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Bob Dylan in America
- Narrated by: Sean Wilentz
- Length: 11 hrs and 49 mins
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Publisher's summary
One of America’s finest historians shows us how Bob Dylan, one of the country’s greatest and most enduring artists, still surprises and moves us after all these years. Growing up in Greenwich Village, Sean Wilentz discovered the music of Bob Dylan as a young teenager; almost half a century later, he revisits Dylan’s work with the skills of an eminent American historian as well as the passion of a fan. Drawn in part from Wilentz’s essays as “historian in residence” of Dylan’s official website, Bob Dylan in America is a unique blend of fact, interpretation, and affinity—a book that, much like its subject, shifts gears and changes shape as the occasion warrants. Beginning with his explosion onto the scene in 1961, this book follows Dylan as he continues to develop a body of musical and literary work unique in our cultural history. Wilentz’s approach places Dylan’s music in the context of its time, including the early influences of Popular Front ideology and Beat aesthetics, and offers a larger critical appreciation of Dylan as both a songwriter and performer down to the present. Wilentz has had unprecedented access to studio tapes, recording notes, rare photographs, and other materials, all of which allow him to tell Dylan’s story and that of such masterpieces as Blonde on Blonde with an unprecedented authenticity and richness. Bob Dylan in America—groundbreaking, comprehensive, totally absorbing—is the result of an author and a subject brilliantly met.
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Critic reviews
"This should have been impossible. Writing about Bob Dylan's music, and fitting it into the great crazy quilt of American culture, Sean Wilentz sews a whole new critical fabric, part history, part close analysis, and all heart. What he writes, as well as anyone ever has, helps us enlarge Dylan's music by reckoning its roots, its influences, its allusive spiritual contours. This isn't Cliff Notes or footnotes or any kind of academic exercise. It's not a critic chinning on the high bar. It's one artist meeting another, kickstarting a dazzling conversation." (Jay Cocks, screenwriter of The Age of Innocence and The Gangs of New York)
"Sean Wilentz makes us think about Bob Dylan’s half-century of work in new ways. Combining a scholar’s depth with a sense of mischief appropriate to the subject, Wilentz hears new associations in famous songs and sends us back to listen to Dylan’s less familiar music with fresh insights. By focusing on the parts of Dylan’s canon that most move him, Wilentz gets straight to the heart of the matter. If you thought there was nothing new to say about Bob Dylan’s impact on America, this book will make you think twice." (Bill Flanagan, author of A&R and Evening's Empire; Editorial Director, MTV Networks)
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Thelonious Monk
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- Length: 25 hrs and 30 mins
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Thelonious Monk is the critically acclaimed, gripping saga of an artist's struggle to "make it" without compromising his musical vision. It is a story that, like its subject, reflects the tidal ebbs and flows of American history in the 20th century. To his fans, he was the ultimate hipster; to his detractors, he was temperamental, eccentric, taciturn, or childlike. His angular melodies and dissonant harmonies shook the jazz world to its foundations, ushering in the birth of "bebop" and establishing Monk as one of America's greatest composers.
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The definitive bio of Monk
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Beatles '66
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The year that changed everything for the Beatles was 1966 - the year of their last concert and of Revolver, their first album created to be listened to rather than performed. This was the year the Beatles risked their popularity by retiring from live performances, recording songs that explored alternative states of consciousness, experimenting with avant-garde ideas, and speaking their minds on issues of politics, war, and religion. Music journalist and Beatles expert Steve Turner investigates the enormous changes that took place in the Beatles' lives and work during 1966.
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Great listen
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The History of Rock & Roll
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Ed Ward covers the first half of the history of rock & roll in this sweeping and definitive narrative - from the 1920s, when the music of rambling medicine shows mingled with the songs of vaudeville and minstrel acts to create the very early sounds of country and rhythm and blues, to the rise of the first independent record labels post-World War II, and concluding in December 1963, just as an immense change in the airwaves took hold and the Beatles prepared for their first American tour.
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Author's blindspots mar this book
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By: Ed Ward
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Alan Lomax: A Biography
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- Narrated by: Scott Sowers
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The remarkable life and times of the man who popularized American folk music and created the science of song. Folklorist, archivist, anthropologist, singer, political activist, talent scout, ethnomusicologist, filmmaker, concert and record producer, Alan Lomax is best remembered as the man who introduced folk music to the masses. Lomax began his career making field recordings of rural music for the Library of Congress and by the late 1930s brought his discoveries to radio, including Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and Burl Ives.
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They Done Good
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By: John Szwed
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Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?
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In 1969, in Capitol Records' Hollywood studio, a blonde-haired troubadour named Larry Norman laid track for an album that would launch a new genre of music and one of the strangest, most interesting careers in modern rock. Having spent the bulk of the 1960s playing on bills with acts like The Who, Janis Joplin, and The Doors, Norman decided that he wanted to sing about the most countercultural subject of all: Jesus.
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Hagiography not Biography
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Light & Shade
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More than 30 years after disbanding in 1980, Led Zeppelin continues to be celebrated for its artistic achievements, broad musical influence, and commercial success. The band's notorious exploits have been chronicled in bestselling books; yet none of the individual members of the band has penned a memoir nor cooperated to any degree with the press or a biographer.
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Production History, FY!
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By: Brad Tolinski
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King of the Blues
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Riley “Blues Boy” King (1925-2015) was born into deep poverty in Jim Crow Mississippi. Wrenched away from his sharecropper father, B.B. lost his mother at age 10, leaving him more or less alone. Music became his emancipation from exhausting toil in the fields. Inspired by a local minister’s guitar and by the records of Blind Lemon Jefferson and T-Bone Walker and encouraged by his cousin, the established blues man Bukka White, B.B. taught his guitar to sing in the unique solo style that, along with his relentless work ethic and humanity, became his trademark.
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Excellent
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Catch a Wave
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In Catch a Wave, Peter Ames Carlin pulls back the curtain on Brian Wilson, one of popular music's most revered luminaries, as well as its biggest mystery. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and never-before heard studio recordings, Carlin follows the Beach Boys from their earliest days through Brian's deepening emotional problems to his triumphant re-emergence with the release of Smile, the legendarily unreleased album he had originally shelved.
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Not great
- By J. Barker on 08-08-16
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Down the Highway
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Down the Highway is an essential biography for Bob Dylan fans and all music enthusiasts, delivering the full, fascinating story of the life and work of this great artist. Author Howard Sounes interviewed more than 250 key people in Dylan’s circle, and gained access to previously unseen documents, to create a fresh and compelling book that takes the reader on a journey from Dylan’s childhood in a Minnesota mining town, through his rise to fame in the 1960s, to his current status as the senior figure in popular music.
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I'm a little late to the party
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Uncommon People
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The age of the rock star, like the age of the cowboy, has passed. Like the cowboy, the idea of the rock star lives on in our imaginations. What did we see in them? Swagger. Recklessness. Sexual charisma. Damn-the-torpedoes self-belief. A certain way of carrying themselves. Good hair. Interesting shoes. Talent we wished we had. What did we want of them? To be larger than life but also like us. To live out their songs. To stay young forever. No wonder many didn't stay the course.
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INSIGHTFULL!
- By CLAUDIA R KENNEDY on 02-18-18
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Outlaw
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Waylon Jennings. Willie Nelson. Kris Kristofferson. Three renegade musicians. Three unexpected stars. Three men who changed Nashville and country music forever. Streissguth's new book brings to life an incredible chapter in musical history and reveals for the first time a surprising outlaw zeitgeist in Nashville. Based on extensive research and probing interviews with key players, what emerges is a fascinating glimpse into three of the most legendary artists of our times and the definitive story of how they changed music in Nashville and everywhere.
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Revealing little-known Details does Captivate!
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Bright lights dark shadows
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An exploration of all aspects of the Abba member’s lives and careers. Amazingly detailed, it examines the group member’s family backgrounds, the pre-Abba days, the legendary 70s, the marriages, the divorces, the business ups and downs, and the post-Abba solo careers.
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Awesome! -- All the Swedish words pronounced!
- By Howard_a on 06-18-12
By: Carl Palm
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What listeners say about Bob Dylan in America
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
- RSH
- 11-20-10
Another side of Bob Dylan
Not the typical tattle tale as the author delves deeply into Dylan's historical influences and extraordinary talent as a 'minstrel'. There are brief snippets of musical material throughout but what Wilentz really elicits is a desire to hear more; to listen carefully with nuanced ears and newly acquired insight so as to reevaluate the entire recorded legacy of a man arguably the most profound troubadour of the 20th and 21st centuries.
This is a serious work and as such, those seeking a peek behind Dylan's multiple personas, may not be satisfied the author can only provide exquisitely detailed signposts instead of pop punditry. However, musicians and poets alike -as well as anyone alive during Bob Dylan's life and times- may find this audiobook the closest we'll get to grasping Robert Zimmerman's true genius.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Ray M
- 12-12-16
Great Historian's a Fan
Sean Wilentz took a break from the heavy writing that encompasses his role as professor and an eminent historian to write a fast-paced look at Dylan's career. What I really appreciate is that Dylan gets the due from academe that he deserves. Wilentz, a lifelong fan of Dylan, not only examines Dylan as writer, musician, performer but also delves into the origins of American folk (not excluding country, gospel, blues, etc.) music which influenced Dylan. This is a book which should be read by anyone who wants to know why Dylan has the iconic status that he has. Of special interest to me was how Dylan had the career renaissance after some fallow periods in the 1970s. Dylan had a personal transformation which he chronicled on two Christian-themed albums and then the late 1990s and early 2000s musical and literary triumphs (Time Out of Mind is one of the great albums of the decade and his book Chronicles is a masterpiece).
But not all is sunshine in this book. Wilentz takes a very hard look at the accusations of plagiarism that began to dog Dylan late in his career. Here I think Dylan is given the benefit of the doubt for the most part. And I think that that is fair. I do wish Dylan was a little more candid about his borrowings if that is what they are. And because Dylan was awarded the Nobel for literature I think maybe that finishes the story but it makes me wish there were some new thoughts from Wilentz about this controversy. Here, I am less sympathetic to Dylan. I am torn about whether he deserved it (both sides make compelling cases here) but I think that he has been very casual to the point of disrespect to the Academy about accepting it. Guess he's still a rebel at heart.
Anyway, enjoy this title. As an added bonus--Sean Wilentz reads his own book and does a marvelous job. I wouldn't mind hearing more from him as a narrator.
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2 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Randal
- 10-07-10
looking back
I am a music history fan, and found the Sean Wilenz book engrossing. Well read by Wilenz with bonus bits of relevant musical passages. Particularly of interest was the historical background of artists such as bluesman Blind Willie Mctel as well as the real life murder of Delia both of which influence Dylans' creativity on the album 'World Gone Wrong'. Was fascinated with the Bing Crosby influence, but then I am a contemporary of the poet/songwriter, and we grew up in the fifties with the crooner. I haven't followed Dylan's work over the years, but am ready to look again thanks to this book. Sean Wilenz has given me quite a list of songs and albums to review - maybe even the Christmas album!
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1 person found this helpful
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- Christopher Jones
- 08-12-19
A book for American history and Dylan buffs.
Not the best Dylan bio but then again it doesn't profess to be. This more a music and cultural history of different periods of Dylan's career. There is a lot of good information here but to me some of the historical non-Dylan info was a bit long-winded and could have been streamlined better. Still if you are a Dylan enthusiast you will want to read or listen to this (like I did) and for rock history teachers this would certainly be a good reference book.
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- Mr. B. Arnold
- 06-21-17
American alchemist; recalibrating genius
Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?
See review below
What was one of the most memorable moments of Bob Dylan in America?
See review below
Did Sean Wilentz do a good job differentiating all the characters? How?
See review below
Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?
See review below
Any additional comments?
Four stars usually denotes a book of uniformly high calibre, though perhaps not truly exceptional. Bob Dylan in America deserves the rating, though parts of it are without doubt truly exceptional. The problem is that parts are verging on dull-as-ditchwater too. Unfortunately (or fortunately if, as I would implore, you persevere) the dullest parts are front-loaded, meaning many will be put off reading what turns out to blossom into one of the most perceptive reckonings of the great man's career to-date. Although more academic in tone (albeit very accessible, if a little dry) BDIA is something of a half-sibling to Greil Marcus's Invisible Republic (aka The Old, Weird America), in locating Bob Dylan's genius in his alchemical relationship to American history & cultural tradition. We all know by now that Bob Dylan is like a human jukebox, but Wilentz really opened my eyes to the depth & breadth of Dylan's reading, which comes to have special bearing on one of the final quarter of the book's main themes: originality. The second half of this book is among the most interesting things I've ever read on Dylan, American popular music & the creative process in general. Although subsequently of more interest to me having completed the book, the first quarter seemed a bit of a drag; so much so that I twice gave up on it to listen to something more engaging. Also, the passages on the making of Dylan's classic album's counterintuitively are among the least interesting (compared to what follows) to anyone who's already read Marcus, Shelton, Heylin etc and has heard the stories a hundred times before. Although not exactly a chore to hear again it seems a bit of a lengthy & unnecessary thematic digression in comparison to the exceptionally interesting and wholly original things Wilentz has to say about inspiration vs plagiarism in the context of Dylan's obsessions (again, off discussed, but I think this book has the most in-depth and enlightening analysis of this topic of any Dylan book), as well as his fascinating origin stories of some of the key songs that formed part of Dylan's (and the folk revival's, rock & roll's, hip-hop's...) psyche.
All said, the first half of this book is interesting, but dry. The second, is one of the truly essential pieces of writing about Bob Dylan and American popular (and esoteric) music. With that in mind, this is highly recommended.
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1 person found this helpful
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- AmazonCustomer
- 04-11-12
A solid choice for Dylan enthusiasts
I've been a fan of Dylan since I was 14 years old. I've seen him in concert a dozen times, spanning 25 years, and have read countless books about him. This one held my interest entirely. It's not a Dylan biography, nor a critical interpretation of his lyrics. There are many books that cover those grounds. Rather, "Bob Dylan in America" is one man's thoughts about "Bob Dylan" viewed in a larger cultural context. I actually found the opening chapters on Aaron Copland highly interesting, and relevant to Wilentz's goal of presenting Dylan as a continuer of an old tradition, the traveling troubadour, a modern minstrel. The book does seem disjointed at times, but not to the point of being distracting. The highlights for me were the sections discussing Blind Willie McTell and the recent allegations of Dylan's plagiarism. If you're Dylan-obsessed, you'll enjoy this book. For casual fans, read the detailed reviews on the Web before purchasing this book to determine if this is for you or not.
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2 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Marc
- 10-14-10
Editing badly needed.
Warning ; The first 2 hours of audio , excepting 20 minutes or so could be entitled " How I wrote this book plus all I know about Aaron Copland. " As a high schooler I used to go to the Gaslight Cafe weekly back in 1966 and went to N.Y.U. Unfortunately a lot of the book sounds like a professor spinning pet ideas that are off subject , 2 Hours ! The Gaslight Cafe info , beat poets etc. are part of the Dylan story ,
not endless factoids about Aaron Copland who no doubt merits some time . But not a mini thesis pasted on to a book .
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5 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Wayne Carlson
- 09-21-10
Don't expect much
I don't know what I was expecting, but this book didn't provide it. It "reads" like a thesis read by the writer (he is an Ivy League professer after all) A few interesting tidbits floating in a sea of "facts." The writer states his opinions like facts even though there is no evidence that he ever met Dylan. His "facts" are either his pretentious opinion or somebody else's. Dylan may be this obtuse, but it seems that the writer is mainly trying to show-off his "knowledge." I could never get engaged as there is really no story.
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- Corey Hutchinson
- 10-06-23
Not a fan. I was quite bored after the first 3 chapters.
I unfortunately could only get through the first 3 chapters after barely hearing anything on Dylan. I feel like this was focusing too much on history that to me really didn’t matter. I just wanted to hear Dylan’s story.
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