World of Dylan Keynote: Elijah Wald

The World of Bob Dylan promises to be a jam-packed weekend filled with a diverse array of papers, exhibits and creative workshops. We are especially pleased to welcome Grammy-award winning musician Elijah Wald to give a keynote address entitled “Bob Dylan, Blues Artist.”

We’re often told that Dylan arrived in New York sounding like Woody Guthrie and followed that lineage till he went electric. In fact, he started out playing blues-based rock ‘n’ roll, first performed in Greenwich Village as a blues harmonica player, was booked, reviewed, and recorded as an innovative young blues artist, and his second album was going to be solidly blues — and blues-based rock ‘n’ roll — until Albert Grossman matched him with Peter, Paul and Mary and he was redefined him as a folk poet and the father of the singer-songwriter scene. What do we hear, and how differently could we think about Dylan’s later career, if we go back to that earlier identity, and consider him as a blues artist. You can learn more at Wald’s talk on Saturday, July 26 at 2 p.m.

Elijah Wald has been a performing musician since the 1970s and a writer and historian since the 1980s. His dozen books include Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues; The Dozens: A History of Rap’s Mama;  How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ’n’ Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music; Narcocorrido: A Journey into the Music of Drugs, Guns, and Guerrillas; Jelly Roll Blues: Censored Songs and Hidden Histories; Dave Van Ronk’s memoir, The Mayor of MacDougal Street (the source for the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis); and Dylan Goes Electric! the source for the major motion picture A Complete Unknown. He has a PhD in ethnomusicology and sociolinguistics and his many awards include a 2002 Grammy. For further information: www.elijahwald.com