riffs, grifters, history – and a terrific playlist
- Written by David McCooey, Professor of Writing and Literature, Deakin University
Bob Dylan, sing-songwriter and Nobel laureate, has spent a career confounding expectations. What, then, should one expect of his new book, The Philosophy of Modern Song? Firstly, “modern song” should read “American modern song”, since almost all of the 66 songs discussed by Dylan are American. And by “modern”, we are talking mid-century, mostly from the 1940s to the 1960s. Stylistically and generically, the songs cover the Great American Songbook, folk, rock’n’roll, country, and so on.
The Philosophy of Modern Song – Bob Dylan (Simon & Schuster, 2022)
Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs – Greil Marcus (Yale University Press, 2022)
In other words, they are the kinds of Americana that can be found on Dylan’s own records. “Philosophy” is the kind of word that can mean anything in publishing contexts, and it should warn the reader not to expect anything so programmatic as, for instance, a history of modern song.
Dylan’s choice of songs forms a mood more than a method. The book is populated by outlaws, grifters, cowboys, gangsters, con artists, and gamblers. There are also references to hucksters like the Colonel Tom Parker (Elvis Presley’s manager) and the 19th-century showman PT Barnum. And to rubes (or those easily duped). So, reader, be aware: this book is concerned with “modern song” on its own terms.
Dylan performing in 2012.
David Vincent/AP
A nation’s shared vernacular music
Like The Philosophy of Modern Song, the title of Marcus’s latest book is a little inaccurate, since it is not really a biography of Dylan, except inasmuch as a biography of America is a biography of its national songwriter.
Just as Marcus did in The History of Rock’n’Roll in Ten Songs (2014), and Dylan does in The Philosophy of Modern Song, the songs in Folk Music are launching pads for wide-ranging meditations – in this case about Dylan and American history and culture.
Indeed, Marcus generally seems more comfortable when talking about cultural matters rather than specifically musicological ones. If there are any unifying themes to Folk Music, they are race and history. (It is emblematic that the frontispiece to the book is a 1963 photograph of the African American writer James Baldwin and Dylan.)
Given these themes, it is not surprising that four of the seven songs that make up Folk Music come from the 1960s. The 60s was not just the time Dylan became the spokesperson for the folk-music movement (and later his whole generation), but it was also the period when the American civil rights movement became notably active in the face of long-standing oppression and violence.
The two movements, of course, intersected in various ways, not least of all in the “protest song”, of which two of the most important – Blowin’ in the Wind (1962) and The Times They Are A-Changin’ (1964) – are discussed by Marcus. (The missing g’s seem less quaint in this context.)
Marcus tends to a hyperbolic style, producing a slightly febrile mood, appropriate to the events being related. He also uncovers, or produces, hidden connections between apparently disparate things.
His chapter on The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll (1964) links that topical song (which gives a more-or-less factual account of a white man who killed a black woman and received a six-month jail sentence for assault) with Laurie Anderson’s unlikely art-pop hit, O Superman (1981). These songs have nothing to do with each other, stylistically or in terms of lyrical content, but Marcus brings the two into the same orbit to show how songs can
come loose from their authors … how songs not only mark history, or even make it, but become part of its fabric.
This strange dis/connection of song and history is shown in a particularly disturbing way in the chapter on Desolation Row (1965). One of Dylan’s most celebrated songs, Desolation Row begins with an especially arresting opening line: “They’re selling postcards of the hanging”.
Marcus recounts how when this song was released
few people knew that in the first decades of the 20th century, there had been a craze of postcards of lynchings of black Americans by crowds of white Americans … postcards sent through the US mail, traded among collectors, sold in souvenir shops and at country fairs.
Marcus is not making the case that Desolation Row is about this appalling historical phenomenon, per se, but (in the shortest chapter in the book) he imagines how echoes of that phenomenon might have made their way to the young Dylan.
Marcus ends Folk Music with a chapter on Murder Most Foul, Dylan’s 17-minute ballad on the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, from his most recent album, Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020). The subject of this song not only returns the milieu to the crucible that was the 60s, but again thematises the strange and complex relationship between history and song. Attending to the way that songs can be in and of history is a way of thinking about that unstable category, the “folk song”.
Read more:
Bob Dylan brings links between JFK assassination and coronavirus into stark relief
Marcus’s Folk Songs doesn’t just deal with Dylan’s folk period; he shows – in a digressive, indirect way – the value of thinking about Dylan in terms of history, and the shared vernacular music of a nation. It is not surprising, then, that Marcus is so sanguine about the accusations of plagiarism that have dogged Dylan since almost the beginning of his career.
This is because Marcus sees Dylan, like the abstract figure of the folk singer, as constantly rewriting the national songbook, giving the old songs “new lives to live”. This is, after all, what he is up to in The Philosophy of Modern Song, which is as much a book of remixes as it is a work of music criticism.
Authors: David McCooey, Professor of Writing and Literature, Deakin University
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