Roberta Hatcher: My Highway 61 Revisited
Well at times ideas seem so absurd
But if you leave me in peace to play with words
I’ll give you something simple
Just a little rhyme
To amuse and to help to pass the time
Video: Mississippi John Hurt | Spike Driver’s Blues
Mississippi John Hurt used a syncopated finger picking style of guitar playing that he taught himself. According to the music critic Robert Christgau, “No one else has talked the blues with such delicacy or restraint.”
Mike Schneider: Stirring Up the “Great Folk Scare”
There’s nothing easy-going about the folk songs of the Greenwich Village revival, not the ones Dylan sang — a man-killing woman, catastrophic floods, a man driven insane by love — songs that taught him there’s nothing new on Earth.
Bob Dylan: Nobel Lecture
When awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, Bob Dylan gave no comment for two weeks, ignored the Academy’s calls, didn’t attend the ceremony, and collected the award in a hoodie four months later. But Dylan later sent them a rambling, 27-minute ode to literature.
Mike Schneider: Incompletely Known | Déjà vu Bob Dylan
The popularity and critical success — a not-easy-to-achieve combo — have to do not only with the singular genius of Dylan, an unknown 19-year-old bohemian who becomes the icon of an era, but also with the historical-cultural milieu in which the movie’s events — real and not — occurred.
Ted Olson: Bob Dylan and the creative leap that transformed modern music
Sixty years ago, on Halloween Night 1964, a 23-year-old Dylan took the stage at New York City’s Philharmonic Hall. He had become a star within the niche genre of revivalist folk music. But by 1964 Dylan was building a much larger fanbase through performing and recording his own songs.
Baron Wormser: Greening
The contest between Trump and Biden represents an allegory come to life of the two forms of consciousness: one candidate who espouses a derisive and divisive let-it-rip individualism that is indifferent to, among other things, truth, and one candidate who has spent a lifetime ministering to the needs of the Corporate State.
Baron Wormser: The System
Humankind never has been very aware of the consequences of their group actions, perhaps because large groups, in particular, are inherently thoughtless.
Raphael Falco: How Bob Dylan used the ancient practice of ‘imitatio’ to craft some of the most original songs of his time
Bob Dylan is both a modern voice entirely unique and, at the same time, the product of ancient, time-honored ways of practicing and thinking about creativity.
Barbara Hamby: Ode to Forgetting the Year
remember the day at the beach when the sun
began to explain Heidegger to you while thunderclouds
rumbled up from the horizon like Nazi submarines?
Video: Odetta | Waterboy
Martin Luther King Jr. called Odetta “The Queen of American Folk Music.”
Norman Solomon: Bob Dylan and the Ukraine Crisis
I’ve learned to hate the Russians
All through my whole life
If another war comes
It’s them we must fight
Baron Wormser: Conceit
If the great motive force in this world is love, how do we love the earth so that the harmony the earth embodies is acknowledged in daily life, to say nothing of adored?
