Let It Grow: A Concept Album Disguised as a Book

Stuart Mitchner

The cover of The Rose & the Briar: Death, Love and Liberty in the American Ballad, edited by Sean Wilentz and Greil Marcus (Norton $26.95), presents the book in the guise of a long-playing record with a red label. In fact, there's an album you can listen to, with the same cover, on the companion CD (Columbia/Legacy $13.98).

Besides being historian-in-residence at Bob Dylan's official website, Sean Wilentz directs the Program in American Studies at Princeton and has written for the New York Review of Books, the New Republic, and the Village Voice. Best known as the author of Mystery Train and Lipstick Traces, Greil Marcus proved himself as an anthologist 35 years ago with Rock and Roll Will Stand, which celebrated the spirit and energy of rock without patronizing it.

There is also plenty of spirit and energy in this freewheeling collection, which is something like a literary version of a concept album. Strictly speaking, you would have to call it a compilation by "various artists," and compilations and concept albums are different organisms. Terminology aside, the book has so much to offer that the editors have added a sub-subtitle: Doomed Lovers, Highway Shooters, A Nation Lost and Found.

While anthologies are meant to be read around in, the opening essay by Dave Marsh should be read first because the book grows out of it, and "grow" is one of the operative words in a collection titled after the image of the rose and briar growing out of the hearts of William and Barbara in the concluding lines of "Barbara Allen" – "the most widespread folk song in the English language," according to Marsh. It's clear from the pre- face, and what the editors say in a Salon interview, that the book grew in all sorts of exciting and unexpected ways when they cast the seed of the subject before a widely varied group of potential contributors, who were told to choose a ballad and "run with it." According to the volume's preface, the writers responded with "dogged historical research, fiction, radical fantasy, memoir, comic strip, cartooning, poetry, and critical freebooting" and, in effect, "sang their hearts out." Like I said, this is a concept album disguised as a book.

What makes the title even more fitting is the nature of the subject. One of the most significant features of ballads before the copyrighted 20th-century ones by Bob Dylan, Randy Newman, and Bruce Springsteen, among others discussed here, is the way the words and stories grow as they pass from singer to singer and generation to generation. In some versions of "Barbara Allen," for example, she has a motive for her cold-heartedness, having once been slighted by the young man dying for love of her. But as the song has passed through different interpreters over the years, some variations have dispensed with the motive. Whatever the changes, the most enduring image is the concluding one, the rose growing out of William's heart, the briar out of Barbara Allen's, growing and growing until they wind together in a true lovers' knot.

Dave Marsh winds the old and new ballads together with a quote from Bob Dylan, who once said that "without 'Barbara Allen' there'd be no 'Girl From the North Country.'" He might have said the same of his later ballad "Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts," which he sings on the CD and which Wendy Lesser discusses here in "Dancing with Dylan." This elaborately plotted song was one she used to play while dancing around the living room with her infant son in her arms. Quite a few of us did the same thing at bedtime during the same time period, wondering, as she does, how deeply the music we played would sink into our child's subconscious. Such an idea has real resonance when you consider how music from any period, heard at any age, sinks not only into the individual's subconscious but into the nation's. In the context of the sub-subtitle's reference to a nation lost and found, it's the music that found the nation and is still finding it, moving us, as Dylan still moves Wendy Lesser, "irrationally – if being moved by a song can ever be said to be rational."

Howard Hampton's approach to "Nebraska," the Springsteen ballad about Charlie Starkweather's killing spree, is reminiscent of something Greil Marcus was writing about in the late sixties when he spoke of responses to rock in terms of a "secret language" and an "effortless metaphorical consciousness" and the "imperfect knowledge that is perfect understanding." Instead of submitting himself to a search for a message, Hampton lifts the song into another realm with a stunning, dead-on medley of related American themes haunting the culture, from Jerry Lee Lewis to Flannery O'Connor to Robert Frank.

Essays like those by Hampton and Rennie Sparks reflect the concept of the book they're embedded in, anthologies within an anthology, and the same could be said of "Destiny in My Right Hand," where David Thomas, founder of the avant rock band Pere Ubu, riffs on "The Wreck of Old '97" and Jan and Dean's "Dead Man's Curve." Among other things, Thomas calls Edison the father of Elvis, cites the Venerable Bede in relation to William Faulkner, and tells us "the automobile is as compelling a philosophical model as Plato's Cave." By the time you get to the page-and-a-half-long sentence he drives home on, you begin to feel your sleeve being tugged by the spectres of word-drunk rock-scholar-gypsy virtuosos Richard Meltzer and Lester Bangs, not to mention Jack Kerouac and his gift to American myth, Dean Moriarity.

In the Salon interview, Sean Wilentz says "we have to become complicit in the ballad. That's one of the things the ballad demands. We have to be part of what is going on. We have to be active listeners." This is what happens in The Rose & the Briar when novelist Joyce Carol Oates and singer/songwriter Anna Domino themselves become narrative characters in their respective ballads (Domino does Oates one better by doing a brilliant rendition of "Little Maggie" on the companion CD); and it happens when poet Paul Muldoon writes a ballad of his own (performed on the CD by the Handsome Family); when R. Crumb draws a comic strip version of "When You Go a Courtin'" and submits his own cranky, reactionary take on the fate of the ballad; when Stanley Crouch and Eric Weisbard focus on the emotional/visceral impact of singers like Mahalia Jackson and Dolly Parton; or when John Rockwell writes about Burl Ives singing "The Foggy, Foggy Dew." Essays so intent on communicating the glory of specific music make a CD version of the anthology an absolute necessity. You will want to hear the performances described, and you won't be disappointed. If, for example, you think of Burl Ives as a fat character actor singing "Jimmy Crack Corn" on albums for kids, you'll find his chillingly beautiful rendition of "The Foggy, Foggy Dew" a revelation.

The Rose & the Briar has more to offer than a mere review can suggest. The section on "Notes, Books & Recordings" is a treat in itself, with each contributor offering biblio/discographies and then some, particularly Anna Domino, Sean Wilentz, Rennie Sparks of the Handsome Family, and Jon Langford of the Mekons. Illustrations precede each chapter, and Langford's contribution is a series of illustrations sprinkled with grafitti-like commentary accompanying his own "See Willy Fly By," which grew out of "The Cuckoo," which grew out of "Jack 'o Diamond," which has roots that go back a thousand years, according to Greil Marcus's notes.

I haven't even mentioned novelist Cecil Brown's fascinating story behind the real-life tale of Frankie (of "Frankie and Johnny," which grew out of "Frankie and Albert"), or Luc Sante's atmospheric picture of the real-life ballad of Buddy Bolden, wherein he cites Jelly Roll Morton, "the Ancient Mariner of New Orleans Jazz," who sings, talks and plays "I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say" on the CD.

Toward the end of Dave Marsh's essay on "Barbara Allen," he asks a series of questions, the last of which is "What is it that roses and briars have in common?" At first glance, this seems dangerously close to one of those inane, mind-numbing study questions in a college reader. But it gives Marsh an excuse to tell us "The answer is not blowing in the wind. The answer is that we will never find the answer, and never stop seeking it. And so we sing the song."