How does one write a biography of one of the most definitive, elusive, and ever-changing artists in the history of popular music? Perhaps, by abandoning any intention to include any straightforward, linear qualities that a so-called traditional biography might promise.
There have been countless books penned on the life, times, and music of Bob Dylan since he first burst onto the folk music scene of the early 1960s. There was Dylan’s own Chronicles, Volume One (2004), a seductively fascinating selected set of tales from his own life, and an arguably successful film by Todd Haynes called I’m Not There (2007), that depicted the wildly different phases of Bob Dylan’s life by casting wildly different actors for each version of Dylan—or each character inspired by him and his songs.
If any music writer and cultural critic should be well-suited to take on the task of composing a Bob Dylan biography, it would be Greil Marcus, who has in part made his name as an American critic by analyzing the work of Dylan. Marcus devoted an entire book to Bob Dylan and the Band’s Basement Tapes with Invisible Republic (1997), and this time seeks to create a Dylan biography of a kind with Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs.
But of course, Marcus’s book is so much more than just seven songs from Dylan’s illustrious canon spanning decades and several incarnations. Much like Marcus’s The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in Ten Songs (2014), the selected tracks are used as jumping off points to articulate a much larger cultural story about one million songs, those that came before Dylan’s existence, those that inspired his own work, and those that were inspired by his own.
If you are familiar with Marcus’s writing style, you will know that he is brilliant, and somewhat musically eclectic or idiosyncratic with his ideas, and if you board the train with him on his thought-trips, it is a beautifully enlightening ride that allows you to fully realize how big popular music, how big rock ‘n’ roll music, how big American music of the past, is. Through his allusions and comparisons, the music is given the cultural leverage and historical teeth it deserves.
The seven songs up for discussion in Folk Music are an intriguing bunch, and clearly not meant to check any kinds of boxes from any textbook standpoint aiming for well-rounded-ness at articulating Dylan’s career. Four of the songs, “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” “The Times They Are A Changin’,’” and “Desolation Row,” are from the first half of the 1960s, during Dylan’s folk music years. “Jim Jones” is from 1992, “Ain’t Talkin’” is from 2006, and the book’s closer is “Murder Most Foul” released during the nightmare year of 2020.
A main theme of Marcus’s in Folk Music is Dylan’s uncanny ability to inhabit the minds and worlds of other people—seemingly very different from himself—in the songs that he writes. How he is a shapeshifter and changer, with unlimited empathy so strong that it supersedes notions of Dylan’s personal identity, at least for the duration of each song.
Marcus beautifully weaves the weight of these songs, into the recent and the now, illuminating how the American problems of decades past are still the problems of today, discussing the human and cultural impact of George Floyd’s murder, and the Covid-19 pandemic’s upheaval on the nature of life as we knew it at the time and how it forever changed everything, as did the murder of President Kennedy in 1963, the partial subject of Dylan’s 2020 song “Murder Most Foul.”
Marcus’s miraculous ability to reference innumerable elements of life, quotes from other artists, scenes and bits of dialogue from certain films, moments in history, and relate them to song lyrics is on full display here, once again raising the bar of what a cultural critic can do, how they can weave obscure strands of time into a wondrous tapestry that has purpose and interconnectedness for all of its parts.
Ultimately what one is left with after reading Folk Music is the genius of Bob Dylan as an artist, how his songs by now not only to belong to him but to cultural history at large. How a great deal of them seem to have been penned by the universe itself, by the world telling its own complex and ongoing story through a myriad of nuanced lenses. But Dylan was the one to perceive them and to write them down and to record them in song so that future generations maybe, could bear witness from a distance and relate.