Elijah Wald > Quotes

“And then there was Ray Charles.”
― Elijah Wald, The Blues: A Very Short Introduction

“Many people in the early 1960s shared a sense that things had gone horrifically wrong, without having a clear idea of how or when they would change.”
― Elijah Wald, Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night that Split the Sixties

“The Beatles were particularly prominent examples, and Dylan’s central position in rock history is rooted in that brief period when he and the Beatles were running neck and neck. He released Bringing It All Back Home in the spring of 1965, Highway 61 Revisited that summer, and Blonde on Blonde a year later. Rubber Soul, the first Beatles album conceived as a cohesive artistic statement, was released in December 1965, followed by Revolver seven months later. In commercial terms the Beatles were in a different league: on the American market, they released four LPs of new material in 1965 and two in 1966, and each spent more than five weeks at number one on Billboard’s album chart, while Dylan would not have a number one album until the mid-1970s. But they were evolving from teen-pop hit-makers into mature, thoughtful artists, with Dylan as their acknowledged model. McCartney recalled playing him a tape of their new songs when he came through London in the spring of 1966: “He said, ‘O I get it, you don’t want to be cute anymore!’ That summed it up. . . . The cute period had ended. It started to be art.”
― Elijah Wald, Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night that Split the Sixties

“virtually all southern rural music shows signs of Afro-European interchange.”
― Elijah Wald, The Blues: A Very Short Introduction

“Sometimes I think that you’re too sweet to die, Sometimes I think that you’re too sweet to die, And another time I think you ought to be buried alive.”
― Elijah Wald, The Blues: A Very Short Introduction

“In a less race-conscious world, black fiddlers and white blues singers might have been regarded as forming a single southern continuum, and such collaborations might have been the norm rather than being hailed as genre-crossing anomalies. Indeed, it is arguably due to the legacy of segregation that blues has presented the most common interracial meeting ground, since, given a level playing field, many of the African American southerners we think of as blues artists might have made their mark performing hillbilly or country and western material.”
― Elijah Wald, The Blues: A Very Short Introduction

“You don’t need a weatherman—to know which way the wind blows.”
― Elijah Wald, Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night that Split the Sixties

“To me, the best that music can be is a medium up-tempo twelve-bar blues in F.”
― Elijah Wald, The Blues: A Very Short Introduction

“Legend says this man sold his soul to the Devil. I don’t know about that. All I can say is, when he died, the members of this church had love in their hearts and gave him a resting place, and God wrote that down. Now, I don’t know what Robert Johnson told the Lord. You don’t know what Robert Johnson told the Lord. We all have come short of the glory of God.”
― Elijah Wald, Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues

“jukeboxes—industry estimates suggest that up to half of all the records sold in the United States in the later 1930s went into commercial music machines—and the early electric speakers were particularly suited to the percussive power of a piano.”
― Elijah Wald, The Blues: A Very Short Introduction

“Twenty-five years later, an African American guitarist named Son House sang, “The blues ain’t nothing but a low-down, aching chill.”
― Elijah Wald, The Blues: A Very Short Introduction

“It is hardly surprising that this should have been the birthplace of the most desperate and primal of American musics. Where musicians in the cities or the more accommodating eastern seaboard states could be cheery entertainers, in the Delta there was little money left over for entertainment. Music, dancing and drinking were not casual pastimes, they were the only available escape from the difficulties of day-to-day life. The music had to serve an almost religious function, to take the listeners to another world.”
― Elijah Wald, Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues

“The first music to be called blues seems to have been slow, but not necessarily sad—it was a sexy rhythm, popular with African American working-class dancers in New Orleans and other parts of the Deep South.”
― Elijah Wald, The Blues: A Very Short Introduction

“There is also a purely musical definition of blues: a progression of chords consisting of four bars of the tonic (I), two bars of the subdominant (IV), two bars of the tonic (I), a bar of the dominant seventh (V7), a bar of the subdominant (IV), and two final bars of the tonic (I).”
― Elijah Wald, The Blues: A Very Short Introduction

“Mladí muzikanti stále berou do ruky banja a akustické kytary, stále zakládají rockové kapely, stále si osvojují staré styly a píší nové písně, stále se ohlížejí do minulosti a hledají své místo v budoucnosti.”
― Elijah Wald, Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties

“His most influential song, “Matchbox Blues,” popularized an image that had first appeared in one of Rainey’s lyrics and would be recycled by everyone from Billie Holiday to Sam Cooke, Carl Perkins, and the Beatles: “I’m sitting here wondering, will a matchbox hold my clothes / I ain’t got so many matches, but I’ve got so far to go.”
― Elijah Wald, The Blues: A Very Short Introduction

“For northern liberals, Vietnam was a much more divisive issue than voting rights and integrated drinking fountains, and many supported Johnson’s effort to stem the spread of international Communism.”
― Elijah Wald, Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night that Split the Sixties

“When did blues emerge? We have all heard variations on a mythic answer: The blues been here since time began Since the first lyin’ woman met the first cheatin’ man.”
― Elijah Wald, Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues

“We were learning firsthand that the so-called national ‘folk boom’ had more to do with celebrity than with any deep grassroots interest.”
― Elijah Wald, Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night that Split the Sixties

“What happened at Newport in 1965 was not just a musical disagreement or a single artist breaking with his past. It marked the end of the folk revival as a mass movement and the birth of rock as the mature artistic voice of a generation, and in their respective halves of the decade both folk and rock symbolized much more than music. Fifty years later both the music and the booing still resonate, in part because Dylan continues to be an icon, in part because the generation that cared then has continued to care—but also because the moment itself has become iconic. This book traces the strands that led to that moment, sometimes seeking to untangle them, sometimes emphasizing how tangled they remain, sometimes suggesting where later chroniclers may have imagined or added strands that did not exist or were not visible at the time, sometimes trying to explain, sometimes trying to make the story more complicated, sometimes pointing out how different a familiar strand can seem if we look at it in a new light.”
― Elijah Wald, Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night that Split the Sixties

“Mainstream pop favored romantic dreams, but blues dealt with the sorrows and joys of real relationships: cheating, abandonment, and abuse were balanced by exuberant physical pleasure.”
― Elijah Wald, The Blues: A Very Short Introduction

“As Dylan’s reputation grew over the next couple of years, those traits went hand in hand. Shelton had previously called him “one of the most compelling white blues singers ever recorded,” but now wrote, “His voice is small and homely, rough but ready to serve the purpose of displaying his songs.”
― Elijah Wald, Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night that Split the Sixties

“However hallowed by history, though, the idea that blues is fundamentally a musical heart-cry has some problems. For one thing, along with some of the most moving, cathartic music on earth, the American blues tradition has produced thousands of comical party songs and upbeat dance music.”
― Elijah Wald, The Blues: A Very Short Introduction

“Ty nejlepší nové písně se zapíšou do paměti, budou putovat od jednoho zpěváka k druhému, vylepšovat se a doplňovat. A za sto let možná přijde nějaký folklorista a nazve je folkovými písničkami. Náš prach proti tomu nebude nic namítat.”
― Elijah Wald, Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties

“Johnson was unknown to the vast majority of the blues audience and ignored by all but a handful of his musical peers until the “blues revival” hit in the 1960s.”
― Elijah Wald, Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues

“Ta práce byla čistá prostituce... prostituce může být zcela v pořádku pro profesionál(k)y - ale je riziková pro amatéry.”
― Elijah Wald, Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties

“A specifically rural-sounding blues style did not reach a mass audience until 1926, with the first recordings of a blind Texas street singer named Lemon Jefferson.”
― Elijah Wald, The Blues: A Very Short Introduction

“Another common way to define blues is as a tradition that employs a range of tonal and rhythmic practices originating in West Africa.”
― Elijah Wald, The Blues: A Very Short Introduction

“Charlie Gillett wrote that “folk existed in a world of its own until Bob Dylan dragged it, screaming, into pop,” and while folk fans might frame that the opposite way—Dylan had dragged pop, screaming very loudly, into their world—it was the iconic moment of intersection, when rock emerged, separate from rock ’n’ roll, and replaced folk as the serious, intelligent voice of a generation. In the process, rock fans adopted many of the folk world’s prides and prejudices: Rock ’n’ rollers had worn matching outfits, played teen-oriented dance music, and strove to cut hit singles. Rock musicians wore street clothes, sang poetic and meaningful lyrics accompanied by imaginative or self-consciously rootsy instrumentation, and recorded long-playing albums that demanded repeated, attentive listening. Those albums might sell in the millions, but they were presented as artistic statements, and by the later 1960s it was considered insulting to call someone like Jim Morrison or Janis Joplin “commercial.”
― Elijah Wald, Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night that Split the Sixties

“Bessie Smith released her first record for Columbia in May 1923, and it had almost as profound an effect as “Crazy Blues.”
― Elijah Wald, The Blues: A Very Short Introduction