The music that inspired Bob Dylan

In Folk Music, Greil Marcus has captured an entire world of the creative and cultural development of the artist known as Bob Dylan in a single book. He not only tells a Dylan biography in seven songs but creates an autobiography of his own long career as a writer on music and America, as well as a rich history of American folk songs and the new life they engendered as Dylan sat down to write his own. How does he do it, I’ve often wondered when I’ve read him in the past. This time, I’ve no answers at all – only admiration and respect.

Other biographies of Dylan (a growing number) often tell you more about their authors than their subject. Writers such as Howard Sounes and Bob Spitz have focused on revealing details of Dylan’s eventful personal life which, honestly, are far less interesting than his work. Sean Wilentz’s Bob Dylan in America, which zooms in on key moments in Dylan’s creative process, and Richard Thomas’s Why Bob Dylan Matters, with its close readings of the songs, are both invaluable books for Dylan students and admirers. But Marcus ranges more widely, and his in-depth analysis of the songs themselves is unmatched.

His cultural knowledge of American history and music spans the 77 years of his life and many centuries before too, from sea shanties sung by English sailors as they made for the mysterious lands to the west, to Highland ballads given new life and instrumentation on the stone and plank porches of cabins in the Appalachian mountains. Marcus’s understanding of the music from which Dylan’s own songs spring is vast, and he brings it to his readings and celebrations of Dylan’s songs without patronising or pretence.

His passionate intensity could be off-putting – as some critics have long complained. I tend to revel in it, and never more so than in this book, which is a perfect storm of things to love: American history, music history, Dylan’s music and beautiful writing.