The idea of the open road creates a deep link between Dylan and the Beats—a shared belief in the values of freedom, mobility, escape, and self-invention made possible by post-war American automobile culture.  The rambler and the rounder, the gambler and the hitchhiker, the drag racer and the rolling stone all weave their ways powerfully in and out of Dylan’s music.  It’s nearly impossible, in fact, to imagine Dylan’s art without the open road, which runs alongside the rivers and railways that carried the blues music from the muddy delta of the Mississippi, through hot jazz cities like Memphis and Kansas City, and on up into the northern reaches on Minnesota where he set out in search of his home.

This second day of the symposium will focus on Dylan’s road music and the debts it owes to the Beats—a debt famously acknowledged when the Rolling Thunder Revue paused in Lowell, Massachusetts for a quiet séance at the Jack Kerouac’s grave.  These sessions will look not only at Dylan’s music, but also at the larger role of the road in the imagination of American identity.  The Beats, typically seen as largely white and male, had a rather different experience of traveling America’s highways and backroads than Black Americans who followed the Green Guides and had to steer clear of dangerous sundown towns. Yet, Black musicians and artists faced these challenges and traversed America’s by-ways anyway to forge world-changing music in their recordings and performances, many that influenced and enabled Dylan and the Beats.  Women, who too faced challenges while traveling, found new opportunities and identities on the road, creating their own counterpoint to the male visions of Kerouac and Dylan.  That new-found freedom—both spatial and sonic—then helped transform American music.

Road Music

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