Bob Dylan in America

Abstract

Sean Wilentz is the celebrated author of numerous books on the nineteenth century, including The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (2006), although he also published The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974–2008 (2008). In his other academic life he has explored popular music, including co-editing The Rose and the Briar: Death, Love, and Liberty in the American Ballad (2004) and receiving a Grammy Award nomination for the liner notes for the album The Bootleg Series, Vol. 6: Bob Dylan Live 1964, Concert at Philharmonic Hall (2004). In Bob Dylan in America he has drawn together seemingly all of his interests and knowledge to explore the life and meaning of one of the most influential musicians over the last half-century. Wilentz contributes significantly to an understanding of his life and music, particularly since the 1960s, and is particularly fascinating with his eclectic reach and knowledge, while adding his own personal memories and anecdotes. As he concludes, Dylan took traditional folk music, the blues, rock and roll, country and western, black gospel, Tin Pan Alley, Tex-Mex borderlands music, Irish outlaw ballads, and more and bent them to his own poetic muse… . His imagination and his voice blasted open by Beat aesthetics, Dylan then pushed his own reinventions of folk music into realms that were every bit as mysterious and mythic as the old traditional music, but in a pop sensibility of his own time that shocked the folk purists. (p. 334).