83. I Pity the Poor Immigrant

My two favorite versions of I Pity the Poor Immigrant, neither of them on John Wesley Harding, treat that wonderful melody with respect, keeping it intact and weaving the matter of their reinterpretations around it. That’s what makes Take 4 off of last year’s Bootleg Series release, Travelin’ Thru, fascinating. I never even thought to imagine the song without that classic melody, but Bob did, and that short fast version, with its almost completely different melody, is excellent too. Had Take 4 been the one on the album (and John Wesley Harding, the opener, rearranged to fit, lest the two sound too similar), I Pity the Poor Immigrant would still have been a powerful song, and future covers and rearrangements would have used Take 4’s strong melody as their core instead.

But given the album as we know it, Bob made the right selection. After I am a Lonesome Hobo, the dustiest song on the album, the stately, sad procession of the album arrangement of I Pity the Poor Immigrant is just what's needed, and The Wicked Messenger, next on the tracklist, likewise thrives by contrast.

Of the two versions of I Pity the Poor Immigrant that I like even more than the album take, one locks in on the original’s stateliness and intesifies it. It’s by Angels of Light, from the period when the Angels were simultaneously an independent band called Akron/Family. Of all the singers in rock and folk music who have aspired at times to sound like prophets from the Hebrew Bible, the one who does it best, as far as I’m concerned, is Michael Gira. He’s got a deep, bloodied voice that, somewhere around 1995, in the Great Annihilator era, began to rise out of the somewhat affected or stylized (though still cool) voice of the earlier Swans albums, and turn into something more open, more vulnerable, and (in allowing these softer elements in) also harsher. By the time New Mother, the first Angels of Light album, came out in 1999, this fuller and more expressive voice had been perfected, and that’s the voice we hear lead Akron/Family aka Angels of Light through I Pity the Poor Immigrant.

Gira, as a songwriter, was no stranger to haranguing the subjects of his songs, so he’s well-trained in that too; and his harangues usually came from a place of degradation, so the tender moment in the song when the first person narrator suddenly becomes an object of the main character’s attention (as in, it’s not just “I pity the poor immigrant who…” anymore, but when the poor immigrant “turns his back on me”)—that moment feels appropriately painful, and it becomes clearer than in any of Dylan’s versions that both these figures, the narrator and the immigrant, are hurting. The difference is that the immigrant, in the midst of his misery and need, indulges in meanness despite, at some level, understanding the direction it’ll take him (and his town, and his neighbors), while the narrator, despite his own misery and need, understands the danger the immigrant is in, yet cannot warn him off his course.

As for the instrumental side of the Angels’ arrangement, it’s a fuller-bodied folk-rock, more countryside than the wasteland where John Wesley Harding is set, with the lead guitar adapting the role Dylan’s harmonica plays on the original album. Fuller does not, of course (especially where John Wesley Harding goes), necessarily mean better; but it’s an interesting alternative, and in any case, the most significant factor is the singer.

My single favorite incarnation of the song returns possession to Bob’s hands: it hails from the 1976 Rolling Thunder Revue. I love the way the song seems to begin, work through the entire melody instrumentally (or rather, as Eyolf Østrem notes pointedly, not quite entire: the final line is purposefully left out), and then crash, slow-motion, to a halt. The little piece is immediately recognizable as I Pity the Poor Immigrant, and the Revue delivers the melody so winningly you could even think, “actually, sure, that’s all we needed”—but then the band comes back to life, you realize the pause was planned, and the vocals, those magnificent ’75/’76 vocals, come to the fore.

In the Revue’s hands, the song is a party number (recalling the mid-’70s fate of A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall). Treating it this way lovingly lifts up the melody, but you wouldn’t think it could work with the lyrics, except that the penultimate lines of each verse come, and the band slows down and drops out, and Dylan and Joan Baez hold the long notes, and right there, the sadness is back. But then the band gets going again and, once more, it’s a party—until the next break.

The lyrics, like all of John Wesley Harding, are playful, deceptive, gnomic, poetic, a mixture of the King James Bible and Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, a railroad-crossing of tones and vantage points. Like everything on the album but The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest, the lyrics are very concise; and yet they create an entire world, an uncertain world, on the brink of ending, or of being recreated anew. There’s a painful paradox there, since an immigrant is traditionally a figure who leaves the old home and comes to a new one so as to start a new chapter of existence, whereas the poor immigrant here—and he is poor only as in “pitiful,” not in the material sense; he has power (but uses it to do evil) and he has food to eat (but is not satisfied) and enough wealth to fall in love with—the poor immigrant is eaten by rancour and regret and is soon to bring his own life (and has all the while been busy bringing many others’ lives) to ruin: a Cain figure, who is bound to say at the end of all this that “My punishment is too great to bear.” But as with Cain, the realization will come too late: the gladness will have been achieved, the glass shattered.

And if the return to the old home that the immigrant wishes he hadn’t left has become, for some reason, a physical or psychological impossibility (money, at least, couldn’t have been the issue), soon the return to an untarnished, undegraded soul will be what’s impossible, the bridge from there to here exploded behind him.