“Folk Music” goes in pursuit of Bob Dylan. In the end, though, America’s rich cultural history is the real subject of the book
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskThey discovered that the 22-year-old singer who seemed to touch the deepest chords of American history—the mournful accents of black slaves and hardscrabble Okie farmers, the rhythms of cowboy minstrels—was just a middle-class kid from Hibbing, Minnesota. He was a college dropout and, riskily for someone purporting to represent a strand of authentic Americana, a Jew.
In “Folk Music”, Greil Marcus doesn’t so much refute the accusation as reclaim it as a virtue. “The engine of his songs is empathy,” he writes in the introduction; “the desire and the ability to enter other lives.” Or, as Mr Dylan himself put it: “I can see myself in others.” From this perspective he is not an impostor but a medium, giving voice to the voiceless and articulating the inchoate yearnings of an age.
Mr Marcus is at his best in exploring this rootedness. The seven works his book is built around—the most recent is “Murder Most Foul”, released in 2020—all offer opportunities for extended riffs on assorted aspects of American life. He delights in flitting back and forth in time, disrupting any sense of chronology and threatening to bury the music beneath the weight of its antecedents. In this telling, each track contains multitudes .
In the end, though, America’s rich cultural history is the real subject of “Folk Music”; the details of Mr Dylan’s life become incidental, even distracting. Mr Marcus justifies his approach by quoting the bard himself. “I just don’t advertise my life,” Mr Dylan said in 2001. “I write songs, I play on stage, and I make records. That’s it. The rest is not anybody’s business.” The result is a book filled with genuine insights but somehow unmoored.
Which is a pity. For all Mr Dylan’s elusiveness, he is hardly self-effacing; his music distils his nuanced personality. Delivering pyrotechnic lyrics in gravelly tones, combining idealism with world-weary cynicism, the kid from Minnesota turned out to be a true American original.