Talking of mondegreens, as we were, one of mine occurred in the Bob Dylan song ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’, in which the murder-victim (I mistakenly used to think) ‘emptied the ashtrays on a whole other level’. I wondered how she had managed to elevate the task of emptying ashtrays to a higher plane; only later did I realise that a level in America is a floor or storey, and that Hattie Carroll emptied ashtrays ‘on the whole of the level’.
Dylan’s wonderful song (from ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’ side 2 band 4) is now the subject of a BBC Radio 4 documentary which has irritated me for four reasons.
First, it was broadcast – in a last-minute schedule-change – in a slot that had been billed as a repeat of ‘God on My Mind Part 2’, which is a programme I produced.
Second, it’s a predictable cliché that every documentary about racism in the American south will include a brief snatch of Billie Holiday singing ‘Strange Fruit’ – and here she was again.
Third, and most important, although it was well-researched and competently assembled, this programme missed the point about song-writing. The presenter, Howard Sounes, told us that the song ‘got some of the details wrong’, that ‘the truth was more complicated’ and that Hattie Carroll’s children were annoyed because they didn’t get any of the royalties – irrelevant, irrelevant and very irrelevant indeed. A song is not journalism; a song is a work of art. Everything we need to know to appreciate it is in there, burned in the grooves of the record. A great song makes its own room in the listener’s brain, decorates and furnishes it, supplies the view from the window and adjusts the lighting. We don’t need anyone to lug in extra bits of furniture and paint the walls a different colour. Anything that isn’t already in the song we don’t need to know. If the lyrics are ‘factually incorrect’ it doesn’t matter. If there’s some ‘context’ that can be supplied, we don’t need it, don’t want it and are better off without it. You might as well claim that Picasso was ‘factually inaccurate’ because there were no bulls killed in the bombing of Guernica.
‘The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll’ blew me away when I heard it the day the record came out in 1963. It blew me away when I saw Dylan sing it from the stage of the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, in 1965. It blows me away today. All I ever needed to be told was that he didn’t sing ‘a whole other level’; and that wasn’t in the programme.
Oh, and fourth, if anyone was going to make a Radio 4 programme about Bob Dylan, it should have been me.
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