I
n his new book Talkin’ Greenwich Village: The Heady Rise and Slow Fall of America’s Bohemian Music Capital, Rolling Stone senior writer David Browne details the rich and often complex history of New York City’s creative hotbed. Even as it coped with hassles from the city, the neighborhood, landlords, and the FBI, the Village was a longtime haven for musical iconoclasts and visionaries, from Billie Holiday and the Weavers, up through pioneers like Dave Van Ronk and Ornette Coleman, folk-rock legends like the Lovin’ Spoonful, later troubadours like Suzanne Vega — and, of course, Bob Dylan.
This exclusive excerpt from Talkin’ Greenwich Village reveals the impact that Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” had on the Village’s folk scene, only a year and a half after he had arrived in New York. It also explores the forgotten role that a local folk group, the New World Singers — and their Black vocalist, Delores Dixon — had in spreading the word about the song before the hugely popular Peter, Paul and Mary took it to the masses.
Talkin’ Greenwich Village, published by Hachette Books, will be released Sept. 17 and is available for preorder now.
No sooner had Bob Dylan released his first album than he was moving on, and with a grander statement all his own. In mid-spring of 1962, he emerged with “Blowin’ in the Wind,” a series of questions about social change that was less a rallying cry and more a thoughtful contemplation. As legend had it, Dylan’s idea for the song grew out of conversations with friends, and after he had written most of it, he played the song for Gil Turner, an activist and full-throated singer who also worked as an emcee at Gerde’s Folk City, the Village’s most prominent folk club. Starting there one April 1962 night, Dylan began singing it to all around, impressing the likes of Dave Van Ronk, who had been pushing him to drop his homages to Dust Bowl and folk heroes and find his own style. “I did tell him to forget the [Woody] Guthrie Thirties idolization and get on with the business of the sixties,” Van Ronk told Dylan biographer Anthony Scaduto. “I mean, Guthrie’s dying and his generation is dead.” When he heard “Blowin’ in the Wind,” Van Ronk told Scaduto, he approved.
Editor’s picks
In his own role as a folksinger, Turner started performing “Blowin’ in the Wind” at Gerde’s Folk City as a member of an interracial folk band, the New World Singers — one of whose members was already conversant with the song. Dylan would later refer to Delores C. Dixon, the group’s Black singer, as a former journalist and dancer from Alabama, not all of which was accurate. Dixon was born in Savannah, Georgia, around the same time Dylan was; after her parents broke up, her mother went north to find work, and young Delores, or “Dee,” lived with a grandmother until she joined her mother in New York. At age twelve she was playing classical piano and organ at a Baptist church in Harlem, and she eventually enrolled in the Performing Arts School in the city. At the Upper West Side home of a friend, Bob Cohen, she met Turner, who proposed they form a group and also named it. “We sat one day thinking of all the names, and Gil came up with that,” Dixon said. “We were going to be in a new world, and things were going to change.” Happy Traum, who joined later, also thought it may have derived from a folk song with the phrase “a new world coming” in its lyric.
At Gerde’s Folk City and a few other venues, the New World Singers had a repertoire that came to include “If I Had a Hammer” and Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” along with reworked versions of “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” (remade into a civil rights anthem that the group called “We Got the Power in Our Hands”) and “Down by the Riverside” (now “Down on the Freedom Line” with revised lyrics like “I ain’t gonna segregate no more”). Dylan had heard them at Gerde’s — Traum would remember him joining them now and then for a few songs — and witnessed one of the high points of their set: “No More Auction Block,” an antislavery song Dixon would sing a cappella. Given that she was one of the very few Black performers on the scene, Dixon’s performance of it was musically and visually dramatic.
Related
In his memoir, Dylan would refer to Dixon as “my sort of part-time girlfriend,” and he described at length a party they attended in the Village, Dixon in a fur coat. “We didn’t call it a date,” Dixon said. “We hung out together. We went to parties. We’d go walking.” She did not recall that particular party, “but it probably happened,” she said. She would remember that they were both eating at her mother’s house when Dylan pulled out a notebook of lyrics and out came some of “Blowin’ in the Wind,” set to a melody that brought to mind the traditional “No More Auction Block.” As Dixon recalled, “I said, ‘Really? Look at that.’” When Turner brought the song to the group, she remembered it, and in performance she took the contralto voice while the men sang gentle harmonies.
Dylan recorded “Blowin’ in the Wind” in the summer of 1962, and the New World Singers were next in line. By early 1963, Traum had joined the group, lending his guitar and harmony skills to what was now a quartet. With Dylan standing right in front of them and holding the lyrics, they recorded a version of “Blowin’ in the Wind” for Broadside Ballads, Vol 1, a companion to the newly launched political-songs periodical Broadside, founded by Agnes “Sis” Cunningham and her husband, Gordon Friesen. With its plucky banjo and showcase for Dixon in the chorus, the New World Singers’ rendition of “Blowin’ in the Wind” felt very much in the Weavers tradition.
Still, the group didn’t experience anything close to the Weavers’ trajectory. Broadside Ballads, on a subsidiary of Moses Asch’s Folkways, was issued with little fanfare, and the group’s gigs — including one at the Bitter End in the fall of 1962 that was recorded for a live album but never released — were few and far between. Since they had to split their paltry earnings, Dixon decided that the numbers didn’t add up for her. “I had to pay rent and food,” she said. “The guys could always go to a girl and eat their food and spend the night or whatever. But I had to have my own money.” She settled for a job at the board of education, although she continued singing from time to time. Neither she nor any of her former bandmates in the New World Singers knew that “Blowin’ in the Wind” was about to get a sizable second gust of its own.
ALBERT GROSSMAN, DYLAN’S NEW MANAGER, immediately renegotiated Dylan’s one-album deal with Columbia and pushed for his other clients to record Dylan’s songs. Ian & Sylvia’s first album for Vanguard relied heavily on traditional songs like “Rambler Rambler” and “Mary Anne” (the latter in a definitive version, their voices poignantly intertwined). But Dylan’s “Tomorrow Is a Long Time” found a place on their second album, Four Strong Winds, and Peter, Paul and Mary included three of his songs, “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and the rowdier “Quit Your Low Down Ways,” on their third album, In the Wind.
Although Dylan’s version of “Blowin’ in the Wind” was already in stores, it would be Peter, Paul and Mary’s harmonies — which both caressed the melody and lent it a pained, long-suffering quality — that took the song to another cultural level. “How do you translate a Dylan tune that doesn’t have much of a melody?” Travers said. “You make a very moving first harmony part. You construct the harmony part that becomes, then, the melody. Then the melody becomes sort of a solid base. And then you construct the second harmony off of the first harmony. So that all of a sudden, you’ve got movement. You have a part on top, and a part on the bottom, and the melody serving at the bottom.”
Rolled out in June 1963, the trio’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” became the fastest-moving single in Warner Brothers’ brief history, selling 320,000 copies in eight days, or so the label claimed. Radio stations in Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Washington, D.C., began playing it hourly. At the Newport Folk Festival, a month after the record’s release, Dylan — inserted into the bill at Grossman’s urging — led a group sing- along of “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Behind him, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, the Freedom Singers, and Peter, Paul and Mary formed an all-star, all-approving chorus. Not everyone on that stage knew every word to every verse, but the way the title phrase was turned into a wistful chorus made it easy enough to join in. By the end of the year, thanks to that song, Peter, Paul and Mary had three albums in the Top 10 of Cashbox, another of the music business’s leading trade papers.
A week before John Kennedy’s assassination, an Associated Press reporter, in search of the folk-music escalation in New York, ventured into Washington Square Park. There, during the Sunday-afternoon hootenannies, he watched a “pale girl uniformed in jeans, bulky sweater and long blonde hair.” Her song of choice was a plaintive version of “Blowin’ in the Wind,” which, after only a few months on the radio, had joined the repertoire for songs any upcoming folk singer needed to learn.
Meanwhile, the New World Singers could only watch from afar as a song they’d first covered became a milestone for another group with a more aggressive manager and a more prominent record company behind it. “We didn’t stand a shot,” said Happy Traum. “Our version was on Folkways. Peter, Paul and Mary were on Warner Brothers. We didn’t have that kind of clout. Their version was better and more commercial.” Added Dixon, who had left the band by then, “I was a little jealous of Peter, Paul and Mary. But I had to move on.”
Trending
Without Dixon, the New World Singers were signed to Atlantic Records that year, and their one and only album for the label included a rendition of “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” — but not “Blowin’ in the Wind.” During their audition for the label, Atlantic head Ahmet Ertegun, sitting in front of them in a chair, listened intently as they sang “Blowin’ in the Wind.” According to Traum, he said, “I like that song. But could you change the words and make it a love song?” Knowing Dylan as they did, the group didn’t bother to ask him for a rewrite.
Excerpted from TALKIN’ GREENWICH VILLAGE: The Heady Rise and Slow Fall of America’s Bohemian Music Capital ©2024 David Browne and reprinted by permission from Grand Central Publishing/ Hachette Books /Hachette Book Group.
