Truncated Song to Woody-With Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan’s  “Song to Woody” In Mind

By Sam Lowell

If you happen by any state hospital these days, the ones that are still left after some ill-disposed fool decided that these misfits should walk the streets unaided to windup under newspapers on park benches pan-handling dimes for doughnuts, sad, not them though you know a place for the chronically sick not the mentally ill think about an old troubadour named Woody who spent his last wasted days in such a place, a place in Brooklyn when the deal went down but it could have been anywhere, could have been an old sailors’ merchant marine place of rest in some rundown seaport strewn across the globe since he did his duty on those flimsy transport craft (build one a day in round the clock shipyard and sinking one every other day on the icy North Atlantic seas) when it counted in the dark days of World War II when such service not recognized until much later by the government and the citizenry at large saved some bacon, somebody’s anyway. Could have been out in the dustbowl hills rolling out to the Okie plains ironically from whence our brave seaman came of age if you can imagine a dust bowl refugee two thousand miles from the foam-flecked ocean sailing the deep blue-green icy North Atlantic seas, so yes when it counted, counted too for his old compadre Cisco Houston who roamed the seas with our Woody, roamed the Village taverns and bedrooms too from all accounts in the days when a good-looking man of the West would inflame the imaginations of many a loose leaf city folk urban woman who tired of the run of the mill City College boys or got nothing but frustrated hanging under the arches of Washington Square waiting for some Long Island bravo to find his way, to find his dick if you really wanted to know what the problem was. So this man of the West came ambling, is there any better way to describe that funny sideway gait those cowboys gathered around them to show the stuff they were made of, cigarette hanging forlornly but intact from those dried country  lips and took the town by a storm and took the breathe away from those lonely exiles who found solace in the Village, Greenwich Village for those who are not familiar with how important those oases were for the misbegotten, the queer literally and figuratively, the outlaws, the goofs , the holy goofs, and every sort of misfit who needed a way station from Peoria, from Grand Island, from Utica I could go on but you get the picture. Those who could not adjust to the coming wave, the chicken in every pot, the roof over every head, the roof of a car in every garage. Yeah leave behind the safety of the cottages, those forty acres and a mule farms, those dry goods salesmen passing through smiling their slick smiles as they fatten up their order books. 

Some people wanted to hear his truth, had been waiting out in the prairie dust since Sooner days in sod-built hovels, waiting out in the Pittsburgh steel mills and shanty town existences, waiting out in the hobo jungle and wine bottle for a friend to talk to and the smell of odd-ball thrown together stews to satisfy that basic hunger the bottle hunger that unrequited one, waiting out in the desperate dust bowl refugee sweated labor camps, the sleeping under the stars riverbanks a rutted knapsack for a pillow, a few sheets of yesterday’s newspaper for cover against the ill-winds of misfortune living day by day, a beggar’s dread existence, waiting along the lonesome railroad tracks for that midnight freight fearing for the ruthless bulls and the sneaky peter companions, waiting in the bracero wetback border towns some sour wine to savor their existences when the tequila ran dry, waiting in some faraway townhouse trying to sneak out the backdoor to the Village to seek a newer way one that would be frustrated until much later when the “beat boys,” know loveless Jack, faggot Allen, street bandit Gregory, footloose Neal, brilliant busted Bull the drugstore cowboy, held sway and made those acres safe for the disinherited and the dispossessed. Yeah they waited for the herald who would usher in the new age where they could breeze anything but the fatal air of the big lie, the big red scare night, the, what did she call it, the ticky-tacky suburban cottage lady who had the deal down pat, oh yeah, the cookie cutter one size fits all existence.     

So they all waited in their simple skins for someone to tell some little truths like how this land was their land if they were brave enough to take it back, take back, what did Scotty boy call it when the Dutchies turned the corner from the washed up seas, yeah, that green fresh breast of the new world that had been grabbed by the greed-heads of every age from the second awakening hustle to the robber barons to the slick financiers who took their cut of every deal or there was no deal, spoke to those ready to take back the simple sense of innate solidarity that with each generation got dissipated with each new loss of indemnity from the vultures and the night-takers. Grabbed the land, the precious land that could only sustain so much abuse, could only find service in reclamation and tender care. Waited for somebody to notice that the desperately poor, the transient laborer, needed a voice, the voiceless needed a voice in each generation and by the process of selection called Woody’s card, called out for his innate sense of what aided the misbegotten world and what they could count on. Explained, patiently explained that some folks robbed you with a pistol but far worse that some did so with a fountain pen and maybe the rage should have accompanied that sense as well. Some guys speak truth to power without the accolades, without knowing they spoke to some common decencies spoke to power and got knocked over their heads for their efforts and then got off their knees and dust the pads going back for another round.

Some oracle, some later troubadour said it best that Woody spoke to the free-born instinct of those who left the hard-boiled, hard-scrabble East, the enclosed uptight East when you think about the matter closely to head out to the unknown not really knowing what the new land would look like not knowing whether they could hold the damn thing once they got there. These were funny pioneers, the wanderers, the restless ones what did one sociologist call them, yes, the master-less men who bore the backbreaking task of freeing the new land after the  old land was exhausted (and which they had taken part of crumbling apart but that is a story for another day), the gypsy rovers, the con man, the whoremongers too but mostly those who could not hack it in the East or had been run out by the hard boys (just as their forebears had been run out of the countries from whence they came sometimes just before the nooses descended). So they sought to get washed clean again, sought change the way truth was running against them then. Grew tired of Mister and his wanting habits, his grab and his pleasures. Grew fearful that he would be crushed under the weight of another man’s weight. Thought about man’s misdeeds and madness too. A lot for a single man to roll up that hill only to have it tumble down on his head.      

And then the quiet, the silence, as Woody descended into his own family-carrying madness, could no longer put pen to paper to speak his truth (one wonders if he had had a word processer in those days fixed up to his fevered brain what he would have been able to say to a candid world). Still they came to learn of his words the way he put them, the simple chords that drove the words, the three chords that got many a man a hearing, and looks from startled girls in cashmere sweaters and write the words that put to shame the breezeway denizens, the gold coast golf course country club loungers and the drifters out of dreams. Yeah think of that coughing bleeding exile out in Brooklyn where the hospital used to contain his last dreams. Think about Saint Woody of the street of dreams and sharply-etched words.