Is it possible for one man to save a country with just the words he had written? What if this man were actually a prophet and his songs had meaning far beyond that which he had originally intended? Bob Dylan finds himself exploring these questions after an unexpected disaster has left much of the United States underwater and bitter political philosophies have forced the survivors into a Civil War. He is now one of these survivors and the Legend discovers that he may possess the only secret that can truly bring peace and reunite America.
The untold story of Chicago’s pivotal role as a country and folk music capital. Chicago is revered as a musical breeding ground, having launched major figures like blues legend Muddy Waters, gospel soul icon Mavis Staples, hip-hop firebrand Kanye West, and the jazz-rock band that shares its name with the city. Far less known, however, is the vital role Chicago played in the rise of prewar country music, the folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s, and the contemporary offspring of those scenes. In Country and Midwestern, veteran journalist Mark Guarino tells the epic century-long story of Chicago’s influence on sounds typically associated with regions further south. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and deep archival research, Guarino tells a forgotten story of music, migration, and the ways that rural culture infiltrated urban communities through the radio, the automobile, and the railroad. The Midwest’s biggest city was the place where rural transplants could reinvent themselves and shape their music for the new commercial possibilities the city offered. Years before Nashville emerged as the commercial and spiritual center of country music, major record labels made Chicago their home and recorded legendary figures like Bill Monroe, The Carter Family, and Gene Autry. The National Barn Dance—broadcast from the city’s South Loop starting in 1924—flourished for two decades as the premier country radio show before the Grand Ole Opry. Guarino chronicles the makeshift niche scenes like “Hillbilly Heaven” in Uptown, where thousands of relocated Southerners created their own hardscrabble honky-tonk subculture, as well as the 1960s rise of the Old Town School of Folk Music, which eventually brought national attention to local luminaries like John Prine and Steve Goodman. The story continues through the end of the twentieth century and into the present day, where artists like Jon Langford, The Handsome Family, and Wilco meld contemporary experimentation with country traditions. Featuring a foreword from Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Robbie Fulks and casting a cross-genre net that stretches from Bob Dylan to punk rock, Country and Midwestern rediscovers a history as sprawling as the Windy City—celebrating the creative spirit that modernized American folk idioms, the colorful characters who took them into new terrain, and the music itself, which is still kicking down doors even today.
Bob Dylan is the prince of self-reinvention and deflection. Whether it's the folkies of Greenwich Village, the student movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Born Again Christians, the Chabad Lubavitch community, or English Department postmodernists, specific intellectual and sociopolitical groups have repeatedly claimed Bob Dylan as their spokesperson. But in the words of filmmaker Todd Haynes, who cast six actors to depict different facets of Dylan's life and artistic personae in his 2009 film I'm Not There, "The minute you try to grab hold of Dylan, he's no longer where he was." In Light Come Shining, writer Andrew McCarron uses psychological tools to examine three major turning points - or transformations - in Bob Dylan's life: the aftermath of his 1966 motorcycle "accident," his Born Again conversion in 1978, and his recommitment to songwriting and performing in 1987. With fascinating insight, McCarron reveals how a common script undergirds Dylan's self-explanations of these changes; and, at the heart of this script, illuminates a fascinating story of spiritual death and rebirth that has captivated us all for generations.
Reid & Williams are "funny as hell."--Amy Morrison, founder of Pregnant Chicken Feeling anxious? Who isn't! Your most irrational (and sometimes rational) fears are hilarious fodder for this sharp and relatable activity book. These days, anxiety is simply part of the human experience. Part journal, part coloring book, part weird coping mechanisms, and part compendium of soothing facts, The Big Activity Book for Anxious People will be an outlet for anyone who wants to take a break from reality, laugh through her fears, and realize with every page that she is not alone--and to help her figure out what to do when it's 3AM and she's wide awake worrying about whether she cc'ed the right "Bob" on that email. (Probably.) Activities include: Fun Facts about Aging! Public Speaking: A Diagram Your Hotel Room Carpet: A Petri Dish of Horrors Obscure Diseases You Probably Don't Have Zen Mantras For The Anxiously Inclined Soothing Facts about Hand Sanitizer On a bad day, try coloring in the soothing grandma. On a really bad day, find step-by-step instructions on how to build an underground bunker. Reid and Williams want everyone to remember that they're in good company: anxious people are some of the funniest and most interesting and creative humans on the planet. (They know, because they are two of them.)
What is the soundtrack for a nuclear war? During the Cold War, over 500 songs were written about nuclear weapons, fear of the Soviet Union, civil defense, bomb shelters, McCarthyism, uranium mining, the space race, espionage, the Berlin Wall, and glasnost. This music uncovers aspects of these world-changing events that documentaries and history books cannot. In Atomic Tunes, Tim and Joanna Smolko explore everything from the serious to the comical, the morbid to the crude, showing the widespread concern among musicians coping with the effect of communism on American society and the threat of a nuclear conflict of global proportions. Atomic Tunes presents a musical history of the Cold War, analyzing the songs that capture the fear of those who lived under the shadow of Stalin, Sputnik, mushroom clouds, and missiles.
A groundbreaking appreciation of Dylan as a literary practitioner WINNER OF THE ELIZABETH AGEE PRIZE IN AMERICAN LITERATURE The literary establishment tends to regard Bob Dylan as an intriguing, if baffling, outsider. That changed overnight when Dylan was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature, challenging us to think of him as an integral part of our national and international literary heritage. No One to Meet: Imitation and Originality in the Songs of Bob Dylan places Dylan the artist within a long tradition of literary production and offers an innovative way of understanding his unique, and often controversial, methods of composition. In lucid prose, Raphael Falco demonstrates the similarity between what Renaissance writers called imitatio and the way Dylan borrows, digests, and transforms traditional songs. Although Dylan’s lyrical postures might suggest a post-Romantic, “avant-garde” consciousness, No One to Meet shows that Dylan’s creative process borrows from and creatively expands the methods used by classical and Renaissance authors. Drawing on numerous examples, including Dylan’s previously unseen manuscript excerpts and archival materials, Raphael Falco illuminates how the ancient process of poetic imitation, handed down from Greco-Roman antiquity, allows us to make sense of Dylan’s musical and lyrical technique. By placing Dylan firmly in the context of an age-old poetic practice, No One to Meet deepens our appreciation of Dylan’s songs and allows us to celebrate him as what he truly is: a great writer.
When Columbia Records finally decided to open up the voluminous Bob Dylan vaults, unleashing thousands of hours of long-sought-after, oft-rumored, unreleased material, it was hard to keep up. Included in the release were six CDs of Blood On The Tracks outtakes, six CDs of the complete Basement Tapes, 10 CDs of Rolling Thunder Revue live material, the six extraordinary CDs of The Cutting Edge from Dylan's game-changing 1965-66 sessions, and a stunning 36 CD release of Dylan's stormy 1966 world tour that some say changed the face of popular music. It is all explored here. This updated examination of Dylan's five-decade career provides a comprehensively analyzes his writing and recording history and the historical impact of Dylan's prolific creative output. It features critical commentary on every song and album, including many rare bootleg recordings and the recent new discoveries from Columbia Records. Later chapters also list and discuss Dylan's numerous appearances in film, in literature, on radio, and on television. Including his Nobel Prize speech and lecture, an extensive bibliography of books on Dylan old and new, and a brand-new introduction with updated Billboard charts, this is the ultimate book on Bob.
