Bob Dylan in America (review)

When Bob Dylan played his first Massey Hall concert in Toronto in November 1964, he was already a star among the new “folk singers” of the time. He had released his first four albums, with their mix of folk and blues, ballads, broadsides, personal whimsy, imagistic poetry and social commentary. He had written a score of searing anthems and other songs that are permanently embedded in the memory tracks of the early 1960s. My own vague recollection is that the Toronto show was at least partly promoted by the Young Socialists, and the Toronto Star reviewer described it as “almost like a peace rally,” observing that various factions in the audience – “pacifists, socialists, beats and Dylanites” – each exploded in their own rounds of applause as he made his way through the familiar material, as well as several long new songs from the as yet unreleased Bringing It All Back Home. In settings such as this, Dylan was performing for what cultural historians would call a contemporary version of the “folk,” in this case an audience of like-minded people, not all of them young, who believed that Bob Dylan was the voice of their movement for social change. Although Sean Wilentz does not discuss this particular concert, it very much resembled the Halloween concert at Philharmonic Hall in New York City a few weeks earlier, which he attended as a teenager. Like many of us, Wilentz has continued to listen to Dylan, with greater interest at some times than at others, but always with an appreciation that somehow Dylan was one of our own, even when he went wrong. Almost half a century later, it is that shared history, and especially that moment of his emergence, that has continued to make Dylan a relevant subject of interest and curiosity – even fascination. Historians will take a special interest in Wilentz’s Bob Dylan in America, because it is not only the writing of a sometime “fan” (and lately “historian in residence” at Dylan’s official website) but also the work of a leading practitioner of American social and political history whose titles include the classic Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (1984) and the more recent Age of Reagan: A History, 1974–2008 (2008).

Wilentz’s first four chapters give a highly contextualized presentation of the roots of Dylan’s America. Perhaps the most striking fact about the book is that it begins not with Dylan but with the composer Aaron Copland (1900–90), like Dylan a descendant of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants who made his way into the main streams of American culture. The young Copland actually spent the summer of 1934 (the same year Dylan’s parents Abraham and Beatrice Zimmerman settled in Duluth) in the Minnesota north country before he went on to participate more fully in the cultural popular front of the times, producing orchestral work such as Fanfare for the Common Man (which Dylan himself has used to introduce live concerts). Among other things, this is a way of pointing out that Dylan (b. 1941) was not a baby boomer but a child with roots in the era of the Great Depression and the New Deal. Wilentz argues that Copland and Dylan shared “common origins and sensibilities” in their attempts to rescue and renew American folk traditions, which Copland once described as an aesthetic of “imposed simplicity.” Of course, the general point is that this was a much broader cultural effort and that “the old radical America” reached Dylan in other ways, most directly through Woody Guthrie and his legacy. Indeed, Wilentz may even understate the relevance of the old left to the environment Dylan encountered in New York City upon his arrival in 1961. Dave Van Ronk introduced him to the traditional and contemporary folk traditions, and Pete Seeger brought him in contact with groups such as sncc’s Freedom Singers, with whom Dylan famously joined hands and voice on occasions such as the March on Washington in 1963. Since the appearance of...