother, sister, brother, neighbor, coworker, plumber, and even the guy or girl who cuts your hair.Beyond that you can support Steeven and the show for as little as a dollar a month on Patreon: www.patreon.com/steevenrorrOr, if the idea of a monthly payment doesn't appeal to you and you just want to throw the show a one time payment, visit ko-fi.com/steevenrorr and buy Steeven and the show a coffee for as little as $3, but as high as you want to go.Ask me questions, tell me stories, lie to me, speak your truth, make suggestions, or even complain right here: feedback@steevenorrelse.comCheck out Steeven's blog at steevenrorr.comJust Another Fanboy is a proud member of the Comics Podcast Network. Find it and more great comic book podcasts at comicspodcasts.com

Episode Notes This is the episode in which I talk about Killadelphia #1 by Rodney Barnes, Jason Shawn Alexander, Luis NCT, Marshall Dillon, and Greg Tumbarello.“SINS OF THE FATHER,” Part One Featuring the show-stopping talents of SPAWN series artist JASON SHAWN ALEXANDER and the writer behind such hit shows as Wutang: An American Saga, Marvel’s Runaways, and Starz’s American Gods—RODNEY BARNES. When a small-town beat cop comes home to bury his murdered father—the revered Philadelphia detective James Sangster Sr.—he begins to unravel a mystery that leads him down a path of horrors that will shake his beliefs to their core. The city that was once the symbol of liberty and freedom has fallen prey to corruption, poverty, unemployment, brutality… and vampires. Welcome to KILLADELPHIA.Published by Image Comics on November 27, 2019.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .More stuff:The theme song used in each episode is Night Drive by The Oldfield Victory. Find them and their music at theoldfieldvictory.bandcamp.comWant to help support the show? You can do that in a number of ways:First, just spread the word. Tell a friend, tell two friends, tell your father, mother, sister, brother, neighbor, coworker, plumber, and even the guy or girl who cuts your hair.Beyond that you can support Steeven and the show for as little as a dollar a month on Patreon: www.patreon.com/steevenrorrOr, if the idea of a monthly payment doesn't appeal to you and you just want to throw the show a one time payment, visit ko-fi.com/steevenrorr and buy Steeven and the show a coffee for as little as $3, but as high as you want to go.Ask me questions, tell me stories, lie to me, speak your truth, make suggestions, or even complain right here: feedback@steevenorrelse.comCheck out Steeven's blog at steevenrorr.comJust Another Fanboy is a proud member of the Comics Podcast Network. Find it and more great comic book podcasts at comicspodcasts.com

Happy Holidays! Lets talk about Crime comics and Listener questions.  We chat up Killadelphia from Rodney Barnes, Jason Shawn Alexander, Luis NCT, and Marshall Dillon.  NCBD Picks: Kill Whitey Donovan, TMNT/POWER RANGERS, Butcher of Paris

Martin and Travis return with a brand new episode to discuss the latest release from Aftershock's latest dystopian title with Orphan Age #2 by Ted Anderson, Nuno Plati, Joao Lemos and Marshall Dillon. But first, we have a new book announcement as Juan Doe dives into his first book on writing duties (as well as art) with Bad Reception coming August 21. Thanks for listening!You can support this show by visiting our merch store, or by leaving us an Apple Podcasts review.

WCA 2019: IN CONVERSATION WITH JIM ZUB & MAX DUNBAR (RECORDED AT WONDERCON ANAHEIM, MARCH 2019) Comic-Con International‘s sibling convention, WonderCon (29th-31st March 2019, Anaheim Convention Center), has over the years grown and developed into a truly epic event in the North America comic convention calendar, selling out over its entire weekend and bringing thousands of talented creators, publishers, artists, writers, cosplayers, actors and actresses and much more to Anaheim in California. WonderCon has developed and evolved from what was primarily a passive ‘experience’ delivering show into one which companies and creators can now bring new projects and share updates on brand new content – we have been lucky to have a couple of correspondents visiting the show as Press, catching up with a number of these fresh stories. One such correspondent is Samantha Maybe who had the chance to talk to comics superstars Jim Zub and Max Dunbar who have come together to produce a new title for digital distribution giant comiXology, STONE STAR, a brand new, original space-fantasy epic which took their cue from pop music artists like Justin Timberlake and Beyonce* to surprise release the book without the usual hype and palaver, allowing fans to discover the title all at the same time, no spoilers required. (*FYI: in this analogy, Max is Timberlake and Jim is Beyonce. Jim pretty much admits as much and, frankly, he has the legs for it.) As Sam talked to the pair about their motivations and inspiration for releasing the book in this manner, how the story of STONE STAR came about, their collaborative creative process in creating story and characters, and what Jim and Max feel their colourist (Espen Grundetjern) and letterer (Marshall Dillon), bring to the table... Thanks to Jim and Max for taking time out of their very busy con to talk, and also to Samantha Maybe for bringing the interview to us. INTRO MUSIC: ‘PUNKY’, BENSOUND.COM IMAGE: SYFY.COM

This episode was recorded on August 25th, 2018! This week, Mike, Kara, and Nick tackle the Goodreads Book of the Month (as voted on by you wonderful Goodreaders out there!): Animosity Volume 1 by Marguerite Bennett, Rafael de LaTorre, Rob Schwager, Juan Doe, and Marshall Dillon. PLUS: Zine #2 is OUT! Read the digital copy now! Or buy a physical copy of the zine in our store! store.ircbpodcast.com Timestamps 00:00:00 – Start/Last Week in Comics 00:23:33 – Comic Picks 00:37:46 – Goodreads Book of the Month – Animosity Vol. 1 01:13:55 – Wrap/Credits Comic Reads/Picks for this week Last of the Dragons TMNT Micro-Series Volume 1 The Quantum Age #1 X-Men: Grand Design – Second Genesis #2 Beyonders #1 Harbinger Wars II #4 Relevant Links/Information Mike – @mikerapin Kara – @KaraSzam Nick – @dethstarplnz IRCB Patreon – http://ircbpodcast.com/patreon Goodreads Thread for BotM discussion

What You'll Hear: Dennis came to Christ at age 11 in a church with 4 people and one light bulb, , the first time he ever talked back to an adult Larry Ward who led Dennis to Christ later ran World Hunger Started playing trumpet, and then started playing guitar after watching the Dillards on the Andy Griffith show Dennis met Billy Graham when Dennis was 17 years old while he was volunteering with Campus Crusade for Christ evangelizing at Berkeley, witnessing to the Vice President of the Hell's Angels In 1974 Cliff Barrows from the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association heard Dennis play at a concert and invited Dennis to play at their Crusade in Lubbock, TX.  Dennis met Franklin Graham there and they've been friends ever since Dennis has done 45 episodes with Billy Graham and over 300 with Franklin. Dennis and Franklin are best friends and they talk several times a day. Will Graham is executive V.P.  of the BGEA, he's just 40 years old and like a son to Dennis Dennis shares some of his fondest memories of playing at the crusades, one of them was when Billy Graham asked Dennis to go to the bars in Boise, Idaho to invite everyone to the crusade Dennis has been to 112 countries, half of all the countries in the world He averages around 110 concerts every year It's important that all men have great work ethics and good integrity When dealing with difficult people at work, a kind word will turn away wrath, but we should be straight up and deal with them directly.  Be a man and stand up like a man.  If they have freedom to be cussing then you have freedom to stand up to them.  Rebuke them sharply and be respected more than liked.  You can be the thorn in their side with God's truth. Have a kind word, but a strong word.  That's what Jesus did.  No man, especially a Christian, should ever be walked on.  Stand strong and support the Lord.  You've got be able to be the Marshall Dillon.  It's a time of confrontation, not negotiation. You should do your job at work, that's what you do.  God's love with show in you. The best way to share the Gospel at work is to first develop a friendship, and speak in a way they are likely to receive, like Paul did at Mars Hill.  Don't get right into theology.  Just talk to them.  Give them milk. People are made to respond to the truth.  We are created to follow God.  It's up to us to tell them how to do that. It's not what a man says, but what he is.  They need to be strong, and diligent, and have wisdom. Favorite verse is Colossians 3:16 When commuting listen to songs that have good Theology.  Jeremy Camp, David Crowder, Dennis Agajanian, some of the old hymns, Fanny Crosby, Michael W. Smith. Final thought: Become a student of the Bible.  Memorize certain verses.  It's important that God know us and we know Him. Check out DennisAgajanian.com and in a month or so GuitarwithDennis.com for accelerated lessons they can take   Podcast Intro: First, YouTube WWA 5 min, 2 episodes out Second, sponsor.. dboutonsmith.weebly.com Third, Prayer line (641) 715-3900 ext 524645#   Dennis Intro: In Nashville, TN for the Inspirational Country Music Association, Dennis Agajanian has won musician of the year seven times.  He has also won Entertainer of the Year three times.  Dennis was awarded the 2008 Living Legend of the Year by his peers.   Dennis takes his brand of phenomenally fast, flat picking, guitar, straight from the heart his classical, bluegrass, country rock, jazz style to thousands each year.   Currently performing up to 120 concerts a year, he has recently returned from five continents around the world visiting 93 countries.   He performs at all of the Billy & Franklin Grahams festivals.  He has also performed at all of the Harvest Crusades with Greg Laurie.   Dennis has an associate of arts degree from College of the Canyons in Los Angeles, CA, and he holds a Bachelor of Science Degree from Cal Poly University in Pomona, CA.   Dennis' interest is leading people to accept Jesus Christ into their lives for the first time, knowing that when these new souls die they will be with God in heaven.   Q&A:   When and how did you become a Christian? You've won many awards for your music and guitar ability, what first got you interested in playing guitar and how did you get so good at it? I understand you've played at both the Billy Graham Crusades and Greg Laurie's Harvest Crusades.  How did you first come to play for these important events and how many of them have you played at? I understand you're close friends with the Grahams.  What are Billy and Franklin like in person? How many countries have you been to and how many concerts would you guess you've played at? Do you enjoy traveling or it just a necessary part of what you do? What's the most memorable event you've ever played at and why? What is the greatest misunderstanding men have about their work? Tell us about a difficult person you've worked with and how you dealt with them How important is excellence at work? How important is integrity at work? Share a tip for sharing the Gospel at work Can you share a joke our men can share at their work? What's your favorite scripture, or life verse. Can you recommend 1 or 2 things for our men to listen to on their commute to work? Any final thoughts? How can our listeners get in touch with you or learn more about you?

Gunsmoke was a long-running radio series and also a TV series that ran for two decades. Each series had its own cast and frankly, I like the radio cast much better. In this episode (the 344th of almost 500), Marshall Dillon gets on the wrong side of some shoot-first-think-later types and they decide the best way to get to him is through his "deputy" and friend, Chester.

It is time for the latest episode! This time around Stratosphear and I discuss that gem from 1954, THEM! Giant ants, Marshall Dillon, illegal aliens and Leonard Nimoy (briefly) We had a bit of a problem not laughing during the recording session but as I was editing I decided to just let the break ups in the show so enjoy! Next up we are doing our first annual Larry (get it?) Awards in honor of our one year anniversary of doing the show! after that? Matango: Attack of the Mushroom People! comments? secretlairpodcast@gmail.com

Gunsmoke. July 13, 1949. CBS net. "Mark Dillon Goes To Gouge Eye". Sponsored by: Audition. With Howard Culver as, "Marshal Mark Dillon." A crooked roulette wheel in the town of Gouge Eye means trouble and a bullet for Marshall Dillon. The second audition recorded of this program. The first was recorded June 11, 1949 (see cat. #61439), this audition is possibly dated July 15, 1949. Neither audition was ever broadcast. Howard Culver, June Foray, Vic Perrin, Morton Fine (writer), David Friedkin (writer), Gerald Mohr, Jack Kruschen, D. J. Thompson, Jay Novello, Del Castillio (composer, conductor), Richard Sanville (director), Alan Botzer (announcer). 10 DVD Old Time Radio Collection $43.49 Free Shipping 1000s of Hours of Listening, Greatest Radio Shows of Altime!   iPhone and iPad  Apps Now Available X Minus One iPhone/iPad App   Big Band Serenade iPhone/iPad App Box Cars 711 Old Time Radio Pod iPhone/iPad App Sherlock Holmes Adventures iPhone/iPad App Tales of Horror iPhone/iPad App Android Apps Now Available http://oldtimeradiodvd.com  Huge Discounted  Sale  10 DVD Set free shipping $43.49 http://audiblepodcast.com/rnn    Free Audio Book,Check it out!  1 Free Book

Gunsmoke. July 13, 1949. CBS net. "Mark Dillon Goes To Gouge Eye". Sponsored by: Audition. With Howard Culver as, "Marshal Mark Dillon." A crooked roulette wheel in the town of Gouge Eye means trouble and a bullet for Marshall Dillon. The second audition recorded of this program. The first was recorded June 11, 1949 (see cat. #61439), this audition is possibly dated July 15, 1949. Neither audition was ever broadcast. Howard Culver, June Foray, Vic Perrin, Morton Fine (writer), David Friedkin (writer), Gerald Mohr, Jack Kruschen, D. J. Thompson, Jay Novello, Del Castillio (composer, conductor), Richard Sanville (director), Alan Botzer (announcer). 10 DVD Old Time Radio Collection $43.49 Free Shipping 1000s of Hours of Listening, Greatest Radio Shows of Altime!   iPhone and iPad  Apps Now Available X Minus One iPhone/iPad App   Big Band Serenade iPhone/iPad App Box Cars 711 Old Time Radio Pod iPhone/iPad App Sherlock Holmes Adventures iPhone/iPad App Tales of Horror iPhone/iPad App Android Apps Now Available http://oldtimeradiodvd.com  Huge Discounted  Sale  10 DVD Set free shipping $43.49 http://audiblepodcast.com/rnn    Free Audio Book,Check it out!  1 Free Book

A stranger comes in to town and he’s acting a little jittery. Marshall Dillon thinks something’s up. Listen and find out the rest of the thrilling story (and the Chesterfield cigarette commercials they don’t let us play anymore.) (I love … Continue reading →

clickhere Visit the Radio America Store web site.Buy your 50 mp3 for &5.00

clickhere Visit the Radio America Store web site.Buy your 50 mp3 for &5.00 creative commons license click here visit creative commons license William Conrad (1920-1994), who was the original Marshall Dillon and one of radio's most prolific actors (he claimed he performed in 7500 radio programs) became a television producer and director. According to a "TV Episode List" published on Gunsmoke: The Great American Western, he directed two television episodes of Gunsmoke: "Panacea Sikes" (April 13, 1963) and "Captain Sligo" (January 4, 1971) , and narrated a third-- "Women for Sale" (September 10 & 17, 1973).

# Gunsmoke was on radio for 9 seasons, from 1952 to 19612. Six of those seasons coincided with the television series. # There were 413 radio stories, broadcast 480 times. # From an e-mail from Mrs. Howard Culver (Howie, the Dodge House clerk from the TV series) Yes, Howard was one of several who did auditions for the radio Gunsmoke, and he was chosen from the recordings with unnamed applicants to play Marshall Dillon. He cut a record (Matt Dillon was known as Mark Dillon in it), but since Howard was playing the lead in "Straight Arrow" on Mutual Network, his contract with Mutual would not let him play the lead in the Gunsmoke show. Thence it was given to William Conrad.