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Bob Dylan: Percy’s Song (1963)

Duration, distance, and repetition are critical here. The singer travels some distance to meet the judge, and when he achieves nothing, faces the same journey home. The song’s slow pace and limited action mirror his long drive. As his mission’s futility gradually sinks in, the song’s mood shifts from weary to despondent, its rain-and-wind refrain from stoic to cruel. “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” also written in 1963, uses similar song length, structure, and straightforward language to tell a story brimming with detail, as does 1964’s “My Back Pages,” but in Dylan’s lyrically abstract, stream-of-consciousness mode (perhaps by 1965, “Percy’s” orthodox form and prosaic language seemed stifling to its stylistically restless creator). The song creates a numbing sense of helplessness by slowing down the film, as it were, almost beyond endurance – like the aural equivalent of a Jim Jarmusch movie (without the humor) or a Bill Viola video (without the transcendence). The listener waits in vain for plot development, for a concrete injustice (beyond harsh punishment) or narrative twist that might assuage the trauma of forced and unexpected separation.

Time for Dividing

Fairport Convention in 1969 (clockwise from lower left): Simon Nicol, Iain Matthews, Ashley Hutchings, Richard Thompson, Sandy Denny, Martin Lamble

Like Dorsey Dixon’s “Wreck on the Highway” (1938), Dylan’s “Percy” suffers slightly from rhythmic stiffness (as does the 1970 folk-pop version by Arlo Guthrie) – a shortcoming remedied by the song’s own Roy Acuff in the form of England’s doom-haunted, electric folk pioneers, Fairport Convention, on their 1969 album, Unhalfbricking. Most famous for introducing singer/songwriter/musicians Richard Thompson and Sandy Denny to the world and blending British traditional music with rock, the original Fairport (a version of the band still exists, with no founding members) brought a lilting, dance-like feel to “Percy,” trading Dylan’s boxy 4/4 meter for a looser 3/4 sway. Essential to this shift was drummer Martin Lamble, whose inventive, jazzy style was a linchpin of the band’s early sound.

Fairport Convention: Percy’s Song (1969)

Fairport’s other stroke was to gradually build their arrangement from an a capella start to a full-band finish – adding guitar, bass, drums, dulcimer, and organ, one instrument at a time, so that volume and sonic richness increase verse by verse. Atop this backing, singer Sandy Denny gives one of her most moving vocal performances. The result is mesmerizing, haunting, heart-breaking.

But I knew him as good
As I’m knowing myself
Turn, turn, turn again
And he wouldn’t harm a life
That belonged to someone else
Turn, turn, to the rain
And the wind

“The narrator [in Dylan’s version of “Percy”] comes off as a grief-stricken kid who’s put out because a sentence can’t be overturned by a sincere character reference,” snarked music writer Tim Riley in an otherwise positive assessment of the song. Perhaps. But part of “Percy’s” power is its ability to conjure that first, epochal encounter we all experience with irreversible loss and its attendant agonies in a non-patronizing way. “Percy’s” subject may be a troubling social reality – the sometimes-irreconcilable collision between subjective character and objective law. But its true theme – present in Dylan’s version but perfected in Fairport’s – is the cold, flat, unyielding reality of loss. And part of life fully lived is re-experiencing that first shock and agony each time we lose someone new.

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