Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs. By Greil Marcus. Yale University Press; 288 pages; $27.50 and £20
Questions of authenticity dogged him from the beginning. The younger man calling himself Bob Dylan appeared in Greenwich Village in 1961, seemingly “out of nowhere”, and rapidly rose to prominence in New York’s folk-music scene. After “Blowin’ in the Wind” made him a nationwide star in 1963, journalists did some digging.
They found that the 22-year-old singer who appeared to the touch the deepest chords of American historical past—the mournful accents of black slaves and hardscrabble Okie farmers, the rhythms of cowboy minstrels—was only a middle-class child from Hibbing, Minnesota. He was a university dropout and, riskily for somebody purporting to symbolize a strand of genuine Americana, a Jew. The subtext of a profile in Newsweek, in accordance with his girlfriend of the time, Suze Rotolo, was that the artist “whose ‘finger was on the pulse of a generation’ was a fake”.
In “Folk Music”, Greil Marcus doesn’t a lot refute the accusation as reclaim it as a advantage. “The engine of his songs is empathy,” he writes within 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 angle he isn’t an impostor however a medium, giving voice to the unvoiced and articulating the inchoate yearnings of an age. The Jewish child from Minnesota—born Robert Zimmerman—merges into one function after one other, evolving in response to tremors within the zeitgeist that he appears to sense earlier and extra intensely than others. Aptly, “I’m Not There”, a biopic of 2007, used six actors (together with Cate Blanchett) to seize his quicksilver character.
“Blowin’ in the Wind”, the anthem that remodeled a little-known folks singer into the conscience of a nation, is exhibit A for Mr Marcus’s idea of empathy. Its melody got here from “No More Auction Block”, a track originating with African-American troopers within the civil struggle. The lyrics captured the earnest striving of the civil-rights motion: “How many roads must a man walk down,/Before you call him a man?” At the identical time they undercut this hope for progress: “The answer is blowin’ in the wind.” It was each pressing and timeless.
Mr Marcus is at his greatest in exploring this rootedness. The seven works his guide is constructed round—the newest is “Murder Most Foul”, launched in 2020—all supply alternatives for prolonged riffs on assorted elements of American life. He delights in flitting forwards and backwards in time, disrupting any sense of chronology and threatening to bury the music beneath the load of its antecedents. In this telling, every monitor comprises multitudes (certainly, one among Mr Dylan’s numbers, not featured right here, known as “I Contain Multitudes”). “He wrote songs”, Mr Marcus says, “that as he put them out into the world wrapped their arms around history and then walked into it.”
In the top, although, America’s wealthy cultural historical past is the actual topic of “Folk Music”; the main points of Mr Dylan’s life develop into incidental, even distracting. Mr Marcus justifies his method by quoting the bard himself. “I just don’t advertise my life,” Mr Dylan (now 81) mentioned 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’s a guide crammed with real insights however someway unmoored. As the creator tramps alongside half-forgotten byways listening for ghostly echoes, the distinctive persona of the artist stays obscure.
Which is a pity. For all Mr Dylan’s elusiveness, he’s hardly self-effacing; his music distils his nuanced persona. Delivering pyrotechnic lyrics in gravelly tones, combining idealism with world-weary cynicism, the child from Minnesota turned out to be a real American unique. ■
Source: www.economist.com