Book Review: Dennis McNally, On Highway 61: Music, Race and the Evolution of Cultural Freedom

Abstract

Book Review: Dennis McNally, On 61: Music, Race and Evolution of Cultural Freedom. Berkley, CA: Counterpoint Press, 2015. ISBN: 978-1619025813 (Paperback). $16.95. 384 Pages.[Article copies available for fee from Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2016 by Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]Last November, Bob Dylan released latest volume of his Bootleg Series titled The Cutting Edge, 1965-1966, in multiple editions. most elaborate of these was an 18-CD edition purported to include every note recorded during Dylan's studio sessions of year and included nine different takes of his song Highway 61 Revisited, song was also title track of Dylan album released in 1965. It has in fact become something of touchstone among Dylan fans, one has been discussed and dissected as much for its figurative lyrics as for channeling famed highway.Highway 61 carries both historic and symbolic power in American popular culture. As Greil Marcus, journalist and cultural critic, documents in his examination of Dylan, Like Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at Crossroads, Bessie Smith, Queen of Blues, died on 61 in 1937, near Clarksdale, Mississippi, where Muddy Waters grew up and where, in 1910s and '20s, Charley Patton, Son House, and others made Delta blues; some have pretended to know Robert Johnson's 1936 'Cross Road Blues' was set right there, where 49 crosses 61. Elvis Presley grew up on 61, in Lauderdale Courts public housing in Memphis; not far away, road went past Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King was shot in 1968. (Marcus 2006, 166-7)Marcus notes most of Dylan's fans had probably never heard of 61 at time his album was released, but it is now subject of book by Dennis McNally, who has previously written biography of Jack Kerouac and books about Grateful Dead. McNally is publicist, lecturer, and, according to his LinkedIn page, music business multitasker. His new book won 2014 ASCAP Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson award for writing and has generated largely positive reviews from newspapers and periodicals.It is probably most accurate to note 61 serves as kind of motif for McNally's book rather than subject. McNally uses 61 as kind of template for an exploration of American culture, specifically influence of African American culture. In his introduction, McNally notes that [African American] culture, largely in its musical manifestations, carried forward message of in United States and allowed white people to see the intellectual shackles in their own lives and [learn] lessons those at bottom of social pyramid had to offer. effect of black on white people, he continues, did not always lead to overt changes, but to widening of vision, softening of heart, and an increase in tolerance. (1-2) McNally's discussion follows 61 northward from New Orleans to Minnesota, and encompasses chapters on Thoreau, Twain, minstrelsy, jazz, blues legends Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, and others before final section on how Bob Dylan absorbed and reflected many of these influences in his music, thereby carrying on improvisatory tradition established by African Americans in blues and jazz music, as well as representing a great flowering of influence of African American quest for freedom on arts. (428)So it probably goes without saying this is an ambitious book, one attempts kind of grand unifying theory connecting Bob Dylan with African American popular (a literal nexus of musical transformation transcending time and space, as he puts it) and traces development of a moral critique of American society and culture in light of concept of freedom. …