Bob Dylan was born in Minnesota and thrived in NYC – yet his museum’s in Oklahoma
The question was blowin’ in the wind: why did the legendary songwriter allow his archives to go to a conservative “red” state in the southern US?
By Toby B. Hemingway
The Bob Dylan Centre in Oklahoma’s second-most populous city, Tulsa, features a permanent exhibition of the artist’s life and career.Credit: Getty Images for The Bob Dylan Center
As my packed plane lands at Tulsa International Airport, the passengers in the row before me look ready to see home. One rises to reveal a T-shirt emblazoned with the words: TRUMP GIRL. Here we go, I think to myself. Welcome to a red state. Red as in the colour of the Republican Party, for which Oklahomans overwhelmingly vote. Red is in the name, too; roughly hewn from the Choctaw words okla and humma, meaning “red people”. It’s also the colour of the dirt, carried by the Red River along the Texas border.
Tulsa’s Bob Dylan Centre opened in 2022. Why Tulsa? I wondered, like many Dylan fans. He was born in Minnesota and found fame in New York City. To place his archive here sounded as if he simply pushed it out of a jet, midway between coasts.
Dylan’s songs have called me from the comfort of my blue state, California. Blue for its politics – Democrat, mostly. Blue for its relaxed mood, its far-reaching cultural coolness, and the giant Pacific Ocean tracing its western flank: an ocean I crossed for good when youthful boredom and a fascination with American music lured me out of Melbourne 25 years ago.
This morning, waiting for the plane, I happened to read news of Oklahoma’s Republican school superintendent mandating Bible teaching in classrooms. Now I wonder what kind of society Bob’s led me to.
I head downtown first to the Greenwood Rising museum, which chronicles the history and brutal destruction of Black Wall Street, as Tulsa’s Greenwood neighbourhood was known. A few blocks away, a man is dancing, holding a handwritten sign that reads REGISTER TO VOTE, before a table bearing branding for the Woody Guthrie Centre, a large, red-brick building that adjoins the Bob Dylan Centre, and offering a clue to Dylan’s interest in Tulsa: the protest songs of Guthrie are fundamental to his early work.
I walk on, past a bright, new minor league baseball field on the corner of what was once one of the most prosperous all-Black neighbourhoods in the US. Greenwood thrived at the turn of the 20th century, when Black people were barred from doing business at white establishments. More than 40 all-Black towns once dotted Oklahoma.
Tulsa’s Greenwood Rising museum chronicles the brutal history of “Black Wall Street”.Credit: Alamy Stock Photo
Greenwood Rising opened in 2021, 100 years after a mob of white Tulsans – jealous at the area’s success making a mockery of popular notions of white supremacy, and enraged by false allegations of a Black man harassing a white woman in a lift – stormed the streets with weapons and flaming torches, burning the neighbourhood to the ground. Local authorities labelled the massacre a “riot”, pinning culpability on the victims and squandering any hope of insurance payments. The number of deaths was also under-reported; they are now estimated at 100-300 Black citizens of all ages.
The museum brings into focus not only how long and deep the scars of slavery run in the US, but also how connected this area is to the country’s other, foundational, original sin: the displacement of Native Americans. It also illustrates the complex layering of racial, social and political histories: most of the first Black Tulsans, for example, were either enslaved or recently emancipated by Native American masters.
Around sundown, a guitar store clerk tips me off to a local music club called the Mercury Lounge. The bar has a neighbourhood feel, walls plastered in old gig posters, with a small, corner stage. A pub-rock cousin, of sorts. Kelsey Waldon soon appears, wearing cowboy boots and a big hat. She sings straight up country tunes about love and loss.
I half expect to hear wolf-whistles from the crowd and for a fight to break out among a mob of soused fellas. But that’s not the spirit of the bar at all. There are pride flags; a large “You’re on native land” placard; a Black Lives Matter banner; and a T-shirt for sale emblazoned with the words: “Mammas don’t let your cowboys grow up to be racists.”
As I listen to Waldon roll through her set, I wrestle with how Tulsa is measuring up to my naive assumptions about Oklahoma. About all red states. This is much like any bar I’d ever played in, or gone to, for a gig in Los Angeles. Yet the battle for civility seems much more real here.
Country singer Kelsey Waldon.Credit: @kelseywaldon/Instagram
It’s the morning I’m scheduled to visit the Bob Dylan Centre. At a diner I find a discarded copy of the Tulsa World, reporting that a statue of country singer Merle Haggard was dedicated yesterday, in nearby Muskogee. This was in honour of his name-checking the town 55 years ago in his song Okie From Muskogee, even though Haggard was from California. “Okie” was a term used there as a pejorative for the many Oklahomans who fled to the state in the Dust Bowl-era of the 1930s.
It’s becoming more clear why Dylan might feel Tulsa gives his life’s work unrivalled context: a fitting backdrop to all the social and political themes his lyrics have consistently carried. How those winds of conflict and change he sang about seem to swirl around the US, tornado-like, with Oklahoma its eye.
Arriving at the Bob Dylan Centre, I note the street names: M. L. K. Jr Blvd and Reconciliation Way. I’m greeted by a guide who hands me my equipment for the audio component of the tour: an iPod and a pair of good headphones. Unlike in most museums, it is not optional, but pivotal. Once inside, I find myself lost in the audio, rarely removing my headphones. The downstairs gallery features a timeline of Dylan’s career, punctuated by deeper dives into the stories of six of his most iconic songs from across his first four decades of music-making.
This focus on the written word shows how Dylan’s able to balance multiple ideas within the one song. It’s humanising to see his tiny, exact penmanship.
Poring over fragments of notebook entries, manuscripts, wallet contents and other ephemera, all to the shifting soundtrack of such a perennially restless artist, is engulfing. It’s a wonder to see in detail how Dylan works, particularly the many scratched thoughts and lyrical drafts. This focus on the written word, not just the music, shows how he’s able to balance multiple ideas within the one song. It’s humanising to see his tiny, exact penmanship, struck through and written again and again. Some we now know to be phrases worthy of the Nobel Prize in Literature.
The experience is unexpectedly draining. After three hours, I am ready to be outside again. Out in these unknown parts of the US, for more exploration.
Muskogee is less than an hour’s drive south-east. Nestled on Agency Hill, the Five Civilised Tribes Museum looks like an old house. It was once home to the Union Indian Agency. Built in 1875, out of local stone, one year after the federal government consolidated its dealings with the Five Tribes of Native Americans. Now it stands alone as another colonial relic. Old trees hang low around the shrub-covered gates and the plot is dwarfed by the massive Veterans Affairs hospital next door.
Inside, small displays retrace the routes taken by almost 40 tribes on foot who were forced off their ancestral lands from as far away as northern California, Florida and the Canadian border, with a US soldier’s gun at their back. The most well-known tribes were from the south and are forever remembered as having walked the Trail of Tears. All were sent to Oklahoma, then termed Indian Territory. One large map draws lines from every point of Native eviction, fanned out like the spokes of a wagon wheel. I am standing, suddenly uneasily, in its hub, the epicentre of treaties, lands and names rewritten over three centuries.
Outside the Muskogee Civic Centre, a few freshly planted pansies are the only sign of the Merle Haggard statue’s dedication. Haggard’s likeness is perched on a bar stool, with an empty seat to his right. I sit down there for a moment. Just two Californians, in golden light, taking in an unencumbered view of the City of Muskogee Payment Centre across the street.
That night, the Los Angeles Dodgers are scheduled to play a series-deciding baseball game, so I head to a sports bar beside the Tulsa Drillers’ field to watch. I sit next to a woman in a Dodgers jersey and chat. As with anyone I spend more than a minute talking to in Tulsa, the name George Kaiser comes up. His Kaiser Family Foundation purchased the Dylan archives and built the centre, as well as Guthrie’s, among many other philanthropic ventures he is responsible for across Tulsa.
The Dodgers fan is from Los Angeles, too, but moved to Tulsa as part of a Kaiser-funded program called Tulsa Remote. It attracts digital nomads with a $US10,000 ($15,300) payment if they make the city their home for one year. “Ten grand goes a long way in Tulsa!” she gleefully announces. I ask if she’ll stay beyond the year. “I think I might,” she says. “Have you been to the Gathering Place?” she asks me excitedly about yet another Kaiser initiative. “You have to go!”
I arrive there a little later than planned. It’s 27 hectares of public parkland, curving along the Arkansas River, on the south end of town. The morning haze has lifted and “Lot full” signs are already posted outside the main parking lot. I park in an overflow area and start walking down a combined bike and pedestrian path toward the park. Over treetops I spot glimpses of large play structures, but never make it in. My flight leaves soon, so I turn back, passing people of all ages and ethnicities, strolling, running, riding, playing and chatting. Under a bright-blue prairie sky.
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