Grown-Up Anger: The Connected Mysteries of Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, and the Calumet Massacre of 1913

In this bold and moving history, author and songwriter Wolff follows a path of memory and resistance through the labor struggles and music of 20th-century America. Wolff argues here that the mass murder of 74 men, women, and children (mine workers and members of their families—most of the victims were children) during a bitter strike in 1913 in Michigan reverberated through the careers of two remarkable American musicians. Using Woody Guthrie’s elegy for the massacre as a launching point, Wolff examines how the dust bowl and the Depression transformed the hillbilly entertainer into a radical artist. Linked to Calumet through his own Midwestern origins and his wholesale imitation of Guthrie, the young Bob Dylan inherited his role model’s hobo crown. Yet the very different conditions of post-WWII prosperity and teen rebellion in which he came up led Dylan to reject the pious expectations of the folk scene for a more personal rebellion, one that remade rock and roll. Without surrendering insight or authority, Wolff spans a remarkable range of material, including 19th-century copper mining on the Upper Peninsula, the origins of folk out of traditional genres, and the ’60s counterculture. Wolff’s descriptions of Guthrie are particularly engaging, as are his forays into music criticism and labor history. At times, the anger that Wolff foregrounds appears too amorphous to convincingly unify such diverse subjects and eras. Yet in a scathing finale that sends him to the postindustrial ghost town of Calumet, Wolff makes clear that by forgetting the past that Dylan and Guthrie passed down to us—and the injustices that motivated their art—we are in danger of losing our futures. [em](June) [/em]