In the published lyric to Bob Dylan’s song Blind Willie McTell, and in the recorded version released on the original Bootleg Series set, the first four lines go:

Seen the arrow on the doorpost
Saying, “This land is condemned
All the way from New Orleans
To Jerusalem.”

It’s a song that Bob Dylan has performed in concert a whole lot in the past decade or so, and I’ll be darned if I’ve ever heard him sing those lines live without making one small but surely significant change: Jerusalem becomes new Jerusalem.

Joseph Bottum (who we talked to on the subject of Dylan long ago) once e-mailed me when he himself noticed this change in a live version. He noted the poetic parallelism of New Orleans and New Jerusalem but thought there must be more to it than that. He also observed that it biblicized the song, by removing the idea of the reference as being only to the modern city of Jerusalem. And I think that’s true.

In the book of Revelation, the new Jerusalem is described by John in chapter 21, in what is surely one of the most beautifully comforting passages for Christians in all of Holy Scripture:

And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”

Hearing Blind Willie McTell’s “new Jerusalem” this way, you might think of it as mapping out not a geographical area but a time-frame; i.e. from the founding of New Orleans, Louisiana (in 1718, to be perhaps a tad too concrete here) to the establishment of the true city of God, the New Jerusalem (TBA). You may hear it as a poetic mapping out of the lifespan of the place we call America.

However, there is also another way of hearing the “new Jerusalem” of Blind Willie McTell, and it plays more strongly in my mind since the recent consideration of Spirit On The Water (in the light of reader Kim’s idea of “Paradise, TX”) and Dylan’s affection for using place names, especially American place names.

First, note that Dylan doesn’t sing “the new Jerusalem,” which is the common way of referring to the biblical post-Apocalyptic city, but rather just “new Jerusalem.” That is, he phrases it in a matter of fact way, just like New Orleans, or New York, or New Hampshire or New London or any number of American towns and cities named after places in the Old World. Just like, in fact, New Jerusalem, Pennsylvania. Or even New Jerusalem, California. Both actual places in the United States, named by their founders with what you might consider to be merely audacious optimism or outrageous ostentation. (Some might argue that New Salem, which is the name of several places in the United States, is also intended as a reference to “the New Jerusalem.” I don’t know where the truth lies on that.)

So, if the singer of Blind Willie McTell is referring to an American town named New Jerusalem, then those lines, All the way from New Orleans / To New Jerusalem become a geographical reference again, only this time telling the listener that the landscape of the song is America, and America only, rather than the broader swathe of the globe (or the entire globe) that would be included if you’re thinking of the city of Jerusalem in Israel.

Now, there are also towns or cities named just Jerusalem in the United States. However, no one could ever infer that the singer of the song as originally recorded was referring to one of those Jerusalems, because the Jerusalem of the Holy Land looms so overwhelmingly large by comparison. Yet, conceivably, he may have been, only later realizing that the line was improved by adding the Americanization of New in front of Jerusalem, to plant the listener more firmly within the landscape of America, while still preserving the biblical and eschatological undertones which cannot but be evoked by the name Jerusalem.

(Photo of New York City’s St. James Hotel taken by me some years back.)

And of-course the landscape of the song is America, from East Texas to the big plantations burning; from the smell of the sweet magnolia blooming to the sound of the hoot owl singing, and right down to that view from the window of the St. James Hotel.

And so, that’s just another angle to consider on the addition of one word in one line in the song Blind Willie McTell.

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