A new life of Bob Dylan is one of the most insightful and revelatory books about the US, its culture and its people
Bob Dylan in America,By Sean Wilentz, The Bodley Head, 400pp. £20
HAVING WRITTEN and published some essays and commentaries on Bob Dylan, Sean Wilentz was invited by Dylan's office in 2001 to contribute an essay to accompany the release of the singer's forthcoming album Love and Death. The Princeton academic, historian and arts writer has since posted regularly on Dylan's official website and written Grammy award-winning sleeve notes to Bootleg Series Volume 6: Bob Dylan Live 1964, The Concert at Philharmonic Hall, an event Wilentz attended at the age of 13 with his father. "I tried to evoke a feeling of being a teenage cultural insider, self-consciously nestled as close to the centre of hipness as possible." Almost a Simple Twist of Fate.
Sean Wilentz grew up in Brooklyn Heights, and his family ran the famous 8th Street bookshop in Greenwich Village, a place that helped nurture the beat poets of the 1950s and the folk revivalists of the 1960s. “Nothing in that setting was anything I had sought out or had any idea was going to become important. As things turned out, I was lucky.”
He boarded the young Dylan's "magic swirling ship" early and stayed on board for the voyage. He wandered a little after Infidels, in 1983, when Dylan's music "seemed tired and torn as if mired in a set of convictions that, lacking deeper faith, were substituting for art", and returned to Dylan in the early 1990s, with the release of Good As I Been to Youand World Gone Wrong:"When my father fell mortally ill in 1994, having Dylan's breathy rendition of the 1830s vintage hymn Lone Pilgrimbrought tears and consolation.'' Dylan's ship is still in full sail, its course impossible to predict with, as Wilentz calls him, the "masked shape-changing American alchemist" at the helm.
An introductory quote from Walt Whitman sets the tone: “Only a few hints – a few diffused, faint clues and indirections. . . ”
Bob Dylan in Americais constructed in a seemingly random manner, not unlike Dylan's own Chronicles Volume One. Over 11 chapters it is ordered in five parts: Before, Early, Later, Interlude and Recent. Wilentz combines his deep musical knowledge with the skills of the fine historian to write one of the most important, insightful and revelatory books about America, its culture and its people, as interpreted through the works of one of its greatest artists. His book is a work both of deep scholarship and profound cultural engagement: a rare and marvellous achievement.
“For a professional historian, it was wildly thrilling to learn that Dylan discovered the cuneiforms of his art in the microfilm room,” Wilentz writes. He understands that Dylan knows his history but that “he does not think about the past with an eye to tracking dialectical abstractions, nor was he interested in looking backwards for pointers about the present or the future . . . What struck him most powerfully . . . was his realisation of the closeness between then and now, especially in America: that the distance was so small that it could fit inside an apostrophe, and that the songs on which he’d wagered his heart and voice collapsed the distance automatically”.
Wilentz recounts Dylan’s notion that the language of folk songs, an old living vocabulary, was a language “that was tied to the circumstances of blood” and of what happened over 100 years ago at the time of secession from the union.
Dylan absorbed more than a century of songs and the history that informed them: standing in an old listening booth, hearing a disc played once and immediately knowing it. Guthrie, Leadbelly, Blind Willy McTell, Doc Watson, Robert Johnson, Memphis Minnie, Bing Cosby, Frank Sinatra, Ricky Nelson, Liam Clancy, Thomas Moore and Paul Brady all found homes in his tower of song.
In Chapter 10, "Bob Dylan's Civil War", Wilentz writes: "Listening to the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem at the White Horse Tavern on Hudson Street, Dylan hears other kinds of songs drenched in history where even in a simple melodic wooing ballad, there would be rebellion waiting around the corner." Rebellion spoke to him louder than death: "He wanted to change over songs like The Minstrel Boyand Kevin Barryto have them fit an American landscape."
And so, searching for “some archaic grail to lighten the way for his song writing”, he went uptown to the New York Public Library and read about America in the Civil War era: “Not just what the historians had to say but the sources themselves” – primary sources, the heart of the matter.
IF YOUwant to know the facts consult the history books; if you want to know what it felt like ask a singer: so said the great song collector and archivist Frank Heart, and it is this relationship between fact and feeling that is at the heart of this book, the relationship and tension between the artist and the historian. From the Lone Pilgrimout of the shape note choral music in 19th-century sacred harp tradition, we journey Across the Green Valley, marching through Dan Emmett's Dixiethrough minstrelsy, blackface and vaudeville. Wilentz journeys on through the Popular Front, Aaron Copland's "enforced simplicity", quoting Stephen Foster's C amptown Racesalong the way.
Lionel Trilling, Charles Seeger, Pete Seeger, Lonnie Johnson, Kerouac and Ginsberg – Dylan first met Ginsberg in 1963 at the 8th Street bookshop owned by the author’s uncle – contribute to a long list of dramatis personae here. Dylan’s remarkable apprenticeship with Norman Raeben, the Jewish Mark Twain, who taught him “how to see” by putting “my mind and my hand and my eye together in a way that allowed me to do consciously what I unconsciously felt”, explains something of Dylan’s creative process.
This book sent me back to the shelves and out to the shed to take down records and songs I have not listened to for some time: the recordings from that period of astounding creative intensity book-ended by Blonde on Blonde,with Dylan beginning to substitute emotion for coherence.
Wilentz reintroduced me to Delia (All The Friends I Ever Had Are Gone), retuned my ear to really hear Everything Is Broken, We Live in a Political World, Highwaterand Arthur McBride. I read this book rolling and tumbling through Dylan's back pages hearing things I never heard before. I read this book with tunes running through my head; I journeyed all the way back home.
Philip King is a musician, writer and film director. He is the series editor of Other Voicesand is currently in preproduction on an Irish multimedia cultural project with music at its core. He is a member of the Arts Council and performs regularly with Scullion
