How does one write a biography of one of the most definitive, elusive, and ever-changing artists in the history of popular music? Perhaps, by abandoning any intention to include any straightforward, linear qualities that a so-called traditional biography might promise.
There have been countless books penned on the life, times, and music of Bob Dylan since he first burst onto the folk music scene of the early 1960s. There was Dylan’s own Chronicles, Volume One (2004), a seductively fascinating selected set of tales from his own life, and an arguably successful film by Todd Haynes called I’m Not There (2007), that depicted the wildly different phases of Bob Dylan’s life by casting wildly different actors for each version of Dylan—or each character inspired by him and his songs.
If any music writer and cultural critic should be well-suited to take on the task of composing a Bob Dylan biography, it would be Greil Marcus, who has in part made his name as an American critic by analyzing the work of Dylan. Marcus devoted an entire book to Bob Dylan and the Band’s Basement Tapes with Invisible Republic (1997), and this time seeks to create a Dylan biography of a kind with Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs.
But of course, Marcus’s book is so much more than just seven songs from Dylan’s illustrious canon spanning decades and several incarnations. Much like Marcus’s The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in Ten Songs (2014), the selected tracks are used as jumping off points to articulate a much larger cultural story about one million songs, those that came before Dylan’s existence, those that inspired his own work, and those that were inspired by his own.
