Becoming Bob Dylan: Sean Wilentz on ‘Through The Open Window’

For decades, historian Sean Wilentz has chronicled the soul of America through its politics, its literature, and its music. A professor at Princeton and author of Bob Dylan In America, Wilentz is a trusted voice bridging scholarship and fandom in the study of Dylan’s work.

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His latest contribution, as co-producer and author of the liner notes for Through The Open Window: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 18, captures Dylan in the making. Spanning 1956 to 1963, the collection includes 48 previously unreleased performances and charts the unlikely path from a teenage kid in Hibbing, Minnesota, to a visionary songwriter standing on the stage at Carnegie Hall.

Sean Wilentz talked to us about Bob Dylan’s formative years featured in this collection and the scene and voices that shaped him. 

Sean Wilentz on Bob Dylan’s Early Years and the Influences That Created One of the Greatest Songwriters of the 20th Century

Dean Fields: Most songwriters are influenced by Bob Dylan, but the further we get from the time period this collection focuses on, the more likely the youngest generation is influenced by people who were influenced by him. We all know about his admiration for Woody Guthrie, but how does this album give a broader sense of Dylan’s influences at the time?

Sean Wilentz: Excellent question, Dean, because there are so many influences that you see in Dylan’s music. The Guthrie thing for sure.

He said that when he arrived in New York City in 1961, he was a Woody Guthrie jukebox, which is true, but not true because he was already singing people that are very, very different. His influences, going back to when he was a boy in Hemming, were many.

You can really hear that in the collection. Early on in the city, he visits friends who have a place out in East Orange, New Jersey, where Guthrie’s gang would hang out every weekend. One of the songs he sings there is by Lulu Bell and Scotty from 1940 or so, called Remember Me, which is a great old country song, but it’s the last thing you’d imagine Bob Dylan listening to, let alone singing in 1961.

And beyond his influences, actually, is the voice that he uses, because he has many, many voices very, very early on. I mean, he surprisingly croons Remember Me. And then there are just so many others.

His first hero was really Hank Williams. And there’s a Hank Williams number in the collection, a little bit later on. Then it just, there is almost nothing that he doesn’t listen to that he isn’t affected by.

And so I hope younger listeners will be able to see that, yes, before there was a Bob Dylan, there was a whole lot more that Bob Dylan manages to bring together. And that’s really his genius: that he has the ability not simply to listen to so much stuff, and not simply to, he doesn’t imitate it, though. He absorbs it.

Another is the influence of the blues on Dylan’s work. Around late 1961, Robert Johnson became his other big influence. His producer, John Hammond, his kind of mentor at Columbia Records, had an advanced copy of a record that he had actually pulled together called King of the Delta Blues Singers. It was Robert Johnson. And Dylan listened to that, and he flipped out.

He also had a close connection with Big Joe Williams, who was passing through the Village around early ’62. The great female blues singer Victoria Spivey was also in the Village. So you can really hear that influence as well.

And then finally, he goes to London in 1962, 63, and he listens to a whole lot of Anglo-Celt balladry that he had heard secondhand, the American versions of these things. But to hear these other songs that go back a thousand years sometimes, that really knocked him out, too.

So you hear some of his better-known songs, in fact, like “Boots Of Spanish Leather” or “Girl From The North Country”, and they’re directly based on a song on Martin Carthy’s version of Scarborough Fair.

So you’re going to hear this all throughout. The other thing about Dylan is that it’s always multi-layered. It’s never one thing, and it’s not dispersed. It’s all kind of blended together. And we hope that we have the same effect in the collection of seeing the many layers, how they work themselves out in his songwriting.

DF: Was there a moment when you were going through this collection that made you stop and think, ‘Wow, this is really something special’?

SW: You know, I had so many ah moments doing this because one does and over the course of a year, year and a half, two years almost of putting this thing together. One thing that struck me was how quickly he evolved. If you take from the point when he writes “Blowin’ In The Wind” in April 1962 or so, to the end of the thing, that’s a year and a half, basically, he goes from being an interesting, novice songwriter to becoming a genius inside a year and a half. Now, the genius was always there; you’re just watching him develop it.

Very early on in 1960, we have a tape of him playing the Guthrie song San Francisco Bay Blues. And you know, he sounds like every other 19-year-old kid playing those songs. It’s okay. By the time he does his first album, which is, again, maybe 18 months after that, he owns a song as a performer. He knows how to enter a song and make it his own.

You hear that on the record with an outtake actually from his first album. He’s never recorded a Woody Guthrie song for all the influence of Woody Guthrie, but he does a recording of Ramblin’ Round, the Woody Guthrie song. And there you can really hear him going into that song and making it his own in a way that was uncanny compared to what it was before. He went from being an imitator to being an interpreter.

And I think that, for him, learning how to interpret unlocked the mysteries of songwriting for him in a way that I suppose everyone goes through it. He just went through it in a particularly extraordinary way. So that’s another thing, how quickly that worked.

And then I suppose also how hard he worked. I mean, some of the cuts on the album are more, shall we say, refined than others in terms of their sonic quality, but we wanted to have a few tracks of him just playing in front of a tape recorder, teaching himself new stuff, and writing new songs. And so you get that he’s always working on it very, very hard, getting his chops together.

And that was something of a revelation, too. You know, we all see the finished product. We don’t see what goes into it. And, especially with a guy like Dylan, you know, people always to think, “oh, well, you know, he’s on another level. He was born with this.” 

No, that’s not what happens at all. He has his share of clinkers along the way, which we don’t have on the record, but we note them in the liner notes. You know, not everything works, but he keeps at it. He is not just ambitious, but intensely dedicated to his craft. And, I hope that, so that came across as well.

And maybe the last thing is just that the work emerges out of a community. People who are in Nashville, for example, know that instinctively almost, because you have these musical communities. Well, Greenwich Village was one of them.

But it was different because it had never been done before. I mean, there have been, you know, sort of precursors of it in a way, but nothing quite like what was going on in the Village in the early 1960s. So, you hear him working out inside a community.

Dave Van Rock, for example, is an enormous influence on him as a performer, and as a songwriter too, but as a performer. But there were many, many others. He mentions a guy named Paul Clayton. So he had great mentors, great colleagues, great rivals. It wasn’t always so friendly. You know, it was competitive. But it’s a kind of, you know, competitive cooperation that’s going on.

DF: You also included those more parlor experiences, the earlier recordings, hanging out with friends in living rooms. Which is really cool. But, not to be dramatic, but it feels like, should I be listening to this? Like I wasn’t invited to this party, right?

SW: (Laughs) Yeah, so you get the various contexts. The party tapes with friends. Again, that’s another community of people. A lot of those are done in Minneapolis by a guy named Dave Glover. We know him as Tony Glover from Koerner, Ray & Glover, who were a very big sort of blues combo in the 1960s. They were done in his place, or with his tape recorder, at various friends’ houses.

That was a community he re-entered back in Minneapolis. He’d keep going back to hang out with his friends. That’s where he could unwind and show off all the things he picked up in New York. And that’s where he could get a little cocky, because you hear that on the tape as well, he’s kind of the king of the hill. But he’s still very close to these people. He’s still very friendly.

DF: How important is the Carnegie Hall performance to you in putting this collection together? What significance does it hold, and what should we be looking out for?

SW: Carnegie Hall is a culmination, and it’s a kind of the end of the beginning of his career, and you can hear it all there in numerous ways. There’s the songwriting itself, just to put it at that level.

This is October ’63. He’s always interested in getting his newest material across, and so you hear that, but the songs are extraordinary. I mean, he’s debuting “Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll” towards the end.

And it’s the first performance of “The Times They Are A-Changin’”, which is going to become another anthem. You hear on the tape, actually, it’s Carnegie Hall, it’s 3,000 people. He comes out, he sings “The Times They Are A-Changin’”, and it’s kind of tepid. People are kind of applauding, and yeah, we like the guy, but we never heard this before.

That’s a weird thing to hear this anthemic song that everybody knows getting this kind of, huh? Okay, great.

But then you also hear the audience. He has now reached a stage of, what, not just fame, but of the adoration of the people in that crowd for that, for him, is amazing. Once you get over that slightly tepid opening, it becomes a roar. And by the end of it, it’s practically a mob scene. The people are responding with so much fervor to everything he has to say and do.

On the other side of that is his mastery as a performer, which matches his mastery as a songwriter. He knows how to work a room. 

He’s come up through the clubs. And by the time you get to October ’63, he’s in the premier venue for American music, Carnegie Hall, and he shows a mastery on stage of not only his own material, but of actually dealing with the audience. Very natural, but very controlled.

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Photo via The Bootleg Series Vol. 18: Through the Open Window 1956–1963