Morrissey’s alternative Olympic vision

Danny Boyle’s Olympic opening ceremony was a wonderful celebration of British popular culture from the last five decades, from the Stones, Kinks and Beatles through to the Arctic Monkeys and Dizzee Rascal. Appropriately enough, there was a good showing for London-based music, with the Jam, the Sex Pistols, David Bowie, Underworld and Prodigy all getting their spot in the limelight.

While Miranda Sawyer in the Observer today picks up on the surprising omissions of Oasis and the Stone Roses, the other Mancunian band that was missing for me was…. The Smiths. I’m fairly certain that Morrissey would have cringed to have been anywhere near the setlist, but arguably his contribution to British popular music has been at least as significant as any of the above.

There was a certain piquancy therefore to hear that Morrissey played his home city of Manchester last night, the day after the Olympic ceremony, the only UK date on a world tour that stretches from Tel Aviv to Los Angeles. (According to one review, he told the audience last night that he “hadn’t been invited to the Olympic opening ceremony because my smile is too sincere”.) I’ve recently written an essay for a book on music, health and geography, exploring the different geographies at stake in Morrissey’s music. Specific places often feature in his songs, even as his emotional landscapes transcend territorial and ethnic boundaries (he has a significant following among Latino populations, for example). There are even tours of Morrissey’s Manchester, where fans can explore for themselves the settings for the early Smiths songs.

Morrissey in a humdrum town

The depressed landscapes that feature in Morrissey’s oeuvre – iron bridges, disused railway lines, out-of-season seaside towns, rented rooms in Whalley Range – might have fitted well into Danny Boyle’s choreographed social history of the British experience. Far from being health-inducing, however, I argue that these places are deployed as a form of anti-pastoral, with a depressing effect on mind and body. The early song, ‘Jeane’, for example, is a kitchen-sink drama worthy of A Taste of Honey or any other 1950s and 60s bedsitter tableau:

‘Jeane/The lowlife has lost its appeal/ And I'm tired of walking these streets/To a room with its cupboard bare…’

‘There's ice on the sink where we bathe/ So how can you call this home/ When you know it's a grave?’

Morrissey is not known for being an Olympic-style picture of health and efficiency. More often he is associated with misery and depression – being ‘The Pope of Mope’ or ‘Prince of Wails’. Not for nothing did he encore his show last night with Still Ill (‘Under the iron bridge we kissed, and although I ended up with sore lips, it just wasn’t like the old days any more’).  So much so that it came as a surprise to me when I first read in Johnny Rogan’s biography of the Smiths, The Severed Alliance – recently reissued - that Morrissey was in fact highly athletic in his youth – a fact that he alludes to on his first solo album (‘Captain of games, solid framed, I stood on the touch line….’)

Who put the M in Manchester?

For Morrissey, music was the great salvation from the industrial grime and murkiness of the landscape of his youth. As he was once quoted as saying:

‘In the history of my life the high points were always buying particular records and hearing records and being immersed in them, and really believing that these people understood how I felt about certain situations. So that’s the richness of records.’

This might well have been the overwhelming message of the Olympic ceremony too. We might have blighted our green and pleasant land with the chimneys of industrialisation, but at least we have produced some of the greatest popular music of the last five decades. Sadly, though, the Olympic Torch did not stop at Salford Lad’s Club when it passed through Greater Manchester in June – a venue that even David Cameron, before he became Prime Minister, found time to visit. 

PM, with Morrissey in background

PS  Fascinating to see Morrissey making a public statement about the Olympics the other day.  Somewhat predictably he adopts a stance that flies in the face of the public mood...

Rainham, London, the World

Rainham Hall in Havering is located not far from the legendary A13 (eulogised by Billy Bragg as the ‘trunk road to the sea’). It is a marvellous survival.

Rainham Hall, with flags

Standing next to a fine Norman church (reputed to have the second oldest door in the whole of London), it sits just off The Broadway, opposite the public library. Set back behind railings, it is too easy to disregard or pass by unnoticed, not least since it is open to the public for just three hours a week.

Rainham's Norman church

The house has been owned by the National Trust since 1949, a Georgian jewel in the midst of the industrialisation and transport infrastructure that surround the Rainham Marshes. And in many ways, the history of the Hall is the history of London itself, its economic power, its circulations and distributions, its comings and goings.

The Hall was built in 1729 by Captain John Harle, who dredged an inlet off the Thames nearby and built a wharf for his trading activities. The marble, wood and tiles that he traded are still evident throughout the house, which is a fine three-storey box in the Queen Anne style.

The painted staircase, Rainham Hall

The back door, Rainham Hall

 

Behind the house was originally a courtyard of buildings, probably used as stables and a brewhouse, and as part of his trading endeavour. It is now an attractive, well tended garden. The brewhouse features on the English Heritage buildings at risk register, but plans are afoot to convert it to a visitor reception area, café and community education space. Currently the house has none of these facilities, and so its potential as a community hub and tourism venture is under-exploited.

Rainham Hall gardens

I visited in order to attend a meeting with National Trust colleagues and others, to consider options for the development of the house. One issue was the absence of furniture, fittings and any indigenous collections. Another was the additional layer of significance left by 20^th century residents – a spate of restoration work, and then the use of the house during the war (as a banana depot) and afterwards (as a distribution point for health and welfare provision).

The team have devised some exciting options for bringing the house to life and telling the story of the Harles and their successors. One interesting story is that of the role of religion. A gate from the house to the Church is said to now be bricked up, because of the conversion of Harle’s son to Methodism.

The ghost of a gate at Rainham Hall?

For me, the house was a tangible reminder of the power of money and trade. As a ghost of a former era of London’s development as a world city, Rainham Hall is a residue of a time when Britain ruled the waves and drew vast stores of wealth from transatlantic exchange. It stands as a symbol of why the UK occupies the place it does in today’s world economy, an echo of an earlier wave of economic growth and development, no less than the nearby docks at Tilbury, City airport, and the Dartford Crossing, which all perform a similar function for more recent times.

Patrick Keiller’s three films ‘London’ (1994), ‘Robinson in Space’ (1997) and more recently ‘Robinson in Ruins’ (2010) explore similar territory, using architecture and landscape to essay politico-economic critiques of late-capitalist Britain. ‘Robinson in Space’ even briefly features Rainham Hall – it is mistaken by the eponymous Robinson for ‘Dracula’s House Carfax in Purfleet’ (until the narrator points out that in fact ‘we were still in Rainham’). Carfax was the house to which Count Dracula was transported from his Transylvanian Castle in 50 boxes of earth. Rainham wharf was where the nightsoil of Londoners was brought to be spread on the fields of Essex.

The Robinson Institute, Tate Britain installation to 14 October 2012

Transportation – of wood and marble, of earth, of bananas – seems central to understanding the role of Rainham Hall and the context in which it sits. Which is why I was delighted to hear of plans to recreate, for visitors, the sights and sounds of the River Thames – the A13 of the 18^th century.

Those National Trust/Beatles connections

I was not at all surprised to see Sir Paul McCartney appear as the finale to the concert at last weekend’s Jubilee celebrations. McCartney is one of only two surviving Beatles, and the only one who still records and performs on a regular basis. The Beatles were by far the most important group of the last 60 years, so it was entirely appropriate for McCartney, who turns 70 next week, to take top billing.

This conflation of the Beatles with our national story is nothing new. It confirms the findings of a Demos report published late last year, which explored the question of national pride. In a survey carried out for the report, members of the public were asked to judge how far different institutions or cultural icons made them proud to be British.

Top of the list was Shakespeare with 75% agreeing that they are proud of his role as a symbol of Britain, with the army (72%), the Union Jack (71%), the pound (70%) and the NHS (69%) following.

Interestingly the monarchy came seventh on the list, with 68% agreeing that they were proud of it as a symbol of Britain. I wonder if the results would be different if the survey had been repeated last week?

What was also striking about the research findings was that the National Trust came joint second, with 72% of people agreeing that it made them proud to be British. Meanwhile the Beatles scored a respectable 55%, more than Parliament (47%) and the legal system (51%).

The research begs the question, what is it about the National Trust and the Beatles that inspires such pride in the nation? Perhaps it is because both are in some way uniquely British achievements, cultural phenomenon that are forever associated with these shores. This is not to say that they are insular or parochial inventions. The creation of the National Trust in 1895 was directly inspired by the formation of the Massachusetts Trustees of Public Reservations in 1891, while the Beatles took rock and roll sounds from across the Atlantic and transformed them into a native beat sound.  

Both the National Trust and the Beatles share the distinction of being much loved cultural assets, private creations that have been of enormous and long-lasting public significance.

This also led me to think about the connections between the two over the years. Here are just a few I was able to come up with:

• Most obviously, the Trust now owns and looks after the childhood homes of Paul McCartney and John Lennon (As recently reported, one of the childhood homes of Ringo Starr does not look set to follow into this fold)

Mendips, John Lennon's childhood home

• The Beatles namechecked the National Trust in ‘Happiness is a Warm Gun’

• The video for Strawberry Fields Forever was filmed at Knole in Kent (one of the Trust’s most important houses, though the park remains in family hands). The story goes that while the Beatles were in Kent that day, John Lennon went into a local Antique Shop and bought an old Circus Poster which featured the title ‘being for the benefit of Mr.Kite’…

Beatles at Knole Park for the filming of Strawberry Fields Forever

• When the future of Abbey Road studios was in question a few years ago, there was speculation about the National Trust taking it over (see also today’s Observer for an article by Jon Savage on the heritage significance of Abbey Road)

Abbey Road Studios

• Croome was the UK centre for the Hare Krishna movement, until they were donated a new home at Bhakti Vedanta Manor in Hertfordshire by George Harrison
• Sir George Martin, the 'fifth Beatle', lives in Coleshill near Swindon, a village largely owned by the National Trust

• Not strictly Beatles, but the famous front cover of Wings’ Band on the Run was shot at Osterley Park.

Osterley was the location for this McCartney sleeve

  

 Anyone know of any other connections between these two uniquely British institutions?

Picturesque Planning

  Harriet Atkinson’s new book The Festival of Britain: A Land and its People (IB Taurus) revisits the celebrations of 1951, exploring the various ways in which the Festival served as a reimagination of Britain’s geography and landscape.

The book’s front cover reproduces Eric Fraser’s Verdant Isle, in which Abram Games’s Festival emblem hovers, Skylon-like, over the nation, pinpointing somewhere in the heart of the midlands.  While the precise coordinates of the emblem’s landing point are unspecified, the image carries connotations of that other famous artistic elision of geography and patriotism, the Ditchley portrait of Elizabeth I, where the monarch’s toe points to Oxfordshire. 

   

  

By recalibrating the national centre of gravity away from London, the image also reminds us that the Festival of Britain was always intended to be much more than its main showroom at the South Bank. As well as the architecture and events of the capital, there were exhibitions in Glasgow and Belfast, a travelling show carried on lorries to Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham and Nottingham, and cultural programming across a great many other regional cities.

The Festival, as the current exhibition on ‘British Design 1948 to 2012’ at the V&A also observes, was therefore much more than merely a metropolitan affair. It was nothing less than a bold and optimistic vision of the future of the entire country and its landscape, built on a sensitive appreciation of the past.

Those involved in planning and building the Festival, among them Patrick Abercrombie, Hugh Casson and Gordon Cullen, chose not to import an alien modernism but explicitly harked back to earlier ideas of the Picturesque to ensure that their designs respected the genius loci or ‘spirit of place’.

The picturesque in 1951

 Atkinson reminds us that this ‘new Picturesque’ was a deliberate evocation of 18^th-century principles laid out by, among others, Uvedale Price and Richard Payne Knight. While Price and Knight had essayed their aversion to the sweeping vistas and identikit forms of Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown’s parklands, their own vision of the picturesque demanded attention to the local and the particular, as well as the painterly qualities of natural landscapes. (These ideas are explored in a new biography of Uvedale Price, written by Charles Watkins and me, to be published next month.)

Uvedale Price

Richard Payne Knight

 By the 1920s and 30s, influential writers on architecture and landscape, among them Christopher Hussey and Nikolaus Pevsner, were consciously revisiting such Georgian visionaries in an attempt to reassert the value of sensitive design in the process of laying out landscapes. Snubbing their immediate Victorian and Edwardian forebears, these writers looked to the 18^th-century as the golden age of British design, and hence reinterpreted the Picturesque for post-war British urban renewal.  

Above all, the emphasis was on sensitive appreciation of landscape in all its deeply layered complexity. The landscaping and design of the South Bank Centre was carried out with attention to geology, topology, archaeology and natural history. The construction process was itself regarded as an archaeological exercise, and Jacquetta Hawkes was employed to curate the displays in the People of Britain Pavilion. (Her classic, A Land, the subject of a recent article by Robert Macfarlane, was written while she worked on the 1951 Festival. It is shortly to be republished.)

Meanwhile, the Exhibition of Live Architecture was located at Poplar in east London, as a demonstration of how Picturesque principles of planning were being put into effect on the Lansbury estate. Celebrations of the new towns that were being constructed after the 1946 Act drew attention to the way old buildings were being incorporated into new designs. As Atkinson notes, ‘All emphasized continuity between the historic past and new developments’ (p.179), just as the new Picturesque proponents on the Architectural Review had called in the 1940s for bombed-out ruins to be reincorporated as public monuments.

The optimists of 1951 hoped that the Picturesque eye would help to reconcile modernity with the landscape, teaching us (as Barbara Colvin suggested) to see beauty in ‘windmills and certain transmission towers’.  

Some of these visions of the future may now seem hopelessly old fashioned. It is somewhat surprising to us these days to find Pevsner identifying Harlow Town Centre as the epitome of ‘Picturesque Principles applied to urban conditions’. Clearly, sixty years of planning disasters have taken their toll. All too often, the past has been razed without proper consideration. The utopian dreams that informed the layout of so many new housing estates and indeed wholesale urban settlements have been shown to be just that – dreams, little taking account of the realities of people’s emotional response to place.

Picturesque Harlow

 But might we yet reincorporate a sense of the Picturesque into our modern-day planning? The National Planning Policy Framework remains a resolutely unPicturesque statement, drawing as it does on so many abstract concepts and assertions (starting from that most anti-Picturesque of notions, sustainable development). Yet the emphasis on the primacy of the local is a fundamentally Picturesque idea.

Local plans that start from the genius loci or ‘spirit of place’, and which assert the importance of retaining local colour and character even while providing for new homes and businesses, may yet manage to retain the Picturesque delight in place, character, and the infinitive nuances of landscape.

 

DCMS's Unhappy Birthday

 

Although I’m normally a sucker for a good anniversary, one recently passed me by with little notice. On 11 April the Department for Culture, Media and Sport celebrated its 20^th birthday, having been created in the days that followed the 1992 election.

The Department of National Heritage, as it was then called, was formed to bring together various separate responsibilities that were held across Whitehall. Sport came from Education, heritage came from Environment, while the old office of Arts and Libraries provided the job of sponsoring national museums and the Arts Council. Together, they formed the ‘Ministry of Fun’ as it soon became known under the brief leadership of its first Secretary of State, David Mellor.

A Minister for Fun

Given that the DCMS, as it has been titled since 1997, is this year responsible for some fairly major national events, it is perhaps hardly surprising that it took little interest in marking its own 20^th birthday. Only a blog from Toby Sargent on the DCMS’s website served to mark the anniversary. And this is as it should be: the passing of decades is of little interest by itself, after all.

Culture towers, Cockspur Street.

 More intriguing, however, has been the flurry of speculation in recent days over the future of the Department once this year’s ‘summer of celebration’ is over. According to the shadow culture minister, Harriet Harman, Number 10 is actively plotting for the dissolution of the department at some point soon, presumably with its spoils shared back among various of the big beast departments in Whitehall. Ms Harman has published an open letter to Jeremy Hunt to try to uncover the truth - though I do wish she would take the trouble to spell the department’s name correctly.

(The world is divided into those who call it the department ‘of’ culture, as opposed to the department ‘for’ culture. Or at least my small world is.)

The speculation has prompted others to come out of the woodwork with their own views on the department. The Institute of Economic Affairs claimed on Thursday that scrapping the department would save Government £1.6 billion, enabling a cut in fuel duty of 3p or various other fiscal benefits.

Maurice Davies of the Museums Association fought back on the Today programme the next day, when he pointed out that simply abolishing the department would not itself save that amount of money. There would instead need to be a conscious decision by Government to pull out of any subsidy or support for sport and the arts - which legally it cannot do overnight. Admission charges on the doors of the national museums would never recoup the vast amounts of money that is required to maintain collections in this way, so the price of a few pence off the price of petrol would be a fullscale retreat by Government from culture as a legitimate area for intervention.

Graham Hitchen, an arts and design consultant who knows the department well, has offered a more measured piece, speculating on a possible scenario in which the department is split up in a post-Olympic games reshuffle into two principal blocks. Arts and sport would join the Education department, while the creative industries and tourism would join the Business department, newly led by a newly promoted Jeremy Hunt.

Such speculation is an entertaining enough parlour game for those who like that sort of thing (and I should declare my own interest at this point: I was a DCMS employee for around a half of its lifetime, from 1998 to 2008). There is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answer of course, and only the politics of the coming months and years will determine the fate of the department. I offer here my own observations on the issue:

• DCMS’s demise has been predicted at just about every election for the last 10 years or more. Each time it has grown in size instead, absorbing other responsibilities. Past performance is therefore no indicator that DCMS is about to face its demise.

• The other great innovation alongside the creation of the department was the invention of the National Lottery, to provide funding for the ‘good causes’ of arts, sport, heritage, charities and the Millennium. The Lottery has had a seismic impact on the world of culture since 1994. To split up the department would presumably also mean splitting responsibility for the Lottery – not a great move.

• Most other EU and European countries have a separate culture ministry of some sort. Splitting up the department would mean a loss of European and international influence.

• Few people have addressed what would happen to heritage if DCMS was split up among other departments. Would it return to the modern-day successor to the old DoE, the department for Communities and Local Government? Or has the impact of nearly 20 years of HLF funding now changed the view of heritage so much that it is no longer regarded simply as a planning issue? In which case, if the Hitchen scenario plays out, does it get shunted in with tourism, or is it placed alongside arts and museums in a reconstituted education department? Neither quite works.

 Arguably, the best place for heritage is in its own department sitting alongside museums, the arts, tourism and the creative industries.  A bit like DCMS, in fact – although recent anti-heritage moves by Government (eg the new VAT on alterations to listed buildings) suggest that the case for heritage is not being quite made as loudly as it could be.  It will be fascinating to hear what the Heritage and Tourism Minister as to say on this, and on the future of DCMS more generally, when he gives a keynote speech on heritage and the economy in a few weeks’ time.

Sheringham Park, Norfolk

Sheringham Park on the north Norfolk coast is a National Trust property that gets about a quarter of a million visitors a year. Many come for the fine displays of rhododendrons when they flower in April and May, or to use the park more generally for walking and taking in the views.

Sheringham Park (NT)

But the landscape is historically highly significant, since it still bears the imprint of the Georgian landscape designer Humphry Repton. Repton’s Red Book for Sheringham is 200 years old this year, and the purpose of my visit to Sheringham last week was to consider ways in which this bicentenary might be marked at the property, which is the subject of a recent project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Humphry Repton

The story behind Repton’s Red Book of 1812 is fascinating. Repton at first anticipated that Sheringham might have been an appropriate gift from the nation to Norfolk’s finest son Admiral Nelson, on his return from war. But the estate was acquired in 1811 by Abbot Upcher and his wife Charlotte, in an exchange facilitated by Repton’s lawyer son William. Repton was commissioned to turn the estate – at the time comprising mainly farmland and a now demolished farm house – into a smart residence and landscape.

Detail from Repton's Red Book for Sheringham (1812): the view from the house

Repton avoided placing the house directly facing the sea, given the inclemency of the spot in winter. Instead, he sited it in a wooded natural valley (actually formed by the retreating ice sheets of many millennia ago). The estate is not actually that large, and Repton used his full powers of design to contrive an approach to the house that accentuated its impact through a highly economic mastery of space and place. The park is entered first by means of a carriage ride, which lines the crest of the wooded ridge on the other side of the valley in which the house sits. Visitors would pass along this ridge, taking views out to the sea and to the surrounding countryside, before they reach ‘The Turn’. At this point Repton dropped the path off the ridge, and by taking a sharp bend visitors would catch their first view of the house ‘like some enchanted palace of a fairy tale’.

'The Turn' at Sheringham: the first view of the house

The house itself has no formal garden: it is designed to take in views of the wider park, which is cleverly given the illusion of greater extent through careful planting. The Trust does not open the house to the public, instead leasing it to private tenants in order to provide the income that enables the park to be maintained. Visitors to Sheringham therefore never see the view from the house itself – the estate is instead marketed as a landscape experience, or indeed as a site of particular horticultural and natural significance.

Sheringham's famous rhododendrons

Given that the site’s significance is so linked to Repton’s design of 1812, however, the AHRC-funded project is looking at the practical ways in which the bicentenary might be marked in order to enhance wider awareness of Repton’s art. A small visitor centre currently offers some helpful information about Repton’s life and work, as well as fine facsimile copies of the Red Book (although these are now suffering some wear and tear).

Facsimilies of the Sheringham Red Book on show in the visitor centre

But is this the best way of explaining the significance of a landscape to visitors? Other ideas that we considered included:

• The possibility of using phone apps or other technology to provide running commentary for visitors while they move around the landscape

• Using animation or moving images in the visitor reception, to convey the sense in which this was a landscape designed to be seen in transit, from a carriage, as well as from the house itself

• Finding ways of raising questions about how the Sheringham landscape has changed in the 200 years since it was designed, and what future changes may look like. (The rhododendrons were a later insertion in the landscape, for example, while the trees that Repton envisioned have now matured)

The latter point is of particular interest to me, in the context of the planning changes that were made by Government last week. The final NPPF reasserted the importance of local plans in the planning process, as a consequence of the campaigning undertaken by the National Trust and others. Sheringham has long been an example of effective planning, since the National Trust has taken care to map out the setting of the house and park in some detail, which has been incorporated into the local plan.  This has not stopped, however, a school development being built within the park’s ‘setting’, and clearly visible from the drive (if not from the house itself, which appears to have been the planning inspector’s main criteria). 

How can the landscape at Sheringham therefore be ‘protected’ from future incursions of this nature, at the same time as recognising that landscapes by definition change and adapt over time? An array of offshore turbines is clearly visible from Sheringham, for example, but as was pointed out during my visit, Repton’s own vision of the seascape was also animated, if then by the sails of passing ships. From ships to turbines, and from barns to schools, how can a landscape’s significance be protected without pretending that it is possible to preserve it forever, in aspic?

The first Bob Dylan album

50 years ago this week, on 19 March 1962, Bob Dylan released his eponymous debut album. It's not an album I can remember listening to much before, although I have an image in my mind (perhaps erroneously) of the LP being among my parents' collection as I was growing up - the sleeve slightly battered at the corners, Bob Dylan's youthful face gazing out from under his black peaked cap and the upturned collar of his sheepskin coat.
For me, the album had more significance as a physical object than as a piece of recorded music. It was a relic from a far distant past, a ticket back to the long-lost early 1960s, pre-Beatles, pre-Stones, pre-anything much. Yet since I was born just 10 years later in 1972, the temporal distance between me and the cultural phenomenon of this album's release really was not so great. I suppose this is proof of the old cliche about time speeding up as you get older, although the gap between 1962 an 1972 still seems to me, in cultural terms, to be considerably greater than that between, say, 2002 and 2012.

As an experiment I bought the album on MP3 this week, and tried to listen to it as though 50 years had not intervened since its release. I tried to imagine what it might have sounded like to someone coming to it afresh in March 1962. A fairly hopeless task of course, since cultural objects cannot be so straightforwardly removed from their contexts in this way. Nonetheless, it was an enjoyable challenge.

I discovered 13 songs of different styles and provenance, very different from the caricature of earnest protest-singing Bob Dylan. Clearly a mixture of self-penned works (Talkin' New York, Song to Woody) and folk standards (House of the Risin' Sun, Gospel Plow), the album rattles along at quite some speed, though it is the simplest possible recording set-up: just Bob, his guitar and a harmonica. The first track, You're No Good, is almost over before it begins, and seems to involve Dylan sniggering half way through as he stumbles over himself to commit the song to vinyl.

 The second track, Talkin' New York, is captivating: the story of Dylan travelling from the 'Wild West' to New York, where the  people go down to the ground and the buildings go up to the sky. 'Walking around with no-where to go, someone could freeze right to the bone', but Dylan ends up in Greenwich Village where he tries his hand at performing in coffee houses for a dollar a day. At first he is rejected for sounding like a hillbilly, then eventually starts to earn more money and even joins the union and pays his dues. The song ends with Dylan leaving New York to head west, but not before departing with this philopsophical observation - laced with threat and anger:

    A very great man once said, some people rob you with a fountain pen
    Don't take too long to find out just what he was talking about
    A lot of people don't have too much food on their tables
    But they got a lot of forks and knives   
    Gotta CUT something.

No doubt it's a staple observation of Dylanologists, but Dylan's voice here is as much an instrument as his guitar - the way he spits, sneers, punches, yells, carouses, propels the words from his mouth in his distinctive twang. Yet there's also warmth and tenderness in the pleading sound of a track like Baby Let Me Follow You Down, where the harmonica joins the voice in seeking to woo a lover with devotional pleadings.

Song to Woody is a key track, where Dylan pays his respects to the passing of another singer, Woody Guthrie. It's impossible here not to understand the song in its context - the story of Dylan visiting Guthrie in hospital is well known, and the song is the folk equivalent of the passing on of a baton. While Dylan claims to have seen his share of hard times, of people sick, hungry, tired and torn, he ends by taking his leave and hoping that he does not have the same hard travelling as Guthrie had in his life. 

Man of Constant Sorrow sounds like a manifesto for the rambling man persona that Dylan was adopting on this album, while acknowledging the morbid truth that death is never far away even from the morning railroad. The album ends with See That My Grave Is Kept Clean, where Dylan's voice demonstrates its power and rage, returning to the spirituality of the earlier tracks In My Time of Dyin' and Fixin' To Die. All three songs, like Song to Woody, have death as their main theme, and death and spirituality recur throughout the album.A birth, then, but one grounded in thoughts of mortality.