Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs

Critic Marcus (More Real Life Rock) digs into seven Bob Dylan tracks in this rollicking account. With interpretive whimsy, Marcus dedicates a chapter to each song: in “Blowin’ in the Wind,” Marcus covers the April 1962 show when the song was first sung and recalls first hearing it on “someone’s boat” in 1963, while “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” is a look at the relationship between music and politics, as Dylan’s 1964 tune “came out of the topical social-protest stream of the Greenwich Village folk milieu.” Elsewhere, “Jim Jones” reflects on a song Dylan hasn’t played live since 1993, while “Murder Most Foul” covers the song’s recording in 2020, “when the shadow of disease was hanging over the world but before the country shut down.” Marcus’s close readings are full of discursive, meandering asides, and his prose is full of flourish: Dylan “wrote songs that as he put them out into the world wrapped their arms around history and then walked into it, songs that like gaudy cloaks of shadow and light wrapped themselves around the people who heard them and then brought them too into history, the history that was going on all around them.” Dylan’s fans will enjoy these lyrical reflections. Agent: Emily Forland, Brandt and Hochman. (Oct.)