Episode 45 - Back Where I Come From: The Roots of Theme Time Radio Hour

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, "Look! This is something new"? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time. - Ecclesiastes

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All things have a past, a history. All trees have roots. All rivers have a source.

There is nothing new under the sun.

It's night time in the Big City. In a loft apartment, a young man rummages through a shelf of old audio tapes. He stops, re-reads a label. He doesn't know the title on the box, but he definitely recognizes at least one performer's name.

"Can I listen to this?" Bob Dylan asks.

Sixty-six years before the first episode of Theme Time Radio Hour, when radio was just radio and the word satellite was only used by astronomers, there was another series that was organized around themes. A fifteen minute radio program that aired three days a week - Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays - at 10:30 p.m., and ran from September 1940 through January 1941. The show, titled Back Where I Come From, was written by Alan Lomax, directed by Nicholas Ray, who would later go on to direct Rebel Without a Cause, and featured Woody Guthrie.

[Back Where I Come From excerpt]

In the summer of 1940 Alan Lomax began work on one of his long-time pet dreams, a folk music series for prime time network radio. Lomax would act as the writer and long-distance producer for Back Where I Come From from his Washington, D.C. home base, while his pal Nick Ray would be the on-scene New York City director.

To give the series the creative foundation it needed to be more than just another hillbilly radio show, Lomax came up with the idea to have each of the programs dedicated around a theme - trains, marriage, animals - and would include skits and dramatic readings as well as songs on that night's subject. The theme idea probably came from the all-night singing contests that Guthrie, Lomax and other invited folksingers delighted in, where the group would challenge each other to name as many songs as they could on a given subject. During one six-hour evening, Lomax recalled, he and Guthrie came up with over 200 songs about animals and stopped singing only after neighbors threatened to call the police.

The pilot of Back Where I Come From aired on August 19, 1940 on the Forecast series; a try-out incubator for new CBS radio shows. The first episode was hosted by Clifton "Kip" Fadiman, a New York literati - writer, editor, and critic - who was already well-known to radio audiences as the host of the popular Information Please quiz show, which he would moderate for 17 years. Joining Fadiman were Willie Johnson and the Golden Gate Quartet, Josh White, Burl Ives, actor Len Doyle, and Woody Guthrie.

Just like the first episode of Theme Time Radio Hour sixty-six years later, the theme of the first episode of Back Where I Come From would be... the weather.

That first 30-minute show was, charitably speaking, a bit uneven. Whatever his skills as a music historian, Lomax was a ham-fisted writer, at least as it came to radio dialog. With the exception of Guthrie's relaxed, entertaining segment on the Dust Bowl and the Golden Gate Quartet's closing gospel sermon-in-miniature about Noah and the Flood, which sounded as if it were being delivered direct from a Baptist Church, most of the show was leaden and artificial. It was all very "merry" and "jolly" Lomax would later write sarcastically, and had little of the authentic voice of America he wanted.

Typical of the pseudo-folksiness in the first episode was a lengthy segment starring Len Doyle, sometimes described as a "cornpone comedian" in accounts about the pilot. In reality the cornpone was being supplied by Lomax, and Doyle was actually a journeyman character actor who would later move on to the popular Mr. District Attorney crime drama that same year, and stay with that show for a 12-year run. Doyle was probably relieved to find a better gig than "The Natural-born Expert" role he had been saddled with on Back Where I Come From. "The Natural-born Expert" was a particularly irritating "done-everything and knows-it-all" character, delivering his pronouncements in a W.C. Fields-like voice, and was apparently conceived by Lomax as a foil for Guthrie, who dryly interrupts Doyle's "Now, you take me-" blustering with, "Brother, I wouldn't take you to a Sunday dance."

Happily, there are genuine nuggets in the show too, especially its major production number, intermingling Woody's So Long, It's Been Good to Know You with dramatic vignettes illustrating people's response to the Great Dust Storm of 1935.

[So Long, It's Been Good to Know You - Woody Guthrie and cast]

The pilot of Back Where I Come From was generally regarded as a success by CBS execs., who took the unusual step of moving ahead with the series even though the show had been unable to secure a sponsor. We might take a moment to reflect on this: Here's an experimental show on folk music, hosted by a New York intellectual, with a cast of relatively unknown black and white artists, some of whose politics is a bit Red, and all sharing the stage on a equal footing. The show can't find a sponsor... and the network decides to put it on the air anyway. Somehow you can't imagine that happening today.

In any case, Woody, who had been paid $83 for doing the pilot, found himself an overnight radio sensation thanks to Back Where I Come From. In close order Guthrie was invited to sing on a CBS talent show and offered three hundred dollars to write and perform a ballad about Wild Bill Hickok for a new NBC radio series. But both offers were topped by the Model Tobacco Company, who wanted Guthrie as host for its weekly show on CBS, Pipe Smoking Time. Pipe Smoking Time offered $200 a week, and with an agreement that Woody could keep his role on Back Where I Come From, which paid $150 a week, Guthrie's income had gone from problematic to healthy in a matter of days.

But not without problems. Back Where I Come From began as a regular program in late September 1940, and by the end of the month Woody Sez - Guthrie's popular column for the U.S. Communist Party's newspaper The Daily Worker - was discontinued without explanation. A spokesperson for the Party said it had been done by mutual agreement. Guthrie later claimed he had been fired for being "too wild." The truth might have been that the Daily Worker wasn't happy about having a people's columnist who was also going to flog tobacco for a capitalist boss.

Or maybe Woody was feeling overstretched and guilty. Certainly he started acting as the gadfly on Back Where I Come From, where he had much more influence than the tightly controlled Pipe Smoking Time. Less than a month after the series start, Guthrie was threatening to quit over what he felt was Nicholas Ray's obstructionist attitude towards Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Leadbelly. Ray wasn't enthusiastic about Leadbelly's appearances on the show, feeling that his thick accent was incomprehensible to a white audience. Worse, Leadbelly was functionally illiterate, meaning that he couldn't read the lines scripted for him. Woody didn't care; he wanted his friend to have a regular role on the show. And if he didn't, then neither would Woody. Lomax arranged a long-distance compromise, and show regular Josh White ended up reciting Leadbelly's spoken lines, while Leadbelly himself continued to sing his songs.

But still in conflict with Ray about almost every facet of the show, Guthrie quit in late October, eventually missing a few episodes before Lomax again stepped in as mediator between the two. Guthrie would return and eventually take on a larger role in Back Where I Come From, narrating several shows, including what would become Nicholas Ray's favorite, a December 6th episode on the 13th Amendment.

In the interim, Pipe Smoking Time with Your Host Woody Guthrie had begun its run in November of 1940, and Woody found that the Model Tobacco Company was a much harsher boss than Lomax and Ray. Guthrie was almost immediately sickened by the compromises he was forced to make - including singing a rewritten version of So Long as the show theme - and by the end of the year he had had enough of radio. In early January 1941 Woody sent off an "I Quit!" letter to Nick Ray. He may have done the same with Pipe Smoking Time's producers. The record is unclear about whether he was fired, quit, or simply walked away from the program after only seven episodes. In any case, he was gone, "lit out again," as he would write to Lomax.

"Money sometimes takes on the appearance of a something that's used to put monkeys in your head." - Woody Guthrie

Typically, Woody Guthrie would bounce between a desire for commercial success and then do his best to sabotage his own chances whenever success seemed within his grasp. By February 1941, he was writing an apologetic letter to Nicholas Ray from California, asking for his old job on Back Where I Come From. But the show - still without a sponsor - had been canceled by CBS, and that was that.

Fast-forward some 20-odd years later, and Bob Dylan is visiting Alan Lomax's loft on West 3rd Street in New York City, where as Dylan would relate, "I spent many nights... listening to and meeting all kinds of folk music people which I never would have come in contact with." One of those "folk music people" Dylan would meet would be Carla Rotolo, Lomax's personal assistant, who would go on to introduce him to her younger sister Suze. Both Rotolo and Lomax's daughter, Anna, remember Dylan as a regular visitor to the apartment, spending much of his time digging his way through Lomax's extensive music collection, which almost certainly contained recordings of the Back Where I Come From program. You can imagine the 20-year-old pausing as he studied a label for a radio show that aired the year before he was born and starred his hero, live, and at the height of his powers.

"Can I listen to this?" Bob Dylan asks.

Fast-forward another 40-odd years, and now we're in the realm of pure fantasy, but imagine: We're still in New York City, in a large room in Greenwich Village, four or five people talking. Jeff Rosen is almost certainly there. Maybe Eddie Gorodetsky. Maybe one or two others of the small trusted cadre.

"Well, we know what sort of music we want to play," someone says. "But we need something to tie it all together, I dunno, some sort of-"

Bob Dylan, who doesn't do meetings well, is bored, staring out the window, thinking of the old days in this city, thinking of the apartment he used to visit on a cold, snowy New York day like this.

"- a theme," someone interrupts. "Exactly."

And the Man Who Never Forgets Anything Connected to Music swings his cowboy boots off the table, clears his throat and says, "Ya got it. We're gonna do a theme radio show. Things like 'Marriage,' 'Trains,' 'Animals.' All songs connected to that theme."

Thinking 40-odd years back, Bob Dylan laughs. "And the first show has got to be about the weather," he says.


Sources and Further Reading/Listening: Dreamtime wants to thank the reader/listener who sent us an email that set us on the trail of Back Where I Come From and who prefers, as the saying goes, to remain anonymous. But you know who you are, and this episode is dedicated to you with my thanks.

Woody Guthrie's involvement with the Back Where I Come From and Pipe Smoking Time radio shows during 1940-41 is noted in both Joe Klein's Woody Guthrie: A Life, and Ed Cray's Ramblin' Man. Although neither biography has a particularly detailed description of that four-month period, with the two together I was able to piece together what I think is an accurate time-line.

Bob Dylan's meeting Carla Rotolo and his frequent visits to Alan Lomax's apartment are well-chronicled in several places including, if you'll forgive the pun, Dylan's own Chronicles: Volume One. Anna Lomax's recollection of Dylan's visits to the apartment are from Howard Sounes' Down the Highway.

I was pleased to find that the pilot "Weather" show of Back Where I Come From is in wide circulation among collectors, and is available as a torrent on the Web in a number of locations, including hungercity.org. Readers may also be interested in this transcription of Guthrie's So Long segment from that show.

Although only one man can tell us whether the idea for TTRH was born from Back Where I Come From, consider whether all this can be chalked up to coincidence. Both shows' pilots were on "The Weather," and both shows have had episodes on marriage, trains, and animals. Bob Dylan was a frequent visitor to Alan Lomax's apartment as well as being a major fan of Woody Guthrie, and was known to immerse himself in Lomax's music collection whenever he had the opportunity. All that makes the possibility shift from "likely" to "near-certainty," in my opinion. I'm a poker player, and I would happily shove my entire stack into the pot on that much circumstantial evidence.

***
Back Where I Come From timeline

August (19) 1940 - Pilot from "Forecast" series for BWICF.

August 1940 - Guthrie signs BWICF series contract for $150 per week. Model Tobacco offers him hosting job on NBC's Pipe Smoking Time starting in November 1940 at around $200 per week. Offers includes agreement that Woody can continue gig with BWICF.

(Late) September, 1940 - BWICF begins airing for 15 minutes at 10:30 p.m. on MWF evenings on CBS. Show is unsponsored.

September 1940 - Woody's Daily Worker Woody Sez column ends without explanation. CWP spokesperson says "mutual agreement." Woody would later claim he was fired because he was "too wild" for the Party.

September/October? 1940 - Woody in conflict with Ray over Leadbelly and threatens to walk off show. Lomax provides compromise.

Late October 1940 - Guthrie quits BWICF because of continuing conflicts with Ray.

Nov (1) 1940 - Lomax letter writes to Woody to get "his side of story" on conflicts with Ray, and offers to again act as mediator between them. Guthrie returns to BWICF after missing at least one show and becomes narrator for many of the following shows.

Nov( 25) 1940 Pipe Smoking Time program with Woody as host begins.

Dec (6) 1940 - Woody narrates BWICF episode on the anniversary of 13th Amendment's ratification. Ray later recalls it as BWICF "at its very best."

Jan (1) 1941 - Most of cast from BWICF plays fund raiser at Will Geer's house.

Early Jan 1941 - Woody sends notice to Ray at BWICF and quits/is fired from PST radio show. He and the family return to California.

February 1941 - Woody writes to Ray asking for his BWICF job back; Ray replies that show has been canceled.

***

You've been listening to the Dreamtime podcast – occasional commentary on Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour. Dreamtime is researched and written by Fred Bals and is a Not Associated With production. As the name says, we're not associated with XM Radio, Bob Dylan, or much of anything else.

Some of the music on Dreamtime is provided via the Podsafe Music Network. Check it out at music.podshow.com.

Remember that the Dreamtime team loves to get email. You can write us at dreamtimepodcast@gmail.com

The Dreamtime top cats are Curly Lasagna and Shaggy Bear. Our announcers are the notorious honky-tonkin' sisters, Jailbait and Joyride.

Until next time, dream well.

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Episode 37 - Chasing The Rising Sun

Left: E. J. Bellocq 1873-1949 Untitled [Prostitute, Storyville, New Orleans] c1911-13

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I: That girl from Kaintuck

"Georgia, hurry up! He's at Cadle's!"

"Okay, mama," Georgia Turner answers, wiping her hands on a dish cloth. The sixteen-year-old's birthday is today, September 15, 1937. She and her mother walk out of the log house onto the dirt street of Noetown, a poor shanty neighborhood of Middlesboro, Kentucky.

They're going to go sing at Tillman Cadle's house. A man has come down from Washington, D.C. to hear the old music. Mary Gill Turner is known in the neighborhood for her religious songs. The blond-haired Georgia, who always seems to be singing, likes ballads and the blues best.

They pass a muddy Studebaker as they approach the Cadle home. Automobiles are still a rare enough sight in Noetown that Georgia pauses for a moment to look inside. She's never ridden in a car.

The two join the crowd, centered around a young man, not that much older than Georgia. But he's treated with deference, as much for being the master of the bulky piece of machinery he's working over as anything else.

Alan Lomax's Presto disc recorder had been supplied by The Library of Congress for his first solo field recording expedition. The Presto was billed as a portable model, but at 350 lbs, was "portable" only in a copywriter's imagination, handle or not. Lomax traveled with the machine in the back of his Studebaker. In order to record in places where there was no electricity, like Noetown, Lomax used the Studebaker's battery, which he attached to a transformer, which in turn was attached to an amplifier. Lomax was finishing the last connection from amplifier to Presto when Georgia and her mother walked in.

Mary Gill sang a few songs into Lomax's machine, and then it was Georgia's turn. Lomax lifted another of the massive, black, glass platters onto the machine and beckoned Georgia over. She began with an old standard, Married Life Blues. Then she leaned into Lomax's microphone and began another song, first tentatively, then more strongly, as the sadness of the story seemed to take over her voice.

There is a house in New Orleans
they call the Rising Sun.
It's been the ruin of many a poor girl
and me, oh God for one.

II: On to New York and Over the Pond

Georgia Turner's The House of the Rising Sun, which she called Rising Sun Blues, wasn't the first recording of the song; that's probably Clarence Ashley's of 19 and 33, nor the most famous - we'll talk about that one a little later on. But it's the one that inspired most of the later folk renditions of Rising Sun, as well as the Animal's ground-breaking folk-rock version that reportedly caused Bob Dylan to jump out of his car in excitement when he first heard it on the radio.

No one knows where Turner first heard the song. Her home in Noetown didn't have electricity, let alone a radio or phonograph, so it's unlikely that she had heard one of the recorded versions. Ted Anthony, in his recent brilliant book tracking the song, Chasing the Rising Sun, speculates that Georgia may have heard the song direct from Clarence Ashley's lips as he performed it on the medicine show circuit. There's some evidence to back that theory. The song was obviously known in the area and being passed from singer to singer. Three weeks after meeting Georgia Turner, Lomax would be fifty miles north of Noetown and recording a man named Bert Martin, who sang a slightly different version of Rising Sun. Lomax would use Martin's extra lyrics to fill out Georgia Turner's version and credit her with the song in his collection, Our Singing Country, which was published in 1941.

By the late `50s, the song was already a folk standard, having been added to the portfolios of Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Josh White, and Pete Seeger, among many others. In 1957 the music, guitar chords, and lyrics were published in Sing Out!, a folk music `zine with an influence far beyond its raw production values. Sing Out! was one of the primary sources for the booming folkie revival of the late `50s and early `60s. If you couldn't lay your hands on an original of the magazine, you'd likely have a mimeograph copy of the song sheets to learn the music for your next coffee house gig or hootenanny.

With changed chords and a descending bass line, Rising Sun became one of Greenwich Village folk icon Dave Van Ronk's signature pieces during the early `60s, impressing the young Bob Dylan so much that he recorded his own take on the Van Ronk version for his first album, Bob Dylan. Unfortunately Dylan waited until after the fact before asking Van Ronk's permission, and Van Ronk had had plans to record the song himself. And even more unfortunately, Rising Sun became so closely associated with Dylan in the folk community that Van Ronk had to stop singing the song or listen to snide remarks that it was a pretty good cover but much too close to Dylan's version.

"Now that was very, very annoying," Van Ronk noted, with just a trace of irony. But Van Ronk would see Dylan himself forced to stop playing the song after the Animals' 1964 mega-hit became the definitive version - an electric rendition based on Dylan's cover of Van Ronk... or was that Georgia Turner... or Clarence Ashley?

III: Another Shot Fired in the British Invasion

About two years after the Animals' release of Rising Sun, I was in my freshman year at a boarding school. One of my dorm mates had taken up the electric guitar, and the first piece of music he learned was the famous seven-note, A-minor chord arpeggio that begins House of the Rising Sun. For a good part of that year, our adult dorm master was treated nightly to an unlikely chorus of seven 14-year-olds soulfully lamenting their misfortune in visiting that house in New Orleans.

There are various stories about where the idea came from - sources claim the Animals decided to record Rising Sun after hearing either Dylan's, or Josh White's, or Nina Simone's versions - but the band knew it needed a memorable signature song for a spring 1964 tour where they would be on the same bill as Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis. They wanted something that would separate them from the pack and make the audience remember them. Something different, because, as Eric Burdon puts it, "You can't outrock Chuck Berry."

Someone in the band - maybe Eric Burdon, maybe Alan Price, depending on whose story you want to believe - suggested Rising Sun and someone - maybe Alan Price again, if you believe him, maybe the band as a whole - developed the unforgettable electric arrangement.

The Animals joined the Berry-Lewis tour and, in their first night on-stage, closed the first half of the show with their first public performance of The House of the Rising Sun. It was one of those moments that performers dream about but seldom really experience. As the final notes of the song ebbed away and the sole spotlight on Burdon faded into darkness, the audience was silent. Then the applause started, and didn't stop.

The Animals recorded the song on May 18, 1964, under the supervision of an unenthusiastic Columbia label producer, who felt that a four-and-a-half minute single was about a minute-and-a-half too long to have any chance to make it to the charts. He was - of course - dead wrong. House of the Rising Sun would become a trans-Atlantic chart-buster, topping both the U.K. pop singles chart in July of 1964 and the U.S. pop singles chart in September, when it became the first British Invasion #1 hit that wasn't a Beatles tune.

Unfortunately, Rising Sun would generate ill feelings among the Animals that would eventually break up the group and rankle the ex-members to this day. Again, someone - the record is unclear but most fingers point to the group's then-manager - told the band that they couldn't all be credited on the 45 single and suggested they just use organist Alan Price's name alone and sort out the royalty percentages later. It didn't occur to the financially naive musicians until after the fact that they could have used "Trad. Arr: The Animals," but the single was released as "Trad. Arr: Alan Price."

Alan Price's official web site notes, "...Price’s hypnotic arrangement of the band's epic version of The House of the Rising Sun was released in June 1964 and went on to become a worldwide smash..." Eric Burdon acknowledges that Price played a major role in the arrangement's development, but claims that ultimately it was a group effort. Less than a year after Rising Sun hit the charts, Alan Price had left The Animals. Some members of the group suspected he left because he had enough money coming in from Rising Sun to strike out on his own.

The other band members never saw a penny from the publishing royalties. But Rising Sun was never a song to reward its various interpreters very well... at least not with money. Clarence Ashley was probably paid $25 and transportation for his recorded version. Alan Lomax spent a great deal time and effort tracking down Georgia Turner in the early `60s so he could offer her royalties from her 1937 recording. But all in all she probably received less than $1,000.

It's a hard-luck song.

Further Reading/Listening: This article was inspired by Ted Anthony's 2007 book Chasing the Rising Sun, Anthony's journey into the heart of that song, as well as into the heart of America itself. I highly recommend it. I should note that, while based on Anthony's report, my description of the meeting between Alan Lomax and Georgia Turner is a pure product of my imagination, and any errors are mine alone.

Georgia Turner's version of House of the Rising Sun (Rising Sun Blues) can be found on Alan Lomax's Popular Songbook The CD also contains Stagolee, Didn't Leave Nobody But The Baby (later popularized in O Brother, Where Art Thou?), and the original Sloop John B. Popular Songbook is a very good starting point for anyone wanting to explore more of the place I spend much of my time, at least in my imagination, the Old Weird America.

***

You've been listening to the Dreamtime podcast – occasional commentary on Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour.


Dreamtime is researched and written by Fred Bals and is a Not Associated With production. As the name says, we're not associated with XM Radio, Bob Dylan, or much of anything else.

Some of the music on Dreamtime is provided via the Podsafe Music Network. Check it out at music.podshow.com. The background music for the opening segment was Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, performed by Bill Furner.

Remember that the Dreamtime team loves to get email. You can write us at dreamtimepodcast@gmail.com

The Dreamtime top cats are Curly Lasagna and Shaggy Bear. Our announcers are the notorious honky-tonkin' sisters, Jailbait and Joyride.

Until next time, dream well.