Bob Dylan on......American Civil War Ghosts

[Sequoia]

BF: When you think back to the Civil War, one thing you forget is that no battles, except Gettysburg, were fought in the North.

BD: Yeah. That’s what probably makes the Southern part of the country so different.

BF: There is a certain sensibility, but I’m not sure how that connects?

BD: It must be the Southern air. It’s filled with rambling ghosts and disturbed spirits. They’re all screaming and forlorning. It’s like they are caught in some weird web - some purgatory between heaven and hell and they can’t rest. They can’t live, and they can’t die. It’s like they were cut off in their prime, wanting to tell somebody something. It’s all over the place. There are war fields everywhere ? a lot of times even in people’s backyards.

BF: Have you felt them?

BD: Oh sure. You’d be surprised. I was in Elvis’s hometown – Tupelo. And I was trying to feel what Elvis would have felt back when he was growing up.

BF: Did you feel all the music Elvis must have heard?

BD:No, but I’ll tell you what I did feel. I felt the ghosts from the bloody battle that Sherman fought against Forrest and drove him out. There’s an eeriness to the town. A sadness that lingers. Elvis must have felt it too.

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/04/07-3

A lady I used to work with went with her boyfried to Clemson, SC and came back and told me it felt weird to be there and why? I said, it was all the Civil War ghosts wandering around. She had this lofty nose in the air attitude about the south so I said it was mostly the dead Yankees trying to get back to New Jersey.

[MedleyMisty]

1. That's why all the good writers come from here

:)

[sasquatch]

10. Yeah right

:P
All of your writers just aspire to be half as good as ours.

[Condem]

2. Fascinating, Sequoia

Great post. A ton of ghosts at Gettysburg, though. You feel them there.

[happyiowan]

3. He mentioned in Chronicles that he read extensively about the Civil War.

This comes as no surprise. It's an endlessly fascinating subject.

[Condem]

4. Yes, he did, happy.

But to know the particulars of Sherman's infantry against Forrest's cavalry, shows an expertise not common to musicians. Or anyone, for that matter. Unique.

[happyiowan]

7. How about Robbie Robertson, condem?

The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down. Stoneman's Cavalry came. Who can drop George Stoneman's name. A sense of history there.

[Condem]

11. I'm trying to figure out who Robbie cut his teeth with.

Oh yeah, Bob Dylan! I can see Bob and The Band, after a session at the Big Pink, sitting around the kitchen table with a bottle of Rebel Yell. Discussing the Civil War. I know, I've killed many a bottle doing it.

[RoyGBiv]

13. Speaking of ...

One thing that has forever irritated me about Joan Baez is how she changes the lyrics to that song.

She didn't just change them once. She changed them repeatedly.

In what I think was her original version, she changed the "there goes Robert E. Lee" to "there goes the Robert E. Lee," changing the meaning of that passage entirely since "the" invoked the name of a riverboat while the phrase without the article refers to the "ghosts" of Civil War memory and a very real post-war phenomenon that Robertson actually researched in the context of writing the song.

But, the most egregious change, imo, involved the reference to Stoneman. In some performances she would sing "until so much cavalry came" but would also change it to "until Stonewall's cavalry came and tore up the tracks again."

Now this is simply absurd and betrays an utter lack of understanding of what that song is about on any level. "In the winter of '65. . ." Stonewall was dead. Stonewall was an infantry general and did not *have* cavalry, and, finally, it makes no bloody sense, especially in the context of the song, for a Confederate general to tear up the Danville train tracks!

Okay, I'm done venting. :)

[Sequoia]

15. That's very interesting.

I've always loved The Band's version of this song. Why did Joan think she should change the lyrics? On an episode of Seinfield is a scene where George says something like, "How do you get to be a Civil War buff? I want to be a Civil War buff? I thought that was pretty funny so my husband went out and got me a little book about the Civil War.

[RoyGBiv]

20. Lyrics ...

I have no idea why she changed them. The fact she changes them repeatedly, somewhat randomly it seems, I suspect she just did it as she was going along.

The only place I've personally heard the "Stonewall" version of the lyric was on the Muppet Show, of all places.

[tigereye]

16. oh, good to know this!

I always wondered about the different versions...

[Condem]

18. "back with my wife in Tennessee, one day she says to me..

Virgil, quick come see, there goes Robert E. Lee". I've studied the Civil War for 40 years and I don't recall Lee ever being in Tennessee in early '65.
Had too much to worry about around the trenches of Richmond.

[RoyGBiv]

19. Yes, that's the point ...

It became something of a legend in the immediate post-war years for people to *think* they saw Lee where they could not possibly have seen him ... a bit like people thought they saw Lincoln after he was dead.

[Condem]

22. Is that right?

Never heard that before. I'll tell you of my run-in with a supposedly haunted place. I've been to Gettysburg at least fifty times in my life. One night, I decided to test the legend of Forney field. Gen. Iverson's North Carolinians were ambushed here on July 1. Union troops were hidden behind a stonewall which, inexplicably, the doomed regiment failed to notice. The Yanks rose and mowed down the Tarheels and the bodies were lain in a neat row a couple of hundred yards long. The drunken Iverson thought his troops had thrown down their arms and surrendered. Legend had it that farmers and migrants refused to work in this field after sundown for years to come. I checked it out one clear summer night. A heavy mist covered the field of clover. Yet, the mist failed to exist at any other part of the battlefield. Spooked the hell out of me.

[skooooo]

5. my husband says the house he lived in in Savannah..

..was haunted. Several people saw the same apparition.

[hibbing]

6. Thanks!

Hi,
Thanks for posting this. I love his way with words.

Blind Willie McTell

See them big plantations burning
Hear the cracking of the whips
Smell that sweet magnolia blooming
(And) see the ghosts of slavery ships
I can hear them tribes a-moaning
(I can) hear the undertaker's bell
(Yeah), nobody can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell

Peace

[sasquatch]

8. ¡Muerte al sur!

:patriot:

[RT Atlanta]

9. Interesting summary

A lot of my family 5 & 6 generations back fought for the South and the stories of the battles and how the families at home survived have been handed were handed down through the generations. I distinctly remember my great grandmother telling me about how her mom and her aunts had to take the food out of their smokehouse and hide it in the woods nearby to keep Sherman's troops from looting the food (this was after Sherman had "marched to the sea" and his troops were coming back inland to burn Columbia, SC).

More personally, every time I go to Kennesaw Mtn Battlefield (Johnny Reb's last big stand before Sherman and Billy Yank took Atlanta), you can feel the tension in the air - it lingers.

The war was very real to the people here in the South.

[tigereye]

17. my mom always tells a story about a woman she met years ago,

complaining in a lovely Southern accent, "The Yankees stabled their horses in the churchyard!"


Or was that a line from a book? ;)

[Name removed]

12. Deleted sub-thread

Sub-thread removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[RoyGBiv]

14. Gods and Generals ...

The only redeeming quality of the movie Gods and Generals was Dylan's contribution to the soundtrack.

[mix]

21. it is like that here in the southwest

where there have been so many wars of conquest

and those Civil War generals who did so much of the killing, they came West to do some more