CFP: New Perspectives on Bob Dylan and the Blues (Edited Volume)

Southern Cultures, 2013

Journal of Jungian Scholarly Studies

James Baldwin’s short story, “Sonny’s Blues,” portrays a jazz artist’s transformation of an historic and ongoing aspect of America’s cultural shadow, treating black people cruelly as if they were not real. He is enabled to bring about this transformation through his becoming conscious of and owning his personal shadow, treating people regardless of race cruelly as if they were not real. His self-knowledge indicates an equality in the human potential of behaving oppressively and thus frees him from the self-pity and helpless rage of victimization possible to those having suffered the injustice of racism. It thus frees him to create music free of lament, music which in turn frees his brother, who has responded to American racism with repression of his emotions, to feel his grief. Baldwin’s story implies that art, such as the story “Sonny’s Blues,” can express a society’s unjustly caused suffering without lament if the artist has taken responsibility for having him or herself unjustly ...

Humaniora Vol 30, No 1, 2018

The current study is a postmodern appraisal of Bob Dylan's artistic career and vocal gestures to examine the way melody in popular music works in relation to speech and singing, the grand and the ordinary. It historicizes Bob Dylan's protest music of the 1960s within the paradigm of folk music culture. Dylan's music is full of riffs, blues sequences, and pentatonic melodies-all heavily part and parcel of blues, folk, gospel, and country music. It is the music that dwells on the pleasures of repetition, of circularity, and of the recurring familiar tune integrated within Dylanesque poetics of rhyme delivered with his idiosyncratic, deep and intense range of voices. Dylan is the official son of the legacies of social, communal, and ritual music-making that mirrors contemporary pop and rock back to folk and blues, street-sung broadsides and work songs, the melodies of medieval troubadours, and the blessed rhythms of Christianity and Judaism. The study is an attempt to illustrate how musicology and ethnomusicology in particular can contribute to understanding Dylan as a 'performing artist' within the postmodern paradigm. Thus, the study seeks to establish Dylan as a phenomenal, prolific postmodernist artist, as well as an anarchist. The power and originality of Dylan's music constitute a prima facie case that his performances should be considered postmodernist art.

The current study is a postmodern appraisal of Bob Dylan's artistic career and vocal gestures to examine the way melody in popular music works in relation to speech and singing, the grand and the ordinary. It historicizes Bob Dylan's protest music of the 1960s within the paradigm of folk music culture. Dylan's music is full of riffs, blues sequences, and pentatonic melodies—all heavily part and parcel of blues, folk, gospel, and country music. It is the music that dwells on the pleasures of repetition, of circularity, and of the recurring familiar tune integrated within Dylanesque poetics of rhyme delivered with his idiosyncratic, deep and intense range of voices. Dylan is the official son of the legacies of social, communal, and ritual music-making that mirrors contemporary pop and rock back to folk and blues, street-sung broadsides and work songs, the melodies of medieval troubadours, and the blessed rhythms of Christianity and Judaism. The study is an attempt to illustrate how musicology and ethnomusicology in particular can contribute to understanding Dylan as a 'performing artist' within the postmodern paradigm. Thus, the study seeks to establish Dylan as a phenomenal, prolific postmodernist artist, as well as an anarchist. The power and originality of Dylan's music constitute a prima facie case that his performances should be considered postmodernist art.

Humaniora, 2018

The current study is a postmodern appraisal of Bob Dylan's artistic career and vocal gestures to examine the way melody in popular music works in relation to speech and singing, the grand and the ordinary. It historicizes Bob Dylan's protest music of the 1960s within the paradigm of folk music culture. Dylan's music is full of riffs, blues sequences, and pentatonic melodies-all heavily part and parcel of blues, folk, gospel, and country music. It is the music that dwells on the pleasures of repetition, of circularity, and of the recurring familiar tune integrated within Dylanesque poetics of rhyme delivered with his idiosyncratic, deep and intense range of voices. Dylan is the official son of the legacies of social, communal, and ritual music-making that mirrors contemporary pop and rock back to folk and blues, street-sung broadsides and work songs, the melodies of medieval troubadours, and the blessed rhythms of Christianity and Judaism. The study is an attempt to illustrate how musicology and ethnomusicology in particular can contribute to understanding Dylan as a 'performing artist' within the postmodern paradigm. Thus, the study seeks to establish Dylan as a phenomenal, prolific postmodernist artist, as well as an anarchist. The power and originality of Dylan's music constitute a prima facie case that his performances should be considered postmodernist art.

2019

Protest music is and has been music that seeks to defy and redefine cultural and political norms. Among the issues addressed by protest music are workers’ organizing rights, prejudice along racial and gender lines, and a critique of law enforcement. Through defiance and redefinition, protest music seeks to give voice to the many excluded people in society, particularly Black and brown people, and provides a new perspective of what the world could be when these marginalized identities are included. But contemporary understandings of what protest music is suffer from race-neutral or colorblind ideas. This project begins by considering the challenges of defining protest music, with a critical eye on aesthetic entanglements of American folk and protest music from the 1960s and 70s. Colorblind conceptions of folk music from this period obscure the power and centrality that whiteness has played in the structure, the history, the legitimacy, and the presence of the musicians in the literat...

Philosophical and Cultural Theories of Music, 2010

Bob Dylan has spent a lifetime despising the nineteen-sixties - all the while being held up everywhere as its avatar. This comic tale of mistaken identity is the the story of his life. No matter what he says - let alone what he sings - it seems to make no difference. When he wrote a percussive-pulsating one chord rant-chant against living in a 'Political World' in 1989, it was dismissed by critics - sub-standard Dylan, they said. What they were really saying was: no, we don't believe you. You are a protest singer at heart. You don't really loath politics, whatever you might say or do. So books continue to be written about him as if he was a nineteen sixties political radical playing loquacious-hipster king to Joan Baez's platitudinous-remonstrating queen. No matter how much he might excoriate this notion of his marvelous biography, Chronicles, Volume One - one of the great pieces of American literature, on a par with Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Angie March - it changes nothing. Left-liberal writers still compulsively lionize him in their own image - and their feckless children, who populate the modern media machines, regurgitate the same risible clichés about him.

Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, 2022

Blues has been used as a term to designate a broad musical category, in addition to an aesthetic that includes the visual arts and literature. Reasserting the significance of the blues as a form of Black vernacular music grounds the idea of a blues aesthetic in both a specific history and a performance practice. The genre was shaped by racialized socioeconomic conditions that influenced its formal and stylistic components. As a key feature of the blues, repetition delimits a field of creative activity. Despite formal and stylistic constraints, the blues models resistance to domination aesthetically, as the genre challenges the idea of the work of art as a fixed product. Valorizing process, the blues models a practice of resistance to domination using repetition with a difference as a form of agency.

2019

Rambling Blues: Mapping Contemporary North American Blues Literature" revises the methodological assumptions that have underwritten our understanding of blues literature and the politics of race and region that surround it. Where previous commentators have defined blues literature primarily through its formal and thematic connections with blues music and with the sociohistorical contours of black southern life more generally, this dissertation expands the boundaries of how we conceive blues literature by examining Langston Hughes' poems "The