Bob Dylan’s musical appetites are famously omnivorous. Over the course of his career, he has metabolized a vast range of musical genres, from folk to rock ’n’ roll, country to gospel, Tin Pan Alley to Western swing. This talk will focus on one genre that has saturated Dylan’s music from the early 60s until today: the blues. I will propose that the blues is not merely a genre among genres for Dylan—one tongue among many in his musical Babel—but that it is something more: an assemblage of idioms and performative behaviors that may be disarticulated from one another while nevertheless retaining their signifying potential. By exploring the multi-dimensionality of Dylan’s blues—from lyrical structure to musical form, rhythmic groove to vocal inflection—this talk will demonstrate the genre’s critical role in the fascinating play of generic consonance and dissonance that has animated his music-making for over fifty years.
Presenter: