Bob Dylan is having a moment — of sorts.
Thanks to “A Complete Unknown,” the Oscar-nominated biopic starring Timothée Chalamet, Dylan’s music is reaching new, younger audiences. David Browne, in a recent article in Rolling Stone, called it “the Chalamet Effect on Dylan’s catalog.”
Before the film’s Christmas release, Dylan’s songs were streamed about 1 million times a day on Spotify, according to Rolling Stone. That number is since surged to around 4 million, with some of the biggest spikes coming from songs featured in the film, like “Song to Woody.” One of only two original compositions on Dylan’s self-titled 1962 debut album, daily streams of “Song to Woody” jumped from 4,000 to 55,000. Digital and physical sales of Dylan’s music also increased, Rolling Stone reported.
How many enduring Dylan fans — much less budding Dylanologists — the film has created is unknown. My own deep journey into Dylan’s catalog began in 1985 with the release of “Biograph,” a sprawling collection of 53 hits, deep cuts, rarities and unreleased tracks that pioneered the career retrospective box set.1 Before that, the only Dylan album I owned was “Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits,” a 1967 compilation of 10 essential Dylan songs recorded from 1963 to 1966.
“A Complete Unknown” has grossed about $120 million at the box office and earned eight Academy Award nominations, including best picture. I liked “A Complete Unknown” well enough2 (“I’m Not There,” Todd Haynes’ 2007 take on Dylan’s career is far more interesting). By focusing on a specific period in Dylan’s career, it avoids some of the pitfalls of most biopics — my least-favorite film genre — though it still falls into the trap of rotely checking off major career milestones. And while I’m no actor, I’ve never understood the Academy Awards’ infatuation with performances in biopics (Chalamet is nominated for best actor), especially when a subject’s voice and mannerisms are extensively documented on tape and film. Too many of these lauded performances feel more like impersonations than fully realized character work. They’re acting karaoke.
All of this brings me to “Bob Dylan in America,” a 2010 book by Princeton history professor Sean Wilentz. Dylan’s profound knowledge of American music and the “new poetic expressions” he gives its various strands are the subjects of Wilentz’s insightful exploration of Dylan’s influences and how he redefined them.
I reviewed “Bob Dylan in America” for the Austin American-Statesman when I was the paper’s book critic. Wilentz’s book also presaged the Swedish Academy’s reasoning for awarding Dylan the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016.
Given the renewed interest in Dylan, I republish my (slightly revised) review here:
Sean Wilentz’s engaging new book, “Bob Dylan in America,” is as much a history of American culture as it is a history and analysis of Dylan’s music.
A history professor at Princeton University and the author of “The Rise of American Democracy” and “The Age of Reagan,” Wilentz is a refreshing and authoritative music critic — Greil Marcus with tenure. He’s also a lifelong Dylan fan and the humorously self-appointed historian-in-residence for Dylan’s official website, BobDylan.com.
Wilentz’s appreciation for Dylan’s music goes back to his childhood. His father, Eli, and uncle, Ted, co-owned the 8th Street Bookshop in Greenwich Village, a Beat hangout. In December 1963, Dylan met Allen Ginsberg in Ted’s apartment above the store. It was a pivotal encounter that reconnected Dylan with Beat literary sensibilities and helped push him beyond the confines of the fold revival. Ginsberg, in turn, found “artistic enlightenment from Dylan.”
On Halloween 1964, Eli took his 13-year-old son to see Dylan at Lincoln Center’s Philharmonic Hall. Forty years later, Sean Wilentz revisited this concert when he wrote the liner notes for “The Bootleg Series, Vol. 6: Bob Dylan Live 1964, Concert at Philharmonic Hall,” a writing gig that earned Wilentz a Grammy nomination in 2005.
“Bob Dylan in America” joins Peter Doggett’s “You Never Give Me Your Money,” a history of the long, litigious breakup of the Beatles, as one of two excellent books about 1960s icons to appear in the past few months. Like the Beatles, Dylan’s primary gift is alchemy — melding folk, blues, vaudeville, country, rock ‘n’ roll and gospel into something entirely new.
From the cryptic liner notes on his eponymous 1962 debut forward, it’s been clear that Dylan draws from an extensive, affectionate knowledge of American music. But as Wilentz demonstrates, Dylan’s influences extend far beyond music, pulling from American history, literature and folklore. How many songwriters can work a line from an 1842 speech by Abraham Lincoln into a song the way Dylan does on “Summer Days” from his 2001 album “Love and Theft”?
Woody Guthrie is the early, obvious influence on Dylan — the point of origin even casual fans can name — and the poetry of Ginsberg and the Beats is the tie that binds Dylan’s churning, densely packed lyrics to Walt Whitman. But it takes a longtime and astute student of American music like Wilentz to connect — or try, anyway — Dylan to Aaron Copland, a composer initially of experimental music who mixed “folk music and orchestral form, informed by his leftist political sensibilities” into thoroughly American compositions.
Copland and Dylan are kindred artists, Wilentz says, practitioners of an “amalgamating art.” Sharing a talent for making something new out of something old, however, along with the fact that some of Copland’s old Popular Front friends would later meet Dylan, marks a pretty indirect path to Dylan. The Copland chapter, which opens “Bob Dylan in America,” is interesting not because Wilentz convincingly argues that Copland anticipates Dylan but because Copland is interesting in his own right.
The book hits its peak with a three-chapter stretch that begins with Dylan’s mid-career masterpiece, “Blind Willie McTell.” McTell was a “songster” who worked in styles — the blues, country, folk — deeply familiar to Dylan. He was not an early influence on Dylan, but a later one, pointing toward a path Dylan began following in the early 1990s to revive his career.
The next two chapters explore the origins of “Delia,” one of the earliest examples of the blues, and the shape-note hymnal “The Sacred Harp.” As he does throughout his book, Wilentz doesn’t confine himself to each chapter’s primary subject but takes us down numerous side streets and alleys before circling back to Dylan.
“Music not busy being born is busy dying,” Wilentz writes, riffing on Dylan’s famous line from “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).” (Wilentz promiscuously sprinkles references to Dylan’s lyrics throughout his book. A few underscore a point; others induce groans.) Since covering “Delia” and “Lone Pilgrim,” a song found in “The Sacred Harp,” on “World Gone Wrong,” his 1993 collection of traditional music, Dylan has increasingly grounded his work even more deeply in the past. He has acted almost out of a preservationist instinct to keep alive music he fears is at risk of disappearing, Wilentz says, bringing bits from here and there into the present to “reclaim and reassemble the American musical past.”
Such recycling has left Dylan vulnerable to accusations of plagiarism, but such charges, Wilentz argues, misunderstand the tradition in which Dylan works. Throughout his career, Wilentz writes, Dylan “has been a minstrel, or has worked in the same tradition as the minstrels … copying other people’s mannerisms and melodies and lyrics and utterly transforming them and making them his own, a form of larceny that is as American as apple pie.”
As Wilentz convincingly illustrates, without such reinvention, popular music (and art in general) would be merely derivative, and repetitive. Dylan not only is in America; America is in him.
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1 Last year was a down year for film, certainly when compared to 2023. I’ve seen eight of the 10 best picture nominees (the exceptions: “I’m Still Here” and “Wicked”). Of those eight, my favorite is “Anora.”
2 One could argue that the true blueprint for retrospective box sets was established by Neil Young’s “Decade,” released in 1977. Over the past 20-30 years, both Young and Dylan have set the gold standard for archival releases.
