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Black Cross

BLACK CROSS
 
 
“Black Cross”  (AKA “Hezekiah Jones”, after the main character) is a poem by Joseph Simon Newman, published in his 1948 collection It Could Be Verse!.  Hezekiah was a poor black farmer, who worked his two acres of land; but he also saved up for and read books.  The poem was a signature piece of the American stage performer Lord Buckley.  Early in his career, Bob Dylan performed the poem, in slightly shortened form, as a spoken piece with guitar accompaniment in a style based on that of Lord Buckley.  Two amateur recordings exist; the Minnesota performance was released on the 1969 bootleg album Great White Wonder.  (More from Wikipedia)
 
 
Great White Wonder is probably the most famous bootleg album of all time and one of the earliest as well, being released in July 1969.  It is a double album with a total of 25 cuts – electric songs and acoustic songs, quiet songs and fast songs, guitar songs and piano songs, solo performances and others with a full rock band, a dramatic recitation of a poem called “Black Cross” (or “Hezekiah Jones”), an interview with Pete Seeger, and a strange story called “East Orange, New Jersey” where Dylan complains about playing in a chess club there and relates a dream he had where they paid him in chess pieces rather than money.  The music is fantastic, without question, but the album has a real personality as well.  It is a simply amazing album that is unlike any that I know of that have been released by Bob Dylan or anyone else. 
 
Great White Wonder opened up a whole world for me.  To me, many of these songs are now as familiar and as solidly in the Bob Dylan canon as anything that I have heard on the Columbia Records studio albums released in the 1960’s, “The Death of Emmett Till” (a great old-school protest song), “Only a Hobo” (my favorite song on Great White Wonder and one of the earliest songs by anyone about the plight of the homeless), “Black Cross”, “Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)”, “If You Gotta Go, Go Now (Or Else You Got to Stay All Night)”, “Poor Lazarus”, “Baby, Please Don’t Go”, “I Shall Be Released”, “Open the Door, Homer”, “This Wheel’s on Fire”, “I Ain’t Got No Home”, and “(As I Go) Ramblin’ ’Round” (the last two being Woody Guthrie songs) among them. 
 
(September 2017)