Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs

by Greil Marcus

Acclaimed cultural critic Greil Marcus tells the story of Bob Dylan through the lens of seven penetrating songs
 
“The most interesting writer on Dylan over the years has been the cultural critic Greil Marcus. . . . No one alive knows the music that fueled Dylan’s imagination better. . . . Folk Music . . . [is an] ingenious book of close listening.”—David Remnick, New Yorker
 
Named a Best Music Book of 2022 by Rolling Stone
 
“Further elevates Marcus to what he has always been: a supreme artist-critic.”—Hilton Als
 
Across seven decades, Bob Dylan has been the first singer of American song. As a writer and performer, he has rewritten the national songbook in a way that comes from his own vision and yet can feel as if it belongs to anyone who might listen.
 
In Folk Music , Greil Marcus tells Dylan’s story through seven of his most transformative songs. Marcus’s point of departure is Dylan’s ability to “see myself in others.” Like Dylan’s songs, this book is a work of implicit patriotism and creative skepticism. It illuminates Dylan’s continuing presence and relevance through his empathy—his imaginative identification with other people. This is not only a deeply felt telling of the life and times of Bob Dylan but a rich history of American folk songs and the new life they were given as Dylan sat down to write his own.

Genres: Music, Biography, Nonfiction, History, American, Audiobook, Criticism

288 pages, Hardcover

First published October 11, 2022

About the author

Greil Marcus is an American author, music journalist and cultural critic. He is notable for producing scholarly and literary essays that place rock music in a broader framework of culture and politics. In recent years he has taught at Berkeley, Princeton, Minnesota, NYU, and the New School in New York. He lives in Oakland, California.

Reviews

[Kathleen Mullins · Rating 1 out of 5]

Good things:
I like the cover. I like Bob Dylan.

Bad things:
I genuinely questioned my reading comprehension at every page, like I'm not sure if I understood a single sentence and I'm barely exaggerating. Almost every sentence is 5 lines long and jumps between multiple decades within the sentence. I'd add an example but we would all get lost and scared.

The one thing I could absorb was that the author LOVED to mention the year and age of death of every (dead) person quoted in the book. It was strange and I did not enjoy it but I totally get it because it adds a line or two to a sentence and if he had to write a short sentence, the author might die himself!

After reading this book, I know less about Bob Dylan and his music/life, and tbh, music and life in general. Might stop listening Bob Dylan just out of spite.

[Janelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not really a biography, it’s more about how Bob Dylan and his songs fit into the history and traditions of folk music. It was an enjoyable read. I’m a fan of Bob Dylan but in no way an expert (either on Dylan or folk). The author clearly is and it was interesting to read this sprawling book. It covers a lot and works as an informative read particularly if you already know the songs.

[Andy Weston · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't have much interest in Dylan's music after Desire, 1976, so only four out of the seven songs used as chapters for the book were engaging personally. Fortunately, these four are by far the longest.

There are few bigger Dylan fans than Greil Marcus. Four of his nineteen books concern him, and he writes frequently in the press and in magazines about him also. His knowledge and research of everything Dylan-related, no matter how obscure, is impressive indeed.

The test, I read, of a piece of non-fiction such as this, is would it be appreciated by someone who wasn't a Dylan fan, and indeed, someone who was totally unaware of him. I think the answer is, only in a very limited way. The book assumes some knowledge, though does send the reader scurrying for the CDs.

I've closely followed Dylan since I was a teenager, when I used to listen to certain of his songs repeatedly to the point where now they have been a little spoilt.. Hurricane, for example.
These days my favourite of his varies from day to day. Late on a Saturday night with a glass of Talisker I'll dig for something on YouTube from the Newport Folk Festival, for example, North Country Blues from 1963.
Or something from Rolling Thunder, like Romance in Durango.

Certainly Marcus gives interesting information about the lyrics which I was not aware of before. There are also plenty of references to musical sources and resources used by the author. I didn't, however, find his writing style particularly compelling, there is a habit of going off on tangents, but the main problem I had, was that in certain sections it feels like Dylan is a mere bystander as Marcus digresses into his own personal musings.

Though chapters like Blowin' In The Wind rarely verge away from the song and its lyrics, others do, for example, Jim Jones, in which it is 36 pages until the song is even mentioned.
Desolation Row barely mentions the 1965 gem.

Its a nice idea, a biography told through the work of a particular artist. By limiting himself to seven, the task was made harder; the chosen songs are not chronological, and neither is the narrative, which makes it harder again. I am left with the feeling that it could have been so much better.

Here's a clip from early in the book, when my hopes will still high..

There are people in this song. There are birds. There are mountains. There is the ocean. There is the wind. There are questions, and there are answers. Why is the world the way it is? Why is there war, cruelty, and hate? Will this ever change?
So today, whenever people feel they are being treated unfairly -
Whenever they know other people only see what they look like, and not who they really are -
They can listen to "Blowin' In The Wind."
They can say,
Yes. I am in that song. That song is about me, too.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is not really a biography of Bob Dylan. Rather, it’s an author writing whatever comes to mind, demonstrating his encyclopedic knowledge of the history of folk music, when he listens to these songs. I get it, you know a lot about folk music. You like writing long sentences and making all sorts of obscure references. I’m very impressed.

I suppose I could have done more research before reading this book, then I would have known what to expect. The problem is, it has “biography” right there in the subtitle! I wanted something a bit more straightforward. I mean, sure, in a biography it makes sense to get into some of the influences of the subject. But going page after page on some obscure folk musician, not even mentioning Dylan, just seemed a bit much. Kind of false advertising.

I enjoyed the parts actually about Dylan. I’d not recommend this for anyone but the most hardcore Dylan fans, of which I am no apparently not! I need to find a more straightforward biography. Overall though, I gotta give credit for the knowledge of the author and the detail. Just change the subtitle to “A History of Folk Music through the Lens of Seven Bob Dylan Songs” or something like that.

[Craig Werner · Rating 4 out of 5]

The primary job of this kind of book for someone who knows Dylan's life and music as well as I do is to take them back to the songs with fresh ears and an expanded sense of where the music's power comes from. Folk Music definitely succeeds in that mission. The seven songs of the title--ranging from Blowin' in the Wind, The Times They Are A-Changin', and The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll to Ain't Talkin' and Murder Most foul--with a brief stop for Desolation Row and an extended excursion in the relatively obscure Australian prison ballad Jim Jones--are only part of the story. As he had done since The Old Weird America, Marcus delves deeply into Dylan's connection with the American turf of Harry Smith's brilliant anthology. It's best to read with spotify or youtube open beside you since he refers to dozens of songs almost no one other than a musicologist will know.

So, definitely a thumbs up. But I do want to add a note that Marcus has always had a tendency to condescend to readers who don't automatically agree with his frequent judgements. There's a hipster tinge to his dismissals of lines as cliches and a celebration of the Bay Area intellectual world he came up in as obviously smarter than everyone else. Easy enough to ignore as you read.

[Tyler McGaughey · Rating 4 out of 5]

1. In my last job, I once cold-emailed Greil Marcus with an unsolicited request to write a book blurb and even though he said no (as he should have), he was unbelievably sweet and generous about it, as if he were the one who had bugged me out of the blue. The man literally said, "Thanks for thinking of me." Like, yeah dude, you're Greil Marcus, thank you for even writing back to a lowly publishing world peon like myself.

2. The 80-page (!) essay that opens this book, about goddamn "Blowin' in the Wind" - a Dylan song that I have dismissed basically my entire life, even as my Dylan fandom has blown through the stratosphere in the past couple years (thanks, Jokermen), a song that has always seemed like nothing much more than anodyne wallpaper music for boilerplate TV montages of the "it was the Sixties and times were changing" variety - left me in tears. Tears!

[Tony Cinque · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading this book is like falling off a tree, landing on your back and realising you can’t move. The ensuing hiatus forces you to take stock of yourself.

Greil Marcus, a doyen of Dylanology and rock music history, writes a fascinating book, challenging us to see the bard’s life and times, the past and the future, from the vantage point of seven Dylan songs.

And from those songs, are you the writer, the listener, the butt of the joke, the hero or the loser? The only thing for certain is that the song tells you something you didn’t know about all those personas, and the times in which they lived. And when you fuse all this together you learn something of life. Is that life yours, theirs, or his?

If you’re a Dylan nut, you’ll love this book; if you’re not a Dylan nut, stick to reading Mills & Boon romance novels and leave your brain be where it is: nowhere.

Coz this book reads like Dylan sings… Rough ramblin’ and nasally, hammered with truth, honed with harsh realities, a hue and cry. Rich in history, deep in foresight. And it ain’t gonna be everyone’s violin sonata.

[Jack · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some God-tier rock criticism + history from one of the masters. makes me wanna listen to every single Bob Dylan song multiple times so I don’t miss any of the best lines. Sounds corny but it’s true, sorry guys: Bob Dylan actually rules.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first half of this book, when Marcus is discussing Blowing in the Wind, and me thinking that this might be the best writing on Dylan ever, and I thoroughly enjoyed it, and recommend it highly. After that, the book kind of loses its theme or goes off the track, and while lots of it is really good, it still was a letdown. That said, it's pretty much must-reading for Dylan fans.

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

' "He wasn't there to see the last of the traditional people," Bob Dylan said some years ago, when a writer suggested an affinity between him and a younger singer. "But I was." He was speaking of John Hurt, and others of Hurt's time who were part of the folk world in the 60s. Dock Boggs. Skip James. Sara and Maybelle Carter. Bascom Lamar Lunsford. Clarence Ashley, who once sat on a Newport stage fidgeting half to death as Bob Dylan sang "Only a Pawn in Their Game" in front of him. Even, perhaps, Mike Seeger. He meant that he saw what went out of the world with them. What will go out of the world with him?'

[sydney andrus · Rating 3 out of 5]

a lot of this was really interesting, but i did not like the writing style. call me crazy but i just don’t think a biography should be completely non-linear stream of consciousness, even if it is a bob dylan biography.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

An ironclad law of social organization sez that sub-cultural scenes calcify and must be re-engineered to accommodate dynamism. Where there's calcification, you'll find a Bohemia; i.e., a set of axioms or vigils in nostalgia for "when we were good." It happened at least twice to Bob Dylan. He leaves the University of Minnesota in December 1960 to visit Woody Guthrie and ends up emerging in the 2nd folk revival Greenwich Village club scene of beat poets, theatrically absurdist comics and boys and girls with guitars; that scene calcified by the Kennedy assassination and Dylan dug the rock 'n' roll generation led by the Beatles that would re-engineer it. Then, in the late Eighties, having written a shock of songs marked by little more than their profound banality ("Every Grain of Sand," a trope not a single Beat poet was ever in doubt about), the scenes that had reduced to his tour-life got re-jiggered when he started playing songs from that tradition that is very different from those scenes, however vigilant the scenes are in remembering traditional songs (I certainly recall a 1988 Hannibal Missouri riverside performance of "The Lakes of Pontchartrain." "Good to be back in my hometown," the singer greeted our cheering.). Here was Dylan the jiggering termite, quaffing the wiring of Alterna-America.

Greil Marcus notes this moment in his Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs, in a chapter celebrating Dylan's 1993 decision to play "Jim Jones," an old Australian prisoner mutiny ballad, every night of that year's tour. This was part of that same jiggering so many of us witnessed, and now in a sense Marcus has sanctified it -- in a kind of liturgy culminating in that secular hymn of our post-Assassination Awakening, "Murder Most Foul." Yes, yes, Marcus' book is a listicle. So is Dylan's recent book, by the way. Yale University, Simon & Schuster, doesn't matter, the kids like a list. So Marcus makes his argument over seven songs that allow his thoughts to follow a poet, Josh Clover's, invocation to "find where all the bodies are buried," e.g., where rock critics came in, in a vast white-wash of integration and cultural appropriation that is rock 'n' roll. Marcus had already written The History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs, -- why not a biography? God knows, the workmanlike Dylan biographies are horrid. Why not a critical biography?

Let's review. The Greil Marcus canon on Dylan would be Mystery Train that takes up the America of Dylan's back-up band's first tours; Invisible Republic, a setting of The Basement Tapes into the context of Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music; Bob Dylan at the Crossroads, a mailed-in one-off on the Highway 61 Revisted sessions; Bob Dylan, the collection of the pulp head's Dylan daily journalism; and now Folk Music. So that's five books on Dylan. Surprise, this is the best.

One of the bodies Elijah Wald came to bury, in his book on the Newport Folk Festival electric music performance of Dylan and his first band, was the rock critic prototype, Paul Nelson, who defended Dylan from his folk wokist cancelors in the pages of Sing Out! and the Minneapolis-based little magazine Nelson and Jon Pancake started, The Little Sandy Review. Marcus exhumes the body. Why? Marcus acknowledges that The Little Sandy's approach to traditional music was itself whitewashed, though I wouldn't say deeply so; as Nelson's own tastes drifted away from Dylan in the late Sixties and Seventies to other songwriters and to blue grass music (as an A & R guy he signed Mike Seeger to Mercury), it was at least as sexist as it was whitewashed, and may have had to do with Nelson's insecurity at judging work from which he felt bound-off socially. He needed no sanction from Ralph Ellison (and later Stanley Crouch) noting how miscegenated American music is to defend Dylan from cultural marxists like Amiri Baraka, who straight-up called Dylan a cultural appropriator in Black Music.

Rather, Marcus wants to get at the force of tradition that spelled the Nelson emphasis on craft, and that separated the run-of-the-mill in a great deal of 2nd Folk Revival product from the "empathy" and endurance of the bohemian Smith curatorial efforts Dylan brings forward. This requires, perhaps, to Nelson, not obviously, the "buried bodies" of a New Song tradition able to access "They're selling postcards of the hanging," the minstrel desolation at the center of "Ain't Talkin'," that select company of listeners cultivated by "Murder Most Foul"'s audience for Wolfman Jack, on the line with the D.J. at just the deathly moment JFK calls in with his rather long-ish request . . . list. Someone up the row from the meagre number of likes I'm sure this journal entry will collect complains that Marcus sees himself as part of this select. Haven't Dylan fans yet figured out that it were always so? You didn't become a Bob Dylan fan but if you didn't enter that order. Ask Robbie Robertson. To say so must be an encomium for Marcus as Bohemia's Dylan Explainer?

[☮ morgan ☮ · Rating 1 out of 5]

"But it doesn't really matter where a song comes from. It just matters where it takes you."

This book gave me a headache. It just feels like incoherent ramblings, with random interesting pieces scattered. There were so many parts where I had no idea what was being talked about. It almost felt like the author was trying to prove how smart he is by making his book completely unaccessible.

[Kyle Driscoll · Rating 2 out of 5]

Good to see Marcus’s style after hearing about him forever as a longtime Rolling Stone reader. Unfortunately it may not be my cup of tea. I would advice interested readers to simply listen to these 7 songs and read their lyrics instead - or even better, sub in a “Hard Rain,” “My Back Pages,” “Tambourine Man,” or “Shelter from the Storm.” This did lead me to “Murder Most Foul,” which itself made it worthwhile.

[eli · Rating 4 out of 5]

guy who is about to get really into bob dylan in a really strange and abnormal way: yeah it’s a pretty good book idk i liked it

[Mattschratz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful writing about Dylan and empathy and the strange roads to surprising empathetic structures in a mostly eclectic mix of Bob's songs. Also a shining example of a kind of criticism that I would, approvingly, call "run-on sentence brain."

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book, while not a biography in the traditional sense, has far more to say about the meaning of Bob Dylan's life and art than any of the official Dylan biographies. Through an analysis of seven songs (6 Dylan originals plus a chapter on the traditional folk song "Jim Jones"), Marcus, in his inimitably digressive and poetic voice, hopscotches across Dylan's career and winds up painting a portrait of the man that honors his complexities in full. For those who haven't liked Marcus' previous writing on Dylan, this is probably not the book for you; in a chapter devoted to "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll," for instance, he spills more ink on Laurie Anderson's avant-pop masterpiece "O Superman" than he does on Dylan's song, which is likely to have his detractors crying perverse. But the chapter on "Jim Jones" is such an incisive analysis of Dylan's relationship to traditional folk music -- both during the Greenwich Village folk revival and during the first few years of the Never-Ending Tour -- that it made me hungry to dive back into not just the Dylan catalogue again but the work of countless other performers (including Karen Dalton and Mississippi John Hurt). Marcus saves the best for last though: the chapter on Dylan's masterpiece "Murder Most Foul" and how that song resonated through the culture in the early days of the pandemic is the single best piece of writing on Dylan's recent work that I've come across. And the last sentence absolutely destroyed me.

[Michael Reilly · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a clever idea. Marcus picks seven songs and uses them as a framework for his most recent thinking on Dylan. It is not a biography, despite the title. Marcus has been thinking hard about Dylan for over 30 years and he is a guy who loves a theory, a connection or a new slant.

At times he loses me. For example, the chapter on "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" from 1963 has an 8 page digression about Laurie Anderson's 1981 song "O' Superman". It is interesting, but I couldn't quite follow what it was doing in that chapter.

I think it is the price Marcus is willing to pay for his approach. He loves to link things. The same chapter has a brilliant analysis of an episode of the TV show "Homicide" where James Earl Jones plays a character who has a fascinating take on what the song means now.

Paul Nelson and Jon Pankake were big deals in the Minneapolis folk scene where Dylan started. They published "Little Sandy Review", one of the first folk magazines. They were hardcore folkies, and they were critical and cynical about Dylan's betrayal of traditional folk music. Marcus has always been fascinated by authenticity. He seems to have always favored artist who start with the authentic and then do something with it. He uses Nelson and Pankake throughout the book as kind of a Greek chorus defending the real authentic.

This is a book which any real Dylanist should read.

[Adam Parrilli · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a listen most foul. The first few chapters were meandering, but somewhat interesting and tolerable. After Desolation Row it was a mess. Not a fan Greil, not a fan. The writing is so peripheral to the stated emphasis/premise that I found it to be plundering.

[Dominic H · Rating 3 out of 5]

The usual limitations - meandering, digressive text to the extent it is mannered and unnecessarily fractured. The usual strengths - vast knowledge and a golden touch in picking out illuminating arcana. Not biographical by any definition but I doubt anyone who has read Marcus before would have expected that.

[Gert · Rating 1 out of 5]

Incoherent, highbrow, leaning to cultural snobbery. Didn't even finish the book.

[Emma Sotomayor · Rating 2 out of 5]

Folk Music examines seven of Bob Dylan's songs, discussing his music career and the historical, cultural and political context surrounding his music. Marcus goes through, lyric by lyric, these pieces of American culture and offers further information on other musicians of Dylan's era and beyond.

While this book had great potential to inform readers about Dylan's life, it was, quite frankly, very disorganized. The songs were not in chronological order, and while I might've forgiven that, I could not forgive the extraneous information that washed away all semblance of coherence. Unfortunately, the author cannot seem to keep his focus on one topic or person at a time. There was simply too much going on at once in this book. He would jump from Dylan to another singer that the reader was presumed to know, and then back to Dylan, with more random information about politics or music that didn't seem to fit in the paragraph. I really wanted to enjoy this book, but it was just all over the place and I didn't learn as much as I wish I would've. I did, however, get to listen to more Dylan music and I did appreciate how he went in-depth on the lyrics and style, even if this book seemed like an info dump of random '60s music information.

[M. Sarki · Rating 4 out of 5]

Greil Marcus has written a long and marvelous study into the history of folk music and how it captivated the mind of Bob Dylan. It is amazing to me how such a young man, a boy really, could have so much focus and insight into making himself in his time. More proof of Dylan’s genius. Please read the rest of my review here:
https://rogueliterarysociety.com/f/fo...

[Chris Cox, a librarian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Veteran journalist Marcus has some keen insights on a handful of Dylan songs but does have a tendency to go off on tangents. You may need to exercise some patience with some of his digressions while you wait for him to bring it all back home, so to speak.

Certainly worthwhile for Dylan fans overall.

[Brent · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed it. Dylan truly encapsulates the American spirit, the ghosts of our pasts, the folk songs of old 19th century America, embodied in his songs yet rearranged with new faces. Marcus rambles a bit, but the core is good. Would not recommend this for the fair weather Dylan fan, but only the die hard dylanoligists.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s like having a half drunk conversation with that friend who knows everything about every LP ever released. It’s circuitous and rambling and by the end you’re not sure how much you’ve actually learned. But it leaves you with a sense of awe for the depth and beauty of the art form we call music.

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

More music criticism than biography, strictly speaking, but a curious work all the same. Marcus includes a wide range of material in his coverage, both from Dylan's body of work and from cultural history. He pulls it all together in some surprising ways.

[Louis Molyneux · Rating 4 out of 5]

Did Greil Marcus need to write another Bob Dylan book?
I'm not sure, but this book is neither a biography of Bob Dylan nor an analysis of seven key songs which are only really talked about in passing and instead used as launching off points for extended poetic sojourns that vary from occasionally brilliant and insightful to rambling and incoherent. More time is spent drawing tenuous connections to the works of a variety of artists such as Laurie Anderson, Mike Seeger, Karen Dalton, Anne Briggs among many others, with a level of microscopic detail that will only be of interest to true heads. Marcus broadens the scope of folk music to a near all-encompassing concept that makes the classification almost redundant and places Bob Dylan as the most important interstice in American music. A prism through which the reflection of all music past, present and future, regardless of genre, can be seen.

[Tom Walsh · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this book very enjoyable and educational. I’m not a Dylan fanboy but i’ve been listening to his stuff since Freewheelin’ in ‘63.

Marcus’ work is a mix of Biography, Musicology, History and a sincere appreciation of what he thought Dylan was trying to accomplish as his Life, Career, and Music evolved over the years. I’m not sure I can name another Artist whose songs have mutated as much as Dylan’s. Plotting them on the Graph of the ups and downs of Folk Music’s development was a daunting task and only an Author with Marcus’ Knowledge and Experience would have even tried. I thought he was quite successful.

I particularly preferred the treatment of just a few individual songs like Blowin’ in the Wind, Hattie Carroll, Desolation Row and Murder Most Foul rather than a Survey Course of Dylanography.Learning the backstories of Mike Seeger and Karen Dalton was an added plus.

All in all, a very intriguing account of the career of an Icon of the Music of my Life that I’m glad I read.

Four Stars ****

[Theodore Kinni · Rating 5 out of 5]

Greil Marcus is the best Dylanist - always pushing for new insights and new heights of expression, and when he succeeds, there is no better music writer. Read it with the music close at hand so you can hear what he's talking about. btw, it's not a biography per se; it's essays about the songs woven around the idea of Dylan as an empath. Reminds me a lot of his terrific book: "Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes"