Thanks to Jay for the link to Douglas Brinkley’s appearance on “On Point with Tom Ashbrook”, from National Public Radio.

The show is 48 minutes, so listen to it if you have the appetite. I picked a part in the middle as being worthy of a little transcription:

Q: There’s the outlaw thing going on, but as I read your piece, there’s also an emphasis on morality. There’s even an emphasis,and it may be linked to the Texas — what? Focus? Obsession? I’m not sure what you’d call it — on patriotism!

Brinkley: Bob Dylan loves America. And in the 1960s, when he was being anointed the head of the counterculture, he moved to Nashville, Tennessee, and recorded country-flavored albums and it angered people. He started spending a lot of time with Johnny Cash. Cash was pro-Vietnam War and was a Richard Nixon supporter, and here’s Dylan, who is supposedly the head of some kind of counterculture, with Cash. He went to Europe with his group the Band, and would drop an American flag behind him and play, at a time when anti-Americanism was high in Europe. This is a person who has deep love of the United States. He has since childhood. His love of our folk songs and our folk poetry, and of our better nature.

We talked about people like Henry Ford and Theodore Roosevelt. He’s deeply steeped in American history. I would recommend a song that he wrote called Cross The Green Mountain that came out — he actually wrote it for a Ted Turner Civil War movie that didn’t do particularly well — it’s an incredible song of a soldier during the Civil War. He listens to our songbook. He knows all the songs of Stephen Foster and Jimmie Rodgers and Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker. He’s just a walking encylcopedia of American music and it’s out of a love of these places that people come from. He loves the city of San Antonio in that it has its own music sound. Or the Kansas City sound. So we might talk on a progam like this about Charlie Parker; Dylan would think of where Parker grew up, and the streets that he walked, what Kansas City was like back then. And he takes time to read old newspapers and looks at old photographs. So in Texas, that means a lot of things to modern culture, but to Dylan it’s the stories, the folklore of Pecos Bill, or John Wesley Hardin the gunslinger, or O. Henry’s short stories, or Nelson Algren’s stint in Texas. Every state in the United States Bob Dylan has a take on it, and it’s kind of a folkloric take, and he feels that that American folklore is stronger than the TIME magazine cover, or the Wall Street Journal today, that it somehow will resonate a thousand years from now. Our folk traditions are more than mainstream media culture.

So, Douglas Brinkley’s commentary speaks for itself. At times it sounds almost as if Brinkley has been reading RWB the last few years, but I guess he’s just been doing the next best thing: talking to Bob Dylan. (C’mon, I couldn’t resist.)

I think that he’s over-simplifying a little bit regarding Bob Dylan in the 1960s — I guess in order to emphasize his point. Bob Dylan didn’t exactly move to Nashville, but he did record Blonde on Blonde and Nashville Skyline there.

And, as I know I’ve written in the past, I think that there is indeed a great drama and significance to the fact that in 1969, at the height of so much tumult, Bob Dylan, with Nashville Skyline, recorded an album that can be heard as a collection of love songs to a simpler America that was very far from his door.

‘Cross The Green Mountain, which Brinkley mentions, is certainly a monumental song, and — although ambiguous and mysterious in some ways — it is centered around the story of the Confederate general Stonewall Jackson, as was the film for which it was written, namely “Gods and Generals.”

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