Bob Dylan Biopic and the Origin Story of an Electrified Maggie's Farm
The Oscar-nominated film, A Complete Unknown, accurately portrays Dylan's two sides—a brilliant creative genius as a songwriter/poet and a narcissist who used and discarded people on behalf of his ambition. It tells a good story, but certainly not all the stories.
The remarkable Bob Dylan bio-pic A Complete Unknown has been nominated for eight Oscars—best picture, actor, supporting actor, supporting actress, director, costume design, sound, and adapted screenplay. The ceremony is scheduled for March 2, but the film, released in December, has already been drawing enormous attention over how true it is to Dylan’s early career, relationships, and music, particularly the controversy over his performance of "Maggie's Farm" at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, backed up by an electric blues band. The film’s arc leads us to this crucial final moment, when he steps on stage and sings, “I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more."
In the first stanza, Dylan sings, “Well, I wake up in the morning, fold my hands, and pray for rain” and “It’s a shame the way she makes me scrub the floor.” Then he complains that Maggie’s brother “hands you a nickel, and he hands you a dime. And he asks you with a grin, if you're havin' a good time.” Dylan’s protagonist clearly hates the backbreaking work, the low pay, and the lack of respect he gets from Maggie’s family.
Where did those ideas and images come from? What does the song tell us about Dylan’s personal and political transformation represented by his performance at Newport? And who was the real "Maggie"?
First some background.
Dylan was born Robert Zimmerman and raised in Hibbing, a mining town in northern Minnesota, in a middle-class Jewish family. As a teen he admired Elvis Presley, Johnny Ray, Hank Williams, and especially Little Richard, and taught himself to play guitar. In 1959, he moved to the Twin Cities to attend the University of Minnesota but soon dropped out. He stayed in the area to absorb its budding folk music and bohemian scene, began playing in local coffeehouses, and improving his guitar playing. A friend loaned Dylan his collection of Woody Guthrie records and back copies of Sing Out! magazine, which had the music and lyrics to many folk songs. He read Guthrie’s autobiography, Bound for Glory, and learned to play many of his songs.
By then young Zimmerman had changed his name (apparently after Welsh poet Dylan Thomas) and had adopted some of Guthrie’s persona. He mumbled when he talked and when he sang, spoke with a twang, wore workman’s clothes (including a corduroy cap), and took on what he believed to be Guthrie’s mannerisms. At first Dylan seemed to identify more with Guthrie as a loner and bohemian than with Guthrie the radical and activist. Soon after Dylan arrived in New York City in January 1961 at age 19 he visited Guthrie, then suffering from Huntington’s disease, in his New Jersey hospital room.
At the time, New York’s Greenwich Village was the epicenter of the folk music revival, a growing political consciousness, and (along with San Francisco) the beatnik and bohemian culture of jazz, poetry, and drugs. The area was dotted with coffeehouses, some of which charged admission fees and others which allowed performers to pass the hat while customers purchased drinks and sandwiches.
Dylan made the rounds of the folk clubs, making a big impression. His singing and guitar-playing were awkward, but he had a little-boy charm and charisma that disarmed audiences. Dylan’s initial repertoire consisted mostly of Guthrie songs, blues, and traditional ballads. At the time, he began weaving a myth about his past, including stories about being a circus hand and a carnival boy, having a rock band in Hibbing that performed on television, and running away from home and learning songs from black blues artists. He was, as he continued to do throughout his life, reinventing himself.
Dylan was never comfortable being confined by the “protest” label and being called the “voice” of his generation. He disliked being a celebrity, having people ask him what his songs meant, and being viewed as a troubadour who could represent American youth.
Between 1962 and 1965, Dylan wrote more than a dozen songs that reflected the turmoil of the period. These included “The Ballad of Emmett Till,” about a fourteen-year-old African American who was beaten and shot to death in Mississippi in 1955 for whistling at a white woman. It was Dylan’s first “protest” song. To this he soon added “Talkin’ John Birch Society Blues” (poking fun at the right-wing organization), “Let Me Die in My Footsteps” (a critique of the Cold War hysteria that led Americans to build bomb shelters), “Oxford Town” (about the riots by white students after James Meredith became the first Black student admitted to University of Mississippi), “Paths of Victory” (about the civil rights marches), and “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” (about the fear of nuclear war, which he premiered at a Carnegie Hall concert a month before the Cuban missile crisis made that fear more tangible).
In 1963, Dylan also wrote “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” (based on a news story from earlier that year about the death of a black barmaid at the hands of a wealthy white man), “Who Killed Davey Moore” (about a black boxer who died after a brutal match), “Talkin’ World War III Blues” (about the threat of nuclear annihilation), and “Masters of War” (a protest against the arms race).
Dylan borrowed the tune from “No More Auction Block,” an anti-slavery Negro spiritual, for what would become his most famous song, “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
Dylan recorded “Blowin’ in the Wind” on his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, released in May 1963, but it was the version released a few weeks later by Peter, Paul, and Mary that turned the song into a nationwide phenomenon. The single sold 300,000 copies in its first week. On July 13, 1963, it reached number two on the Billboard pop chart, with over a million copies sold. Millions of Americans learned the words and sang along while it was played on the radio, performed at rallies and concerts, and sung at summer camps and in churches and synagogues.
Unlike Dylan’s songs that were ripped from the headlines about specific events, “Blowin’ in the Wind” suggested broad themes. Dylan‘s three verses achieve a universal quality that makes them open to various interpretations and allows listeners to read their own concerns into the lyrics. “How many times must the cannonballs fly before they’re forever banned?” and “How many deaths will it take till he knows that too many people have died?” are clearly about war, but not any particular war. One can hear the words “How many years can some people exist before they’re allowed to be free?” and relate them to the civil rights movement and the recent Freedom Rides. “How many times can a man turn his head pretending he just doesn’t see?” could refer to the nation’s unwillingness to face its own racism, or to other forms of ignorance. The song reflects a combination of alienation and outrage. Listeners have long debated what Dylan meant by “The answer is blowin’ in the wind.” Is the answer so obvious that it is right in front of us? Or is it elusive and beyond our reach? This ambiguity is one reason for the song’s broad appeal.
“The Times They Are a-Changin’” was also not about a specific event but broadly challenged the political establishment on behalf of Dylan’s youth cohort. The finger-pointing song is addressed to “senators, congressmen,” and “mothers and fathers,” telling them that “there’s a battle outside and it is ragin’” and warning them, “don’t criticize what you can’t understand.” Dylan’s lyric “For the loser now will be later to win” sounds much like the biblical notion that the meek shall inherit the earth, or perhaps that America’s black and poor people will win their struggle for justice. Like “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “The Times They Are A-Changin’” became an anthem, a strident warning, angry yet hopeful. It came to symbolize the generation gap, making Dylan the reluctant “spokesman” for the youth revolt.
Dylan’s third album, also called The Times They Are a-Changin’, was recorded between August and October 1963 and included the song “North Country Blues,” which draws on Dylan’s Minnesota upbringing and describes the suffering caused by the closing of the mines in the state’s Iron Range, turning mining areas into jobless ghost towns—a theme that Bruce Springsteen would reprise years later. Remarkably, Dylan tells the tale from the point of view of a woman.
By 1963, Dylan was a super-star, aided by his manager Albert Grossman (who got him a recording contract) and other performers (including Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, and Peter, Paul, and Mary) who recorded Dylan’s songs and popularized them to wide audiences. Dylan, Baez, Peter, Paul, and Mary, and Odetta were invited to sing at the August 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.
But Dylan was never comfortable being confined by the “protest” label and being called the “voice” of his generation. He disliked being a celebrity, having people ask him what his songs meant, and being viewed as a troubadour who could represent American youth. In 1963, before singing “Blowin’ in the Wind” at Gerde’s Folk City in Greenwich Village, Dylan explained, “This here ain’t a protest song or anything like that, ‘cause I don’t write protest songs…I’m just writing it as something to be said, for somebody, by somebody.” Dylan may have been being coy or disingenuous, but it didn’t matter. The song caught the wind of protest in the country and took flight. Her later told Phil Ochs, who continued to write and perform topical songs and to identify with the civil rights and anti-Vietnam war movements, “The stuff you’re writing is bullshit, because politics is bullshit. You’re wasting your time.”
In 1965, the Newport Folk Festival invited Dylan to be the closing act on Sunday night, June 25. He agreed, but insisted on singing a few songs backed by an electrified blues band. There is much controversy about what actually happened before, during and after his performance. A Complete Unknown—based on Elijah Wald’s 2015 book, When Dylan Went Electric: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties—shows Seeger agonizingly trying to persuade Dylan to stick to his acoustic music. When Dylan insists on performing with his rock-and-roll back-up band, Seeger is visibly upset, but it isn’t clear if he actually tries to pull the plug on the amplified sound or is mainly angry that the sound system isn’t adequate to blast such loud music. The person in the film who appears most shaken up by Dylan’s performance is Alan Lomax, the eminent folklorist who played a major role in aiding little-known rural blues singers, mostly in the South, to gain more widespread attention.
Underlying the controversy is a debate about whether “folk” music mainly involves traditional songs by everyday people or newly-written songs about contemporary concerns by professional singers and songwriters. It also involves whether performers who use amplified electronic instruments are performing “folk” music. Even Seeger and Lomax were big fans of Black blues musicians (like Howlin’ Wolf and Memphis Slim) who played with electrified bands. In fact, the black Chambers Brothers and the white Paul Butterfield Blues Band, which backed Dylan, had already done electrically-amplified sets at Newport on Sunday afternoon with no complaints.
On stage, Dylan sang three amped-up songs—“Maggie’s Farm,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” and a work-in-progress called “Phantom Engineer” (which would eventually turn into “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Lot to Cry,” on his sixth album, Highway 61 Revisited. His back-up band included three members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Bank (guitarist Mike Bloomfield, bassist Jerome Arnold, and drummer Sam Lay), Al Kooper on organ, an Barry Goldberg (who died on January 22) on organ and piano.
Some audience members were not happy with Dylan’s new sound. A few even booed. After performing those songs, Dylan stormed off the stage. But Seeger and others persuaded him to return to the stage, where he performed two songs with an acoustic guitar, “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” Many of those same audience members who had booed his first set and cheered his second set no doubt would eventually cheer for the upcoming wave of folk-rock music, like the Byrds’ version of “Mr. Tambourine Man.” But it was “all over now” between Dylan and the Newport Folk Festival. He refused to return to that venue for 37 years.
One aspect of the Newport controversy was Dylan’s apparent rejection of politically-oriented music. That was certainly the direction he was heading. With occasional exceptions, he abandoned acoustic and political music for rock and roll, country, blues, and gospel.
But the back story of “Maggie’s Farm”—and its double meaning—is missing from A Complete Unknown and from most tellings of the Newport brouhaha.
On different occasions, Seeger said he liked Dylan’s song. That shouldn’t be surprising. Seeger had recorded a traditional song, "Penny's Farm," on his first solo album (Darling Corey) in 1950. He often sang it at concerts. It is told from the perspective of a sharecropper protesting the working conditions on the farm.
It was originally recorded on Columbia records as "Down on Penny's Farm" by the Bentley Boys, a duo from North Carolina, in October 1929. That was a few days before the Wall Street stock market crashed, triggering the Great Depression. But the rural south was already facing a depression, especially among sharecroppers.
Here the opening lyrics to the Bentley Boys’ song:
Come you ladies and you gentlemen and listen to my song
I'll sing it to you right, but you might think it's wrong
May make you mad but I mean no harm
It's just about the renters on Penny's farm
[Refrain]
It's hard times in the country
Out on Penny's farm
It continues:
You go in the fields and you work all day
Way into the night but you get no pay
Promise you meat or a little lard
It's hard to be a renter on Penny's farm
[Refrain]
It’s hard times in the country
Out of Penny’s farm
Now here's George Penny come into town
With his wagon-load of peaches, not one of them sound
He's got to have his money or somebody's check
You pay him for a bushel and you don't get a peck
Then George Penny's renters, they come into town
With their hands in their pockets and their heads hanging down
Go in the store and the merchant will say
Your mortgage is due and I'm looking for my pay
It is likely that Dylan heard the Bentley Boys' version, which was reasonably well-known because Harry Smith had included it in his three-record Anthology of American Folk Music, issued in 1952, which helped spark the folk music revival during that decade. Dylan was familiar with the songs on the Anthology and recorded several of them on his first album.
The first stanza and chorus of Dylan’s "Hard Times in New York Town," as well as the tune, are borrowed directly from the Bentley Boys' "Down on Penny's Farm."
Here's the opening words and the tune for Dylan’s “Hard Times in New York Town”:
Come you ladies and you gentlemen, a-listen to my song.
Sing it to you right, but you might think it's wrong.
Just a little glimpse of a story I'll tell
'Bout an east coast city that you all know well.
[Refrain] It's hard times in the city,
Livin' down in New York town.
So, whether he learned the song from Smith's Anthology or from Seeger's album, it is clear that Dylan drew on "Down on Penny's Farm" when he wrote “Maggie’s Farm.”
“Down on Penny's Farm" was based on previous songs. That’s the folk tradition—borrowing and revising older songs. Woody Guthrie was a master of the craft. Others who recorded the song, after Seeger, include Jim Kweskin and Geoff Maldaur, Natalie Merchant, and Roger McGuinn of the Byrds.
There’s another twist to Dylan’s “Maggie’s Farm.” On July 6, 1963, Dylan traveled to Greenwood, Mississippi—in the heart of the Delta—to perform at a voter registration rally sponsored by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). He was joined by Seeger, Theo Bikel, and the Freedom Singers. SNCC leader, and later Congressman, John Lewis was there, too. You can see a clip of Dylan’s performance in the 1965 documentary about Dylan, Don't Look Back.
Dylan performed a new song, “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” about the murder of Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers by a segregationist thug, which occurred only a few weeks earlier, on June 12. The song expresses Dylan’s outrage at the assassination of the civil rights leader, but it also attacks the white Southern politicians and landed aristocracy, who used Jim Crow to pit black and white workers against each other to weaken both groups. In the song, Dylan revealed a sophisticated analysis of the white ruling class’ divide-and-conquer strategy, something that Martin Luther King discussed in some detail in his March 1965 speech at the end of the Selma-to-Montgomery march for voting rights.
One stanza of the song captures Dylan’s perspective:
The deputy sheriffs, the soldiers, the governors get paid
And the marshals and cops get the same
But the poor white man's used in the hands of them all like a tool
He's taught in his school
From the start by the rule
That the laws are with him
To protect his white skin
To keep up his hate
So he never thinks straight
'Bout the shape that he's in
But it ain't him to blame
He's only a pawn in their game
The voting rights rally at which Dylan performed took place on a cotton farm owned by the McGhee (sometimes misspelled Magee) family who were deeply involved with SNCC’s local organizing work. The family included six sons, one of whom, Silas, who had organized to desegregate a movie theater, was shot in the face the following summer by someone whom many believed was a Ku Klux Klan member.
It is hardly a stretch to see that Dylan turned McGhee’s farm into Maggie’s farm.
But what did he mean that he wasn’t going to “work on Maggie’s farm no more”? He certainly wasn’t referring to the McGhee family, whose courage Dylan surely admired. The words refer to his involvement in civil rights movement and politics more broadly.
At the end of the song, Dylan says,
Well, I try my best to be just like I am
But everybody wants you to be just like them
This is Dylan's way of telling his fans, and the broader public, that, having written many protest songs about civil rights and war in his still-early career, he was no longer going to be a protest singer and didn't like being pigeonholed that way. That was the message he was sending at Newport when he went electric and performed “Maggie’s Farm.”
In fact, Dylan wrote few politically oriented songs after that. By his fourth album, the aptly titled Another Side of Bob Dylan, he had decided to look both inward for his inspiration and outward at other kinds of music. He began to explore more personal and abstract themes in his music and in his poetry. He also became more involved with drugs, alcohol, and religion. His songs began to focus on his love life, his alienation, and his growing sense of the absurd. In subsequent decades, Dylan would reinvent himself several more times.
Even after 1965, however, Dylan occasionally revealed that he hadn’t lost his touch for composing political songs. His “Subterranean Homesick Blues” references the violence inflicted on civil rights protestors by cops (“Better stay away from those/That carry around a fire hose”) but also reflected his growing cynicism (“Don’t follow leaders/Watch the parkin’ meters”). The extremist wing of Students for a Democratic Society took their name—Weatherman—from another line in that song (“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”). Other songs, such as “I Shall Be Released” (1967), the Guthrie-esque “I Pity the Poor Immigrant” (1967), “ George Jackson” (1971), “Hurricane” (1975), “License to Kill” (1983), and “Clean Cut Kid” (1984) indicate that Dylan still had the capacity for political outrage.
A Complete Unknown captures the mood and the music of the first few years of Dylan’s ascendency. Timothee Chalamet as Dylan and Edward Norton as Seeger embody their characters, including their voices, playing, looks, and performance styles. If the film gets people to be more curious about Seeger, to listen to his songs and learn about his life and legacy—that alone would be enough.
The movie accurately portrays Dylan's two sides—a brilliant creative genius as a songwriter/poet and a narcissist who used and discarded people on behalf of his ambition.
Though based on Wald’s extraordinary book, the film takes some artistic liberties that bend or distort the truth. It underplays the importance of his girlfriend Suze Rotolo, a committed leftist, in educating Dylan about both literature and the civil rights movement. It downplays the fact that Joan Baez was already famous when she met Dylan and helped jumpstart his career by introducing him at music festivals. Contrary to the film, Dylan never appeared on Seeger's homespun educational TV show, "Rainbow Quest." Dylan did visit Woody Guthrie in the hospital when he first arrived in New York, but Seeger wasn't there. And Dylan's second visit with Woody, as depicted at the end of the film, is entirely fictional.
But perhaps most disappointing is what the film left out—Dylan playing on McGhee’s farm in Mississippi and at the March on Washington, both in 1963. Had those incidents been included, we could see that Dylan’s commitment to civil rights and activism , however brief in the context of his long career, was more than rhetorical, and contributed to his image as a protest singer.
