Purists booed ‘Electric’ Bob Dylan, but Mike Gold loved him in People’s World

Folk singer and songwriter Bob Dylan, 22, performs on Nov. 8, 1963.

I am not a music expert, but I’m kind of an expert on Mike Gold, so I got a kick out of the new Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown. The film opens in 1961 with a (fictional) historical hand-off involving Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and Dylan in Guthrie’s room at Greystone Park Hospital. The torch of American folk music, having already passed from Woody to Pete, is symbolically transferred to Dylan. With Seeger’s encouragement, a young Bob just arrived from Minnesota, gets out his guitar, and takes over Pete’s job by singing for the ailing Guthrie.

Though I don’t think the film portrays Seeger fairly, I liked how the script used Woody as a touchstone to the origin of “people’s songs,” and I was reminded of another instance of serenading a folk music pioneer. In 1967, in a hospital near San Francisco, Pete Seeger sang at the bedside of Mike Gold, whom Seeger often called his “hero.” Gold, then 74 and nearing death, had once been the most famous communist writer in America. He certainly mattered as a Depression-era influencer. And for the generation of Pete and Woody, Gold helped shape and define what folk music should be.

Ten minutes in, I thought, “Maybe this movie will mention Gold!” Though that didn’t happen, I noticed something in the next scene, where Seeger brings home the lonely Dylan to stay at his rustic place near Beacon, N.Y. At this moment, I broke theater protocol and whispered to my wife, “Mike Gold helped build that cabin.” Yes, Mike and his sons Nick and Carl once mixed batches of mortar and slept on Seeger’s back porch. (In the film, Dylan crashes on the couch).

If helping to build Seeger’s house isn’t enough to get you a mention in the Dylan movie, Gold’s role in building the space for the careers of both Guthrie and Seeger should be. So, I’m going to insert him into the conversation.

The Seeger-Gold connection began as early as September 1933, when Pete, 14, returned to his boarding school in Connecticut with a subscription to New Masses and quickly became a devotee of Gold, its firebrand editor.

At about this time, music began to be seen as a necessary element of the communist program, but initial production of leftist songs was sporadic because there was no set theory about the form such music should take. Though Gold had no formal musical training, he had been a big fan of Joe Hill’s labor ballads and was forever on the lookout for a “Shakespeare in overalls” who could make world socialism a singing movement—and he knew good working-class music when he heard it.

In his regular Daily Worker column, Change the World!, he endorsed songs that were both “realistic in form and agitprop in character” for the purpose of awakening class consciousness in the masses.

No one was more passionate than Gold in opposing the highbrow proletarian music of, for example, Hanns Eisler and Charles Seeger (Pete’s father, a Ph.D. musicologist). Rather, he advanced the notion that Appalachian folk ballads and Black spirituals were the authentic songs of the people. Many, including music historian Richard Reuss, believe that Gold’s passionate 1936 endorsement of the Auvilles, a Southern folk-singing couple, “marks the single most identifiable watershed in the American left’s acceptance of songs and lyrics composed in the folk idiom.” In Reuss’s view, 20th-century folk music bears to a significant degree Mike Gold’s philosophical imprint.

Evidence for this claim? In 2006, Seeger sat for a radio interview, during which the 87-year-old folk singer described the origins of American “people’s music.” Seeger referred to the four co-founders of the Almanac Singers—Lee Hays, Millard Lampell, Woody Guthrie, and himself—and then called attention to a cultural figure who had worked enthusiastically with the group to boost their art:

“In 1940, we sang at peace meetings and strike meetings, and we made two records. We were famous in the Daily Worker crowd. Mike Gold just thought we were the greatest thing. You see Mike Gold was outraged by the Composers Collective. He said, ‘These musicians don’t know how to write music for working people.’ And along come the Almanacs six or seven years later. And he said, ‘This is what we need!’ And he wrote about us in his column in the Daily Worker. So, in the Daily Worker we were famous. Unknown elsewhere.”

In 1939-40, Gold welcomed Woody Guthrie to New York and championed the Okie singer to the extent of becoming his unofficial promoter and the chief interpreter of his message for East Coast liberals. Introducing Guthrie in his column, Gold wrote that “Woody comes right out of the book by John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath… Steinbeck’s Okie is not only an Okie. He is a symbol of working-class America. Welcome to the Daily Worker, Comrade Woody.” Gold wrote multiple columns about Guthrie, claiming that “a people’s theatre in America could be built around someone like Woody.”

By 1943, war-related events would temporarily halt Guthrie’s career just as his audience was growing. In the mobilization period that followed Pearl Harbor, he accepted duties in the Merchant Marine. A few days before Guthrie shipped out, he realized he owed something to the columnist who had ignited his fame and helped him understand the anti-fascist purpose his music could serve. He wrote a letter to the Daily Worker stating that he would not be afraid of U-boats as long as there was “a whole world full of people like Mike Gold to keep things going.”

Gold and his family would long maintain ties with Seeger and his wife Toshi. By the late 1940s, Pete was an honorary uncle for Gold’s two sons. When little Carl showed an interest in music, his father told him to pick an instrument. The boy said, “I want to learn guitar and banjo because I love Pete Seeger.” Carl did well; he played a few sets with Bob Dylan in a Greenwich Village coffee house in 1961.

So, what did Mike Gold think of Dylan? Three months after the fateful Newport Festival of ’65, Gold, 72 years old but still immersed in music and still churning out columns, weighed in on the young poet’s innovations. In the San Francisco-based People’s World, the aging communist penned a tribute that referred approvingly to rock and roll—and to “Maggie’s Farm,” the first song played by the Electric Dylan who had infuriated the purists at Newport.

It’s interesting that when he wrote “Bob Dylan—Voice of America’s Youth,” copied below, Gold was living amid the Hippie-Beatnik atmosphere of Haight-Ashbury, on the second floor of 448 Waller Street. A series of Dylan concerts in San Francisco starting three weeks later had just been announced. While Dylan was in the Bay Area in December, he famously hung out with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg at the City Lights Bookstore, three miles away. The building where Dylan gave a packed press conference was even closer. And Dylan’s hotel was all of 3.4 miles away.

Who knows? Maybe Bobbie stopped by Waller Street to thank Mike for the article—or to sing for him and crash on the couch.

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“Bob Dylan—Voice of America’s Youth”

By Mike Gold

People’s World – Nov. 13, 1965

Ralph Gleason, jazz critic of the San Francisco Chronicle and perceptive writer in his field, says the following about Bob Dylan: “The most popular single performer in this country, perhaps in the world today, is Bob Dylan, the poet and singer whose songs are dominating the popular music hit parade, who can draw 15,000 people in the Forest Hills arena and the Hollywood Bowl all by himself, and whose albums are among the best-selling discs in the music business…

Dylan’s music is a powerful voice raised in the worldwide moral disaster area. His lyrics are poetry pure and simple, and represent for the first time in our society a merger of poetry and popular music which can have a deep and lasting effect on our entire society.

No, jazz cannot do that much. It cannot quite change the battlefields of the social conflict, any more than a song like “John Brown,” however marvelous, popular, and significant, could have won the Civil War. Yet popular music is a great force. It is significant that just now, a renaissance of folk music and an elevation of its tone has taken place in America.

Dylan justifies the praise of Mr. Gleason, however, in that his songs, poetry, and themes are having a great effect on American youth. He is their intellectual leader, their artistic guide, with whom they can share every emotion, every modern image, every bewilderment, and the feeling of reversal for all grown-up, so-called mature logic.

Dylan is a small young man who looks sometimes like Charlie Chaplin walking with a broken heart into the sunset. He is even more fragile during his saddest moments. He has let his hair grow so that he is no longer an actor who stops acting when he is off stage. His hair identifies him with that curious world of beatnikism and surrealism that squares, or ordinary people of America, have not yet caught up with.

Statisticians have been telling us that in ten years the majority of the population of the USA will be under the age of twenty-five. In other words, in a decade, the youth will be actually forming the thinking of this country. Now the juvenility of popular music has been, up to the advent of the Bob Dylan epoch, a pretty terrible thing: maudlin, illiterate, infantile in its emotional self-pity, weepy like a spoiled child or an abandoned orphan.

Dylan walked into this world and gave it a new character. It is a character full of violent contradictions which, I think, will sooner or later turn upon itself and demand some new synthesis. But whatever the future holds, Dylan has already done something as popular with youth as the Beatles, but a lot more profound.

Most of Dylan’s themes are concerned with the poor people of the gutters of our monstrous cities; with the injured and despised of our cold society everywhere. Several years before President Johnson directed an alleged war on poverty, Dylan was portraying the victims of the great American social desert.

There is one of his songs called, “I Don’t Want To Work On Maggie’s Farm No More,” that has clung to my memory. In a dazed, almost incoherent whine of protest of a lost soul, Dylan’s little farm hand tells of the cruelties and insults he suffers from the family of rich farmers for whom he is the wage slave. The refrain goes: “I don’t want to work for Maggie’s father because he has done such and such a thing. I don’t want to work for Maggie’s mother, sister, brother…” and it goes on and on. Somehow, hearing it, you don’t know whether to laugh or cry. And that’s the effect, no doubt, Dylan wanted to give you.

Dylan’s songs are on the model of the French Surrealists that are still fashionable in the posh and plush cafes of Paris. Their work may have struck Dylan for their weird mixtures, for the America he knows is also jumbled up in a crazy pattern of contradictions. But whatever the source of his inspiration, the fantastic attempt to clutch at the essence of this upside-down society and to put it in songs, really succeeds in Dylan’s own American surrealist expression. Dylan’s songs are not all melancholy strains. Positive assertions that life is going to be good someday, despite everything, despite the destruction which now hangs over all of us, emerge throughout the young poet’s work.

In addition, there is also the rock and roll music that Dylan writes. He is actually a fine composer in this expression of youthful America. It takes an old square like myself time to catch up with rock and roll. But I think that I have made it. All you have to do is try to be as natural as Bob Dylan, let your hair grow long, sing when you feel like singing, sleep when you have to sleep, love, protest, and be a natural man in an unnatural time. I have become a partisan, in my late years, of rock and roll, for the reason that it is also a positive music with a strong life beat in its veins. It is a great music to get up to in the morning and do a little exercise when all your bones are creaky.

You don’t get old gracefully unless you do keep up with the youth. And I assure you that anybody over fifty who will invest in an album or two of Bob Dylan’s music and verses will find again that there is hope and humor in this nuclear surrealistic world of the squares and the exploiters.

Dylan’s stupendous popularity should teach us all a lesson in communication. The moral of his technique is perhaps his breadth and continental generosity. It reminds one of Walt Whitman. Yet, he is himself and brand new, and no critic has been able really to define the essence of his art. Keep going, friend.

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CONTRIBUTOR

Patrick Chura

Dr. Patrick Chura teaches courses in nineteenth and twentieth-century American literature and culture studies at the University of Akron. He is the author of three books and has published articles on a variety of literary-historical topics. His book, Michael Gold: The People’s Writer, won the 2022 Literary Encyclopedia Book Prize and the Paul Cowan Award for Non-Fiction.