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PORTSIDE CULTURE

BOB DYLAN BIOPIC AND THE ORIGIN STORY OF AN ELECTRIFIED MAGGIE’S
FARM  
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Peter Dreier
February 16, 2025
Common Dreams
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_ The film, A Complete Unknown, accurately portrays Dylan's two
sides—a brilliant creative genius as a songwriter/poet and a
narcissist who used and discarded people on behalf of his ambition. It
tells a good story, but certainly not all the stories. _

Bob Dylan plays a Fender Stratocaster electric guitar for the first
time on stage as he performs at the Newport Folk Festival with
guitarist Mike Bloomfield on July 25, 1965 in Newport, Rhode Island.,
Photo by Alice Ochs/Michael Ochs Archives // Common Dreams

 

The remarkable Bob Dylan bio-pic _A Complete Unknown_ has been
nominated for eight Oscars—best picture, actor, supporting actor,
supporting actress, director, costume design, sound, and adapted
screenplay. The ceremony is scheduled for March 2, but the film,
released in December, has already been drawing enormous attention over
how true it is to Dylan’s early career, relationships, and music,
particularly the controversy over his performance of "Maggie's Farm"
at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, backed up by an electric blues
band. The film’s arc leads us to this crucial final moment, when he
steps on stage and sings, “I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no
more."

In the first stanza, Dylan sings, “Well, I wake up in the morning,
fold my hands, and pray for rain” and “It’s a shame the way she
makes me scrub the floor.” Then he complains that Maggie’s brother
“hands you a nickel, and he hands you a dime. And he asks you with a
grin, if you're havin' a good time.” Dylan’s protagonist clearly
hates the backbreaking work, the low pay, and the lack of respect he
gets from Maggie’s family.

Where did those ideas and images come from? What does the song tell us
about Dylan’s personal and political transformation represented by
his performance at Newport? And who was the real "Maggie"?

First some background.

Dylan was born Robert Zimmerman and raised in Hibbing, a mining town
in northern Minnesota, in a middle-class Jewish family. As a teen he
admired Elvis Presley, Johnny Ray, Hank Williams, and especially
Little Richard, and taught himself to play guitar. In 1959, he moved
to the Twin Cities to attend the University of Minnesota but soon
dropped out. He stayed in the area to absorb its budding folk music
and bohemian scene, began playing in local coffeehouses, and improving
his guitar playing. A friend loaned Dylan his collection of Woody
Guthrie records and back copies of _Sing Out!_ magazine, which had
the music and lyrics to many folk songs. He read Guthrie’s
autobiography, _Bound for Glory_, and learned to play many of his
songs.

By then young Zimmerman had changed his name (apparently after Welsh
poet Dylan Thomas) and had adopted some of Guthrie’s persona. He
mumbled when he talked and when he sang, spoke with a twang, wore
workman’s clothes (including a corduroy cap), and took on what he
believed to be Guthrie’s mannerisms. At first Dylan seemed to
identify more with Guthrie as a loner and bohemian than with Guthrie
the radical and activist. Soon after Dylan arrived in New York City in
January 1961 at age 19 he visited Guthrie, then suffering from
Huntington’s disease, in his New Jersey hospital room.

At the time, New York’s Greenwich Village was the epicenter of the
folk music revival, a growing political consciousness, and (along with
San Francisco) the beatnik and bohemian culture of jazz, poetry, and
drugs. The area was dotted with coffeehouses, some of which charged
admission fees and others which allowed performers to pass the hat
while customers purchased drinks and sandwiches.

Dylan made the rounds of the folk clubs, making a big impression. His
singing and guitar-playing were awkward, but he had a little-boy charm
and charisma that disarmed audiences. Dylan’s initial repertoire
consisted mostly of Guthrie songs, blues, and traditional ballads. At
the time, he began weaving a myth about his past, including stories
about being a circus hand and a carnival boy, having a rock band in
Hibbing that performed on television, and running away from home and
learning songs from black blues artists. He was, as he continued to do
throughout his life, reinventing himself.

Dylan was never comfortable being confined by the “protest” label
and being called the “voice” of his generation. He disliked being
a celebrity, having people ask him what his songs meant, and being
viewed as a troubadour who could represent American youth.

Between 1962 and 1965, Dylan wrote more than a dozen songs that
reflected the turmoil of the period. These included “The Ballad of
Emmett Till,” about a fourteen-year-old African American who was
beaten and shot to death in Mississippi in 1955 for whistling at a
white woman. It was Dylan’s first “protest” song. To this he
soon added “Talkin’ John Birch Society Blues” (poking fun at the
right-wing organization), “Let Me Die in My Footsteps” (a critique
of the Cold War hysteria that led Americans to build bomb shelters),
“Oxford Town” (about the riots by white students after James
Meredith became the first Black student admitted to University of
Mississippi), “Paths of Victory” (about the civil rights marches),
and “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” (about the fear of nuclear war,
which he premiered at a Carnegie Hall concert a month before the Cuban
missile crisis made that fear more tangible).

In 1963, Dylan also wrote “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll”
(based on a news story from earlier that year about the death of a
black barmaid at the hands of a wealthy white man), “Who Killed
Davey Moore” (about a black boxer who died after a brutal match),
“Talkin’ World War III Blues” (about the threat of nuclear
annihilation), and “Masters of War” (a protest against the arms
race).

Dylan borrowed the tune from “No More Auction Block,” an
anti-slavery Negro spiritual, for what would become his most famous
song, “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

Dylan recorded “Blowin’ in the Wind” on his second album, _The
Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan_, released in May 1963, but it was the
version released a few weeks later by Peter, Paul, and Mary that
turned the song into a nationwide phenomenon. The single sold 300,000
copies in its first week. On July 13, 1963, it reached number two on
the _Billboard_ pop chart, with over a million copies sold. Millions
of Americans learned the words and sang along while it was played on
the radio, performed at rallies and concerts, and sung at summer camps
and in churches and synagogues.

Unlike Dylan’s songs that were ripped from the headlines about
specific events, “Blowin’ in the Wind” suggested broad themes.
Dylan‘s three verses achieve a universal quality that makes them
open to various interpretations and allows listeners to read their own
concerns into the lyrics. “How many times must the cannonballs fly
before they’re forever banned?” and “How many deaths will it
take till he knows that too many people have died?” are clearly
about war, but not any particular war. One can hear the words “How
many years can some people exist before they’re allowed to be
free?” and relate them to the civil rights movement and the recent
Freedom Rides. “How many times can a man turn his head pretending he
just doesn’t see?” could refer to the nation’s unwillingness to
face its own racism, or to other forms of ignorance. The song reflects
a combination of alienation and outrage. Listeners have long debated
what Dylan meant by “The answer is blowin’ in the wind.” Is the
answer so obvious that it is right in front of us? Or is it elusive
and beyond our reach? This ambiguity is one reason for the song’s
broad appeal.

“The Times They Are a-Changin’” was also not about a specific
event but broadly challenged the political establishment on behalf of
Dylan’s youth cohort. The finger-pointing song is addressed to
“senators, congressmen,” and “mothers and fathers,” telling
them that “there’s a battle outside and it is ragin’” and
warning them, “don’t criticize what you can’t understand.”
Dylan’s lyric “For the loser now will be later to win” sounds
much like the biblical notion that the meek shall inherit the earth,
or perhaps that America’s black and poor people will win their
struggle for justice. Like “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “The Times
They Are A-Changin’” became an anthem, a strident warning, angry
yet hopeful. It came to symbolize the generation gap, making Dylan the
reluctant “spokesman” for the youth revolt.

Dylan’s third album, also called _The Times They Are a-Changin’_,
was recorded between August and October 1963 and included the song
“North Country Blues,” which draws on Dylan’s Minnesota
upbringing and describes the suffering caused by the closing of the
mines in the state’s Iron Range, turning mining areas into jobless
ghost towns—a theme that Bruce Springsteen would reprise years
later. Remarkably, Dylan tells the tale from the point of view of a
woman.

By 1963, Dylan was a super-star, aided by his manager Albert Grossman
(who got him a recording contract) and other performers (including
Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, and Peter, Paul, and Mary) who recorded
Dylan’s songs and popularized them to wide audiences. Dylan, Baez,
Peter, Paul, and Mary, and Odetta were invited to sing at the August
1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Martin Luther
King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.

But Dylan was never comfortable being confined by the “protest”
label and being called the “voice” of his generation. He disliked
being a celebrity, having people ask him what his songs meant, and
being viewed as a troubadour who could represent American youth. In
1963, before singing “Blowin’ in the Wind” at Gerde’s Folk
City in Greenwich Village, Dylan explained, “This here ain’t a
protest song or anything like that, ‘cause I don’t write protest
songs…I’m just writing it as something to be said, for somebody,
by somebody.” Dylan may have been being coy or disingenuous, but it
didn’t matter. The song caught the wind of protest in the country
and took flight. Her later told Phil Ochs, who continued to write and
perform topical songs and to identify with the civil rights and
anti-Vietnam war movements, “The stuff you’re writing is bullshit,
because politics is bullshit. You’re wasting your time.”

In 1965, the Newport Folk Festival invited Dylan to be the closing act
on Sunday night, June 25. He agreed, but insisted on singing a few
songs backed by an electrified blues band. There is much controversy
about what actually happened before, during and after his
performance. _A Complete Unknown_—based on Elijah Wald’s 2015
book, _When Dylan Went Electric:_ _Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the
Night That Split the Sixties—_shows Seeger agonizingly trying to
persuade Dylan to stick to his acoustic music. When Dylan insists on
performing with his rock-and-roll back-up band, Seeger is visibly
upset, but it isn’t clear if he actually tries to pull the plug on
the amplified sound or is mainly angry that the sound system isn’t
adequate to blast such loud music. The person in the film who appears
most shaken up by Dylan’s performance is Alan Lomax, the eminent
folklorist who played a major role in aiding little-known rural blues
singers, mostly in the South, to gain more widespread attention.

Underlying the controversy is a debate about whether “folk” music
mainly involves traditional songs by everyday people or newly-written
songs about contemporary concerns by professional singers and
songwriters. It also involves whether performers who use amplified
electronic instruments are performing “folk” music. Even Seeger
and Lomax were big fans of Black blues musicians (like Howlin’ Wolf
and Memphis Slim) who played with electrified bands. In fact, the
black Chambers Brothers and the white Paul Butterfield Blues Band,
which backed Dylan, had already done electrically-amplified sets at
Newport on Sunday afternoon
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no complaints.

On stage, Dylan sang three amped-up songs—“Maggie’s Farm,”
“Like a Rolling Stone,” and a work-in-progress called “Phantom
Engineer” (which would eventually turn into “It Takes a Lot to
Laugh, It Takes a Lot to Cry,” on his sixth album, _Highway 61
Revisited_. His back-up band included three members of the Paul
Butterfield Blues Bank (guitarist Mike Bloomfield, bassist Jerome
Arnold, and drummer Sam Lay), Al Kooper on organ, an Barry Goldberg
(who died on January 22) on organ and piano.

Some audience members were not happy with Dylan’s new sound. A few
even booed. After performing those songs, Dylan stormed off the stage.
But Seeger and others persuaded him to return to the stage, where he
performed two songs with an acoustic guitar, “Mr. Tambourine Man”
and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” Many of those same audience
members who had booed his first set and cheered his second set no
doubt would eventually cheer for the upcoming wave of folk-rock music,
like the Byrds’ version of “Mr. Tambourine Man.” But it was
“all over now” between Dylan and the Newport Folk Festival. He
refused to return to that venue for 37 years.

One aspect of the Newport controversy was Dylan’s apparent rejection
of politically-oriented music. That was certainly the direction he was
heading. With occasional exceptions, he abandoned acoustic and
political music for rock and roll, country, blues, and gospel.

But the back story of “Maggie’s Farm”—and its double
meaning—is missing from _A Complete Unknown_ and from most
tellings of the Newport brouhaha.

On different occasions, Seeger said he liked Dylan’s song. That
shouldn’t be surprising. Seeger had recorded a traditional song,
"Penny's Farm," on his first solo album (_Darling Corey_) in 1950. He
often sang it [[link removed]] at
concerts. It is told from the perspective of a sharecropper protesting
the working conditions on the farm.

It was originally recorded on Columbia records as "Down on Penny's
Farm" [[link removed]] by the Bentley
Boys, a duo from North Carolina, in October 1929. That was a few days
before the Wall Street stock market crashed, triggering the Great
Depression. But the rural south was already facing a depression,
especially among sharecroppers.

Here the opening lyrics
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Bentley Boys’ song:

_Come you ladies and you gentlemen and listen to my song_
_I'll sing it to you right, but you might think it's wrong_
_May make you mad but I mean no harm_
_It's just about the renters on Penny's farm_

_[Refrain]_
_It's hard times in the country_
_Out on Penny's farm_

It continues:

_You go in the fields and you work all day_
_Way into the night but you get no pay_
_Promise you meat or a little lard_
_It's hard to be a renter on Penny's farm_

_[Refrain]_

_It’s hard times in the country_

_Out of Penny’s farm_

_Now here's George Penny come into town_
_With his wagon-load of peaches, not one of them sound_
_He's got to have his money or somebody's check_
_You pay him for a bushel and you don't get a peck_

_Then George Penny's renters, they come into town_
_With their hands in their pockets and their heads hanging down_
_Go in the store and the merchant will say_
_Your mortgage is due and I'm looking for my pay_

It is likely that Dylan heard the Bentley Boys' version, which was
reasonably well-known because Harry Smith had included it in his
three-record _Anthology of American Folk Music_, issued in 1952,
which helped spark the folk music revival during that decade. Dylan
was familiar with the songs on the _Anthology_ and recorded several
of them on his first album.

The first stanza and chorus of Dylan’s "Hard Times in New York
Town," as well as the tune, are borrowed directly from the Bentley
Boys' "Down on Penny's Farm."

Here's the opening words
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the tune [[link removed]] for Dylan’s
“Hard Times in New York Town”:

_Come you ladies and you gentlemen, a-listen to my song._
_Sing it to you right, but you might think it's wrong._
_Just a little glimpse of a story I'll tell_
_'Bout an east coast city that you all know well._

_[Refrain] It's hard times in the city,_
_Livin' down in New York town._

So, whether he learned the song from Smith's _Anthology_ or from
Seeger's album, it is clear that Dylan drew on "Down on Penny's Farm"
when he wrote “Maggie’s Farm.”

“Down on Penny's Farm" was based on previous songs. That’s the
folk tradition—borrowing and revising older songs. Woody Guthrie was
a master of the craft. Others who recorded the song, after Seeger,
include Jim Kweskin and Geoff Maldaur
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Merchant [[link removed]], and Roger
McGuinn [[link removed]] of the
Byrds.

There’s another twist to Dylan’s “Maggie’s Farm.” On July 6,
1963, Dylan traveled to Greenwood, Mississippi—in the heart of the
Delta—to perform at a voter registration rally sponsored by the
Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). He was joined by
Seeger, Theo Bikel, and the Freedom Singers. SNCC leader, and later
Congressman, John Lewis was there, too. You can see a clip
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performance in the 1965 documentary about Dylan, _Don't Look Back._

Dylan performed a new song, “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” about the
murder of Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers by a segregationist
thug, which occurred only a few weeks earlier, on June 12. The song
expresses Dylan’s outrage at the assassination of the civil rights
leader, but it also attacks the white Southern politicians and landed
aristocracy, who used Jim Crow to pit black and white workers against
each other to weaken both groups. In the song, Dylan revealed a
sophisticated analysis of the white ruling class’ divide-and-conquer
strategy, something that Martin Luther King discussed in some detail
in his March 1965 speech
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the Selma-to-Montgomery march for voting rights.

One stanza of the song captures Dylan’s perspective:

_The deputy sheriffs, the soldiers, the governors get paid_
_And the marshals and cops get the same_
_But the poor white man's used in the hands of them all like a tool_
_He's taught in his school_
_From the start by the rule_
_That the laws are with him_
_To protect his white skin_
_To keep up his hate_
_So he never thinks straight_
_'Bout the shape that he's in_
_But it ain't him to blame_
_He's only a pawn in their game_

The voting rights rally at which Dylan performed took place on a
cotton farm owned by the McGhee
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Magee) family who were deeply involved with SNCC’s local organizing
work. The family included six sons, one of whom, Silas, who had
organized to desegregate a movie theater, was shot in the face the
following summer by someone whom many believed was a Ku Klux Klan
member.

It is hardly a stretch to see that Dylan turned McGhee’s farm into
Maggie’s farm.

But what did he mean that he wasn’t going to “work on Maggie’s
farm no more”? [[link removed]] He
certainly wasn’t referring to the McGhee family, whose courage Dylan
surely admired. The words refer to his involvement in civil rights
movement and politics more broadly.

At the end of the song, Dylan says,

_Well, I try my best to be just like I am_
_But everybody wants you to be just like them_

This is Dylan's way of telling his fans, and the broader public, that,
having written many protest songs about civil rights and war in his
still-early career, he was no longer going to be a protest singer and
didn't like being pigeonholed that way. That was the message he was
sending at Newport when he went electric and performed “Maggie’s
Farm.”

In fact, Dylan wrote few politically oriented songs after that. By his
fourth album, the aptly titled _Another Side of Bob Dylan_, he had
decided to look both inward for his inspiration and outward at other
kinds of music. He began to explore more personal and abstract themes
in his music and in his poetry. He also became more involved with
drugs, alcohol, and religion. His songs began to focus on his love
life, his alienation, and his growing sense of the absurd. In
subsequent decades, Dylan would reinvent himself several more times.

Even after 1965, however, Dylan occasionally revealed that he hadn’t
lost his touch for composing political songs. His “Subterranean
Homesick Blues” references the violence inflicted on civil rights
protestors by cops (“Better stay away from those/That carry around a
fire hose”) but also reflected his growing cynicism (“Don’t
follow leaders/Watch the parkin’ meters”). The extremist wing of
Students for a Democratic Society took their
name—_Weatherman_—from another line in that song (“You don’t
need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”). Other songs,
such as “I Shall Be Released” (1967), the Guthrie-esque “I Pity
the Poor Immigrant” (1967), “ George Jackson” (1971),
“Hurricane” (1975), “License to Kill” (1983), and “Clean Cut
Kid” (1984) indicate that Dylan still had the capacity for political
outrage.

_A Complete Unknown_ captures the mood and the music of the first few
years of Dylan’s ascendency. Timothee Chalamet as Dylan and Edward
Norton as Seeger embody their characters, including their voices,
playing, looks, and performance styles. If the film gets people to be
more curious about Seeger, to listen to his songs and learn about his
life and legacy—that alone would be enough.

The movie accurately portrays Dylan's two sides—a brilliant creative
genius as a songwriter/poet and a narcissist who used and discarded
people on behalf of his ambition.

Though based on Wald’s extraordinary book, the film takes some
artistic liberties that bend or distort the truth. It underplays the
importance of his girlfriend Suze Rotolo, a committed leftist, in
educating Dylan about both literature and the civil rights movement.
It downplays the fact that Joan Baez was already famous when she met
Dylan and helped jumpstart his career by introducing him at music
festivals. Contrary to the film, Dylan never appeared on Seeger's
homespun educational TV show, "Rainbow Quest." Dylan did visit Woody
Guthrie in the hospital when he first arrived in New York, but Seeger
wasn't there. And Dylan's second visit with Woody, as depicted at the
end of the film, is entirely fictional.

But perhaps most disappointing is what the film left out—Dylan
playing on McGhee’s farm in Mississippi and at the March on
Washington, both in 1963. Had those incidents been included, we could
see that Dylan’s commitment to civil rights and activism , however
brief in the context of his long career, was more than rhetorical, and
contributed to his image as a protest singer.

_[PETER DREIER is the E.P. Clapp distinguished professor of politics
at Occidental College. He joined the Occidental faculty in January
1993 after serving for nine years as Director of Housing at the Boston
Redevelopment Authority and senior policy advisor to Boston Mayor Ray
Flynn. He is the author of "The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th
Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame" (2012) and an editor (with
Kate Aronoff and Michael Kazin) of "We Own the Future: Democratic
Socialism, American Style" and co-author of "Baseball Rebels: The
Players, People and Social Movements That Shook Up the Game and
Changed America" (2022).]_
 

* Bob Dylan
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* A Complete Unknown
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* Newport Folk Festival
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* folk music
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* Pete Seeger
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* Woody Guthrie
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* protest music
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* 1960s
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