We are very excited to be publishing Sean Wilentz' groundbreaking Bob Dylan in America. The book is the first to fully place Dylan in the context of American culture in the 20th century and is based on exclusive access to recording session tapes (notably the Blonde on Blonde sessions), rare photographs, as well as previously unused manuscripts.
Below are two fascinating entries by Sean on Dylan’s cultural influences:
Bascom Lamar Lunsford
One of the most striking lines in “Stuck Inside of Mobile (With the Memphis Blues Again)” on Blonde on Blonde runs: “all the railroad men just drink up your blood like wine.” Whether consciously of not, Dylan was rephrasing a line from “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground,” by the North Carolina clawhammer banjo great, folklorist — and lawyer and New Deal Democrat — Bascom Lamar Lunsford: “‘Cause a railroad man they’ll kill you when he can/ And drink up your blood like wine.”
In 1928, Lunsford helped organize the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival in Asheville, which is sometimes called the nation’s original folk festival. In 1935, the left-wing musicologist Charles Seeger accompanied his son Peter to the festival; and the experience helped make the young Pete Seeger a lifetime lover and performer of American traditional and folk music. Only a year earlier, Charles Seeger, writing under the pseudonymn Charles Sands, had praised in the Daily Worker the “undeniably revolutionary” Piano Variations of the still young and rising composer (and Seeger friend) Aaron Copland, who was still in his difficult, modernist dissonant phase. But with the advent of the Communist Party’s Popular Front in 1935, Seeger would become a champion of the American folk music he had once scorned, as would his son and, in his own way, Aaron Copland.
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Not too long before the Seegers attended the Asheville festival, Lunsford was filmed accompanied by a group of other musicians, in a performance of “Dogget’s Gap.” The song’s tune is similar to that of the more familiar “Cumberland Gap,” whose own melody descends from the old Scots ballad, “Bonnie George Campbell.” (In the film, Lunsford sings, dances, and plays the fiddle, not the banjo.) Decades later, the song would be recorded by Buffy Sainte-Marie as “Doggett’s Gap.”
T.S. Eliot in Minneapolis
When Bob Dylan was growing up, it was not unusual to hear great poets read their work in packed auditoriums. Robert Frost, Dylan Thomas (who toured the United States regularly), T.S. Eliot, all could be seen and heard in the flesh — and not just in the great coastal metropolitan centers. They also recorded their poetry for labels like Caedmon, and some of those recordings are still available.
Serious poetry was far more firmly embedded in American culture during Dylan’s formative years than it is now — a clue to Dylan’s awareness not just of Allen Ginsberg and the beats but of the entire range of modernist poets, whose work dated back to the early decades of the twentieth century.
On April 30, 1956, Eliot delivered a lecture at the University of Minnesota’s Williams Arena in Minneapolis — the largest collegiate basketball arena in the country. Entitled “Frontiers of Criticism,” the lecture expressed surprise that the so-called New Critics then in vogue had taken Eliot as their leading voice. But Eliot then proceeded to propound poetic principles that closely resembled those of the New Critics. The lecture later appeared in Eliot’s collection, On Poetry and Poets.
Here is a recording of Eliot on another occasion, accompanied by some striking photographs, reading his early poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”
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Zimmerman arrived for what proved his brief stint as an enrolled student at the University of Minnesota
Please click here to view more blog posts from Sean Wilentz. Bob Dylan in America will be published next Thursday by The Bodley Head.