Only a Pawn in Their Game?: Bob Dylan and Trotskyism
Bob Dylan in the early 1960s is the subject of a good new film, Complete Unknown, but at this distance the politics of his early period have largely passed into history.
Dylan in the first years of the 1960s didn’t just sing protest songs he had far left politics. The lyrics of some of his earlier songs could not have been written as they were without an understanding of such a perspective.
Much of that work was inspired by Dave Van Ronk who was then and remained until his death in 2002 a (broadly) orthodox Trotskyist.
Dylan picked up a great deal from Van Ronk’s music- not least his re-working of House of the Rising Sun but his profound grasp of the politics of early 1960s America may well have owed something to Van Ronk as well. Several commentators have highlighted for example Dylan’s Only a Pawn in Their Game as a complex analysis of racism and the US white working class. It still has great relevance.
Van Ronk, again broadly, was the subject of the Coen Brothers film Inside Llewelyn Davies which featured both beards and cats. His Guardian Obit from 2002 is here:
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2002/feb/13/guardianobituaries
There is a good deal on this in a book by the late Mike Marqusee on Dylan and the 1960s,Wicked Messenger, a very good way to understanding where Dylan came from for those unfamiliar
Did not know that about Van Ronk! It confirms my suspicion that the story told by A Complete Unknown – that Dylan hung out on the protest scene long enough to become the best protest singer out there, and then got bored and moved on – was a fairytale. (Review here.)
The Coens’ Llewyn Davis is a kind of anti-Van Ronk, or a Van Ronk with Dylan’s personality – he’s shown as being in the right places at the right times, but by all accounts Van Ronk was much more of an organiser & activist, and also just a much nicer guy, than Llewyn D. (or Bobby D.).