Introduction

Abstract

I n 1965, Bob Dylan shifted from acoustic folk music to albums and live performances backed by drums and electric guitar and bass. To a small but vocal number of fans, this change was a step in the wrong direction. Having developed a reputation as the folk heir to Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, Dylan famously went “electric.” Throughout his career, Dylan continued to change styles. However, no other moment in his career took on such importance and mythos than his 1965 transformation, which began with the album Bringing It All Home in March of that year and culminated with its follow-up, Highway 61 Revisited, five months later. Although the latter opens with the famous and perhaps overplayed “Like a Rolling Stone,” the album final track, “Desolation Row,” almost returns Dylan to his acoustic folk roots. With its narrative pastiche of references, like many Dylan lyrics from the 1960s, the song leaves much to be interpreted. Still, the first line starkly portrays an execution with a commercial enterprise, the selling of postcard bearing the image of a hanging. Although Dylan moves on from this scene, leaving ambiguity between who is selling the postcards, who died, and who buys such postcards, to scholars who study the history of American racism, the answers are quickly at hand. In the United States, mobs hang Black men and women, and white spectators take in the spectacle firsthand and collect and exchange souvenirs of their swinging bodies. Scholars Sean Wilentz and Robert Polito have placed Dylan’s lyrics to a specific historic lynching, the 1920 triple murder of Elmer Jackson, Elias Clayton, and Isaac McGhie in Dylan’s hometown of Duluth, Minnesota and the postcards produced of their cruel deaths. The streetlight lynching occurred two blocks from the home of Abram Zimmerman, Dylan’s father, who would have been nine at the time. Speculation by Dylan scholars has gone into Abram’s presence or absence at the lynching, with Dylan’s lyric suggesting that he, perhaps through his father, had some familiarity with the event. Moreover, even if Abram had not been in attendance, the events of that day would be etched into the city’s history, emerging in Dylan’s “Desolation Row” as its own folk story. For scholars who have speculated about the effects of that day on Dylan’s life and songwriting, none have connected the lynching, the implement of the electric lamp post, with Dylan’s own going electric. Dylan is not alone in producing speculative knowledge of Black traumawithin circuits of white American poetics. Ezra Pound provided the only first-person account of the death of Louis Till, Emmett Till’s father. Executed by the US Army at a detention center near Pisa, Louis’ only chronicler was his fellow prisoner, Pound, who recorded only fleeting mentions of the man in The Pisan Cantos, noting Till’s nickname by his fellow prisoners and a slightly longer passage that functions as a eulogistic note. Again, this moment is marked by its apparent ambiguity. It only becomes legible to scholars after Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam murdered Emmett