Merging poetry and song

The best book so far about Bob Dylan, the only one worthy of his oeuvre, is his own astonishing Chronicles, Volume One (2004), but while we wait for the next fix, Bob Dylan in America will keep the withdrawal symptoms at bay. Sean Wilentz is a history professor at Princeton, and author of books about Jefferson, Lincoln and Reagan. He is also a second-generation hipster and a Dylan fan since 1964, when he first saw him play.

Wilentz planned this book, he explains, as ‘a coherent commentary on Dylan’s development, as well as his achievements, and on his connections to enduring currents in American history and culture’. As a critic he is not a patch on Christopher Ricks — Dylan, as he notes, is ‘one of the major writers Ricks has studied meticulously’ — and limits himself mainly to quotation and paraphrase. As an historian, though, he is impressive.

It has always been clear that, in making his ‘new kind of high popular art’, Dylan has borrowed from traditional folk, and from ‘the blues, rock and roll, country and western, black gospel, Tin Pan Alley, Tex-Mex borderlands music, Irish outlaw ballads…’ Wilentz traces these influences with scholarly care, taking us beyond such obvious candidates as Woody Guthrie and Huddie ‘Leadbelly’ Ledbetter and into such esoteric company as Tom Turpin and Bill Dooley.

He writes at length about ‘Blind’ Willie McTell, who is the subject of what is probably Dylan’s most perfect song, which inexplicably failed to make the cut for Infidels, and was the author of such classic lines as

Cutty he’s in the barroom drinkin’ out of a
silver cup,
Delia she’s in the graveyard, she may not never wake up.

But nor does he neglect ‘Blind’ Willie Johnson and ‘Blind’ Blake Alphonso Higgs — who is not to be confused with ‘Blind’ Blake— or ‘Whoopie’ John Wilfhart.