10:00am to 11:30am          Archivists Roundtable

As rock music becomes an established part of our shared cultural history, our attention now turns to preserving its often ephemeral artifacts and organizing them for use by scholars, teachers, and others.  The Dylan Archive® is playing an important role in this work but is also one example among many.  This session will feature scholars and archivists who have created, curated, and used both established and emerging archives built around some of rock’s singular figures. 

Blood in the Stacks: The Bob Dylan Archives@ in Tulsa, Oklahoma

Mark Davidson on Bob Dylan

Archiving the Evanescent: The Challenges of Counterculture Collections

Nick Meriweather on The Grateful Dead

Still Speaking to Us Sweetly

Robert de Young on Leonard Cohen

Thundering Roads

Eileen Chapman on Bruce Springsteen

Working the Gaps and the Silences

Ken Womack on The Beatles

11:30am to 1:00pm          I Shall Be Free? Dylan, Copyright, and Creativity

In December 2020, Universal Music announced that it had purchased Dylan’s entire songwriting catalog, including publishing rights to over 600 songs from “Blowin’ in the Wind” to “Tempest.”  This occurred at a moment when copyrights now stretch for decades after a creator’s death and yet work of all kinds finds its way to the public through digital channels of all kinds.  This keynote session will feature a lecture by Dr. Robert Spoo that will focus on the complexities of contemporary intellectual property laws and their consequences for artists, scholars, teachers, and fans. Spoo is the Chapman Professor of Law at the University of Tulsa and an internationally recognized expert in copyright law and creativity. 

2:00pm to 3:30pm          A Conversation Piece with Clinton Heylin

Already recognized as one of the world’s leading experts on Dylan’s life and work, Clinton Heylin is now at work on a new three-volume biography with the first volume, The Double Life of Bob Dylan: A Restless, Hungry Feeling, 1941-1966, due out from Little, Brown in May.  In this keynote event, he will discuss his latest work, talk about why it will stretch across three volumes, and explain what the archives in Tulsa have changed. 

4:00pm to 5:30pm         Songs to Be Sung: An Evening with Emma Swift and Trapper Schoepp

Dylan closed his Nobel lecture with the hope that his songs will be not just read, but sung–brought to life again and again by those who come after him. This panel will bring together two younger singer-songwriters who are making sure that Dylan’s work will indeed remain “alive in the land of the living.”   Emma Swift released Blonde on the Tracks in 2020, a collection of eight Dylan covers that earned critical praise, with Greil Marcus describing their uncanny ability to evoke “fragments of old songs now speaking to each other.”  And in 2019, Trapper Schoepp came across an incomplete Dylan lyric from 1961 called “On Wisconsin,” which he completed and set to music to earn an official co-writing credit with his songwriting hero.  In this session, music journalist Katie Moulton will moderate a conversation with Swift and Schoepp about their work, their careers, their creative process, what they’ve learned from Dylan, and why he still matters for rising generations of singer-songwriters.

7:00pm to 8:00pm          ‘Dignity Never Been Photographed’: A Special Exhibition by Duncan Hume

Since 1984, Duncan Hume has been photographing Dylan in performance and this session will offer a special look at his enormous collection of work gathered from 250 shows in 14 countries.  Hume was staff photographer for Judas! and his work has appeared in multiple books, official Dylan tour programs and exhibitions globally, including the Dylan exhibit in the Museum of Jewish People in Israel in 2016.  He will present his collection and we will then host a “virtual reception” allowing others to share their memories and distinctive experiences of Dylan in concert.

8:00pm to 9:30pm          Dylan in Nashville

We often think of Dylan’s 1966 motorcycle accident as a breaking point in his career, one that separates the folk and rock music of the early sixties from the basement and country music that followed.  In the years before and after this event, however, Dylan recorded a series of astonishing albums in Nashville where he drew on the dazzling talent of that American musical capital.  This session will offer an in-depth look at those years in a conversation between Daryl Sanders, author of The Thin, Wild Mercury Sound: Dylan, Nashville, and the Making of Blonde on Blonde, and Leigh Edwards, a scholar of American music who contributed the essay “Dylan and Country Music” to The World of Bob Dylan. 

Why Blonde on Blonde  could only have been recorded in Nashville

Daryl Sanders

Dylan, Johnny Cash, and the Projection of Authenticity

Leigh Edwards