Where are Bob Dylan's grantparents from?
My mother gets regular letters from Turkish organizations and to my dismay she sends some of them to me, and though I discard most without even a second look this one had an excerpt from Bob Dylan's Chronicles. And it really made my day. Excerpts follow:
BOB DYLAN, CHRONICLES (Volume One), Simon & Schuster (Pages 92-93),
2004 (Copyright)
................................................................
................................................................
When I wasn't staying at Van Ronk's, I'd usually stay at Ray's place, get back sometime before dawn, mount the dark stairs and carefully close the door behind me. I shoved off into the sofa bed like entering a vault. Ray was not a guy who had nothing on his mind. He knew what he thought and he knew how to express it, didn't make make room in his life for mistakes. The mundane things in life didn't register with him. He seemed to have some golden grip on reality, didn't sweat the small stuff, quoted the Psalms and slept with a pistol near his bed. At times he could say things that had way too much edge. Once he said that President Kennedy wouldn't last out his term because he was a Catholic. When he said it, it made me think about my grandmother, who said to me that the Pope is the king of the Jews. She lived back in Duluth on the top floor of a duplex on 5th Stree. From a window in the back room you could see Lake Superior, ominous and foreboding, iron bulk freighters and barges off in the distance, the sound of foghorns to the right and left. My grandmother had only one leg and had been a seamstress. Sometimes on weekends my parents would drive down from Iron Range to Duluth and drop me off at her place for a couple of days. She was a dark lady, smoked a pipe.
The other side of my family was more light-skinned and fair. My grandmother's voice possessed a haunting accent-face always set in a half-despairing expression. Life for her hadn't been easy. She'd come to America from Odessa, a seaport town in southern Russia. It was a town not unlike Duluth, the same kind of temperament, climate and landscape and right on the edge of a big body of water.
Originally, she'd come from Turkey, sailed from Trabzon, a port town, across the Black Sea-the sea that the ancient Greeks called the Euxine-the one that Lord Byron wrote about in Don Juan. Her family was from Kagizman, a town in Turkey near the Armenian border, and the family name had been Kirghiz. My grandfather's parents had also come from that same area, where they had been mostly shoemakers and leatherworkers.
My grandmother's ancestors had been from Constantinople. As a teenager, I used to sing the Ritchie Valens song "In a Turkish Town" with the lines in it about the "mystery Turks and the stars above," and it seemed to suit me more than "La Bamba," the song of Ritchie's that everbody else sang and I never knew why. My mother even had a friend names Nellie Turk and I'd grown up with her alwats around.
There were no Ritchie Valens records up at Ray's place, "Turkish Town" or otherwise. Mostly, it was classical music and jazz bands.
That's right. Dylan's roots go back to Turkey. There is no bigger fan of Dylan than I. Ever since i heard "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carol" I've been in awe of the man. Lately I haven't got a cgance to listen to much of his music. I did get to see him on TV the other night. He was playing himself, on "Dharma and Greg." Talk about lame TV shows, but his voice was mesmerizing.
