Bob Dylan once dismissed college as the graveyard of human imagination. Ironically, Dylan has become a hot topic for academics eager to parse his lyrics and politics, to sound out his cultural resonance and interrogate the man behind the many masks. In 2007, the University of Minnesota sponsored a Dylan symposium. Scholars from the diverse fields of English, African-American studies, music theory, American and Italian studies, history and art history were invited to present papers assessing the songwriter from their various perspectives.
Out of this conference came a fascinating collection of essays, Highway 61 Revisited: Bob Dylan's Road From Minnesota to the World (published by University of Minnesota Press). A few thin pieces aside, most of the work collected here makes invaluable contributions toward understanding the most influential American songwriter since Chuck Berry. Dylan's road began in a tight-knit, small-town Minnesota Jewish community at the dawn of the rock'n'roll era, turned South to explore African-American roots music, and swung through Appalachia toward the folk-blues revival in Greenwich Village, circa 1960.
Greil Marcus, who coined the memorable term "weird old America" to describe the sources of Dylan's inspiration, visits the songwriter's hometown in "Hibbing High School and the Mystery of Democracy." The second half of the essay's title references a famous speech by Woodrow Wilson, who speculated that in a democracy, the "richest fruits spring up out of soils that no man has prepared and in circumstances amidst which they are least expected."
Rhetorically, at least, it's a good place to begin. Marcus learned that Hibbing possessed a high school-junior college that rivaled many universities in its ample facilities, the product of a deal struck by local politicians with the mining interests that dominated the nearby iron ridge. Hibbing may have been small and remote, but Dylan was given a solid education in literature by day. At night he listened to the distant semaphore signals of African-American culture, arriving on the airwaves from a widening web of R&B disc jockeys.
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Most of Highway 61's other essays pick up the thread of Dylan's life and run with it to interesting places. Charles Hughes, a history graduate student at UW-Madison, explores Dylan's relationship with the Civil Rights movement. Comparable to most of the movement's great spokesmen, his songs "combined gospel redemption and scathing critiques of American society." Given the persistent religious imagery in his "protest songs" (the best ones were always more than merely topical broadsides), it should have shocked no one that he embraced Pentecostal Christianity for a time. Less well known was his relationship with one of gospel's leading acts, the Staple Singers, and his besotted feelings for Mavis Staple. As usual in the chronicling of rock music, Baby Boomer critics focused on blues and country roots, omitting the enormous inspiration of gospel music. Even those musicians who couldn't intellectually accept the message were often moved by the emotion.
Dylan deepened his own sometimes-ambiguous connection with African-American culture on recent albums, performing an oddly affecting synthesis of blues with lyrics transposed from "the laureate of the Confederacy," the 19th century Southern poet Henry Timrod.
Several contributors to Highway 61 Revisited remark upon Dylan's fascination with the American Civil War, as revealed in his autobiography, Chronicles, Volume 1. In "Nettie Moore: Minstrelsy and the Cultural Economy of Race in Bob Dylan's Late Albums," Albert University English professor Robert Reginio discovers that "Nettie Moore," from Modern Times, turns out to be a reconfiguration of a 19th century tune by a white performer in black face, narrated by a slave whose lover was sold down river to another master. Reginio speculates that Dylan's magpie poetics results in part from the taming with age of his wild muse, although in fact his lyrics have always included many lines caught from Anglo-American folk and blues songs. More interesting is his speculation that Dylan's recent borrowing from blues and Timrod "does not add up to some unified vision of the past, but rather opens up a labyrinthine series of interpretive possibilities."
Highway 61 Revisited proves that Dylan's ability to inspire exegetes remains undiminished.
