“Bob Dylan: New York” by June Skinner Sawyers (Roaring Forties Press”/”Bob Dylan:Like A Complete Unknown” by David Yaffe ( (Yale University Press)

The celebration of Bob Dylan’s milestone 70th birthday continues unabated in the nation’s bookstores, with a wealth of newly written material, newly reissued material, and of course old favorites sharing space on the shelves. Here are two recent additions which have caught my attention.

“Bob Dylan: New York” is part of Roaring Forties’ “MusicPlace” series which, to quote their own blurb, “unravels the relationships between musicians and the cities they call home.” In other words, the theme of June Skinner Sawyers’ book is to examine Bob Dylan’s early years on the New York folk scene by looking at his life in the City and the work he produced there, exploring the relationship between the two. This could well be the subject for a weighty academic tome, but Sawyers has instead given us a more readable, informal glimpse of the New York neighborhoods in which Dylan spent his first productive, dare I say most innovative years, the clubs and shops he frequented, the people he hung with, and so on.

What it may lack in depth, it gains in capturing the feeling of young Bob finding his way around Greenwich Village, seen from the vantage point of the settings which figured into many of his songs. It is an atmospheric history with enough detail to make you feel at home in Dylan’s world. Indeed, it could well be used a travel guide, since addresses and maps are provided, though most of the places mentioned are long-since out-of-business, serving other uses, or torn down. You can carry it with you on your own Dylan history walk, if you wish, since it does not bog the reader down in analysis or technicalities, which when viewed in relation to so many of the current crop of Dylanological works, is actually downright refreshing.

Sawyers has done the vast majority of her biographical research in other people’s books, so you should not expect amazing new insights, previously uncovered facts, interviews with long-lost Dylan pals, or the like. Sometimes, it’s all in how you arrange the material you’ve learned from other sources, and the first two-thirds of this book is very good in this respect. If you’ve read a lot of Dylan-oriented books, you may well know most, perhaps all, of the actual facts presented here already. Even so, they’re assembled from a fresh perspective, one of time and place, so as to trace Dylan’s growing consciousness of what he wanted to do with his career and how he proceeded in turning those ideas into reality. It is only after Dylan, and subsequently the book, leave New York City proper and move upstate a bit that things become spotty. The details seem more haphazard (two words - “Nashville Skyline”), the observations more obtuse, the settings less easy to grasp. One wishes the author would have clung more assiduously to her original concept of Dylan in New York City, without worrying about his later career.

But up to that point, this is a lively look at young Bob Dylan and the scene that spawned him. I have no qualms about recommending this to anyone looking for a jargon-free and agenda-less introduction to Dylan and his early career.

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David Yaffe’s “Bob Dylan: Like A Complete Unknown” is likewise relatively jargon-free as University Press books go, but it is jam-packed with agenda. One might say it is ALL agenda. The dust-jacket blurbs are lavish in their praise from authors and academicians. Yet, while I will confess to having had a good read, I am left with the feeling that I haven’t really learned much that is shockingly new, that other folks - whether writers, readers, or just fans - haven’t already considered for themselves. Having said that, I would suggest you might wish to give it strong consideration, if only because Yaffe phrases his interpretations in a fresh, original manner. Sometimes it’s not what you say, but how well you say it that makes a book significant.

Yaffe divides his book into four sections (not counting an Introduction and an Afterword). In the first, he discusses how Dylan’s singing voice has altered so often through the years, and how these changes in vocal quality have mirrored changes in Dylan’s song material and worldview. Haven’t we all made this connection already? Even so, it’s certainly worthwhile to have a thoughtful look at this phenomenon from someone who has obviously put a great deal of concentrated thought into the matter, who expresses his ideas well, bringing a sense of intellectual weight to a topic we may have thought about casually before dismissing it from our minds.

The second essay - I say “essay”, not “chapter”, as there is little to tie them all together; it’s really a collection of four essays - looks at Dylan in the movies. This is not a comprehensive look at all of Dylan’s screen roles; don’t expect tales of “Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid”. Instead, Yaffe looks at the way Dylan is portrayed in specific documentaries (most notably “The Last Waltz”), and dramas (“I’m Not There”, “Masked and Anonymous”), plus “Renaldo and Clara”, which I’ve never seen, but which would seem to be somewhere in between truth and fiction. Yaffe is less concerned with Dylan’s performances as musician or actor - though these aspects do figure into the discussion - as he is with what these films tell us about Bob Dylan the Man, Bob Dylan the Changing Persona, Bob Dylan the Artist. From a strictly personal viewpoint, I feel I learned more from this essay than the others, because this is an area of Dylanology with which I happen to be less familiar. I feel I now have enough of a handle on “Masked and Anonymous”, as to warrant pulling out the DVD for another look. So for me, Yaffe did exactly what he set out to do.

The third essay might be considered controversial to many people, as discussions of racial matters often are, particularly when the subject is the “blackness” of a white person. Not only do we get the expected look at blues influences on Dylan’s music and lyrics, as well as his involvement with the Civil Rights Movement (also covered in the Sawyers book). These we know about. But we also get to know perhaps more than we really want to know about Dylan’s sexual exploits with black women, particularly gospel-style backup singers. Elsewhere, we’ve seen plenty of discussions of Dylan the Christian and Dylan the Jew. Now we get to see the Bob Dylan who thinks he’s black. I can’t say I buy into all of Yaffe’s arguments here, yet it’s the one time in the book I come close to being truly surprised by what I was reading.

The last chapter is the most entertaining and thought-provoking to me, because it deals with Bob Dylan the plagiarist. This is a topic we have all become familiar with in recent years, but it’s good to have all the “gory details” of what Dylan stole from what source, all presented compactly in one place. Of course, in the early days of his career, Dylan was simply following the lead of his role model, Woody Guthrie, plus A. P. Carter, Robert Johnson, and virtually every folk and blues performer who lived previous to and during the early 1960’s, by engaging in the “folk process”. There was no copyrighting of folk songs in the days before music became an Industry, but there was a lot of community sharing of musical and lyrical concepts. New lyrics would be set to older melodies (“Star Spangled Banner”, anyone?), new melodies would be written or adapted to previously-existing sets of lyrics, so-called “floating verses” would appear in song after song, to the point where it’s generally (not necessarily always) impossible to know who wrote what, or who did the “original version”. So, we’ll give Dylan a pass on being a part of the time-honored folk-process tradition, though from a purely legalistic viewpoint, it is, as a matter of fact, plagiarism. But when the mature, copyright-conscious, no-longer-part-of-the-folk-tradition (or is he?) Bob Dylan starts pilfering whole passages from other people’s creative works, both copyrighted and public domain, without giving due credit to the originators, both in his autobiography and his recent songs, is it still forgivable? It would seem the media, after making a major fuss about these thefts when they were initially revealed, has pretty much forgotten about them. But Yaffe gives us the details for us to ponder. He has his opinion, I have mine, which doesn’t necessarily agree with his, and I invite you to read this fourth essay to form your own opinion. You may surprise yourself after you decide not to throw the book at Dylan after all!

In any case, this is a Dylan book well worth reading, even if I feel the blurb-writers were a bit hysterical in over-praising it. Whereas Sawyers’ book may appeal more to the non-specialist in Dylan, those who take their Dylanology seriously will benefit from reading and thinking about the Yaffe work.

“The Song Is Not The Same: Jews And American Popular Music”, edited by Bruce Zuckerman and Josh Kun (Purdue University Press)

This collection of essays is Volume 8 of an “Annual Review” (what might be thought of as an academic journal in book form) called “The Jewish Role In American Life”, published under the guidance of the USC Casden Institiute for the Study of the Jewish Role in American Life.

I have to confess it is not the sort of book I was expecting when I took it off the pile of books to be reviewed. The title would seem (to me at least) to promise some sort of comprehensive survey of the roles played by Jewish artists in the popular music of the United States, rather than a collection of unrelated essays. Beyond that, I was hoping it would be something more along the lines of the Jewish composers of Tin Pan Alley, with perhaps a glimpse of klezmer music thrown in as well. But while there is a famous mainstream American songwriter profiled here, it is not Jerome Kern or George Gershwin, but Bob Dylan. And while klezmer music is likewise covered here, it’s by the very contemporary Naftule’s Dream, not the very traditional Naftule Brandwein.

But books deserve to be read, studied, and reviewed for what they are, rather than for what they are not. After a rather shaky first essay, this is a collection of thoughtful, well-written and often fascinating essays on topics not encountered as often as they might be. That first essay, which strikes me as more a preliminary sketch for an essay which needs to be far more comprehensively researched than this brief memoir, is a reminiscence by Gayle Wald, about being Jewish and listening to Michael Jackson as a young girl during the 1970’s. I should state right offhand that I am not Jewish, but even so I cannot fathom that Jewish-Americans listen to commercial pop music any differently from the way Gentiles do, or - taking the opposite point of view - that all young people, whatever their backgrounds, listen to all music in the same way. Essentially, all Wald tells us is that her ethnic background and, as a consequence, her family background were very different from that of a typical Michael Jackson fan, and thus she reacted to him in her own special way. Indeed, despite the essay’s title, “Dreaming Of Michael Jackson: Notes On Jewish Listening”, the essay is as much about Wald’s reaction to Michael Jackson, the stage presence, and Michael Jackson, the pop-culture phenomenon, as it is about actually listening to his music. But there may be a kernel of an idea here which is worth pursuing - do people of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds living in the United States listen to the same music as their fellow Americans in a way that is different from their neighbors? I think most people would say that African-Americans listen differently - or for different things - than white Americans, but the evidence is strictly anecdotal. But do Jewish-Americans listen differently from Italian-Americans, for example? Take a step in another direction - do Republicans listen differently from Democrats? The possibilities would be limitless, and potentially lucrative to certain industry types. My gut feeling tells me this is a concept which might be worth looking into, but a more serious study is needed.

The second essay is also somewhat more of a preliminary sketch than a full-blown examination. But in this case, pictures tell the story as well as words can, so the result is more successful. Jody Rosen discusses and illustrates early 20th-century sheet-music covers, primarily of Tin Pan Alley comic songs with Jewish themes (some of them written by Jewish Tin Pan Alley songwriters, including Irving Berlin). The subject is not so much the stereotypes in the lyrics, but the stereotypical portrayal of Jews in the front-cover pictures, whether drawn or photographed. The images on these sheets may not be as consistently damaging as those on “coon song” sheet-music covers, but they tend to be insultingly racist, nonetheless. One of the worst offenders is reproduced right on the cover of this book - “When Mose With His Nose Leads The Band”, featuring a cartoon-style drawing of a musical quintet being conducted by a director whose nose is said to be so prominent that he can conduct with his nose instead of a baton. Amazing what trash our ancestors could come up with, isn’t it?

The third essay, by Peter LaChapelle, is an examination of the much more insidious racism of the then-powerful industrialist Henry Ford, as typified by his attempts to establish country-dance music among right-thinking (i.e., Caucasian Gentile) Americans of the 1920’s, to overthrow the invasion of Jazz and jazz-rooted popular music and popular dancing, a scourge promulgated by blacks and Jews. I don’t think there’s a great deal of disagreement anymore over the extent of Ford’s racism, but I do question the author’s lumping together of Ford’s country-dance movement with the growing popularity of Southern country music in the 1920’s. The Appalachian string bands of that period were not playing the older dance forms favored by Ford, but breakdowns and long-regionally-established fiddle tunes, slanted toward a very different audience than the urban, Northern listeners Ford seemed to be aiming for. Ford’s favorite fiddlers were Northerners such as Mellie Dunham and Jep Bisbee, whose popularity on records paled beside that of Gid Tanner’s Skillet Lickers or the North Carolina Ramblers. Other than that, this is an interesting glimpse of a once beloved, now more often reviled American icon and the near-Hitlerian society he envisioned for America.

Jonathan Z. S. Pollack offers an entertaining look at the use of Yiddish words and phrases in scat-singing, the influence of cantorial singing on Cab Calloway’s style - and now that he mentions it, I can tell it’s there, I simply never thought about it - and in the oddball jazz songs of singer-songwriter Slim Gaillard, who was known to occasionally write lyrics consisting entirely of names of Jewish foodstuffs. He also takes a very brief side trip into minstrelsy, looking at the role it played in the development of artists such as Al Jolson.

Much more arcane is Josh Kun’s look into the world of Jewish comediennes who appeared in nightclubs and on LP’s doing “blue” (that is, naughty) material for the middle-aged, middle-class “party records” crowd. Though they were primarily comics, they spiced their act with songs as well. As Kun points out, performers such as Belle Barth and Pearl Williams (the two he specifically concentrates on) have pretty much been excised from the histories of both comedy and music. So while I must confess that I have always considered this to be a low form of comedy and a mediocre variety of music, it’s worthy of documentation like any other entertainment phenomenon.

David Kaufman examines the Jewishness of Bob Dylan, who changed his name from Zimmerman, wrote songs that did not overtly address Jewish concerns. professed to be a born-again Christian at one point in his career, and in general could be interpreted as ignoring, if not necessarily outright denying his Jewishness. Having read this essay a day or two before seeing the clip of Dylan on a Hassidic telethon in the “Bob Dylan: Revealed” DVD, I’m inclined to say that to Dylan, his Jewishness was to him largely a non-issue rather than a denial. But while this is a topic that has been broached in the past, Kaufman’s essay is an interesting read.

The final essay, by Jeff Janeczko, looks at a handful of albums on John Zorn’s Tzadik Records, from the “Radical Jewish Culture” series, specifically from the viewpoint of musical hybridity, I have to confess I have heard none of the records being discussed, which as the author points out, is essential to a full understanding of his discussion. But while he claims samples of these recordings may be found on the web, I was unable to find them. (Other performances by the artists can be found on Youtube, which helps considerably.) Even so, his discussions about and excerpts of interviews with four diverse artists - Ben Perowsky, Wolf Krakowski, Koby Israelite, and Naftule’s Dream - are quite interesting. What’s more, the discussion of the various types of hybridity is most enlightening. So even without hearing the specific records Janeczko talks about, I feel I gleaned more from this essay than any of the others.

In sum, this is, like so many collections of essays by various authors on a diversity of topics, inconsistent. Of course, you may find those segments I’ve downplayed to be much more to your liking, which is likewise pretty much the nature of books of this sort. If the subject matter looks promising to you, I would suggest that you seek it out to find out more.