We are excited to welcome Greil Marcus back for the World of Bob Dylan 2025!
Following his 2023 talk on “Noir Tones in 21st-Century Dylan,” conference mainstay Greil Marcus returns this year for “First Unto This Country: Bob Dylan and the Little Sandy Review,” a listening session and conversation co-presented by the Bob Dylan Center and moderated by Center Director Steven Jenkins.
Struck by the dismissive questioning of the Village newcomer’s Minnesota origins in A Complete Unknown—as if a kid from the sticks couldn’t possibly know the music’s history or be that good—Marcus will share a specially curated playlist highlighting Minnesota’s rich folk-music lineage as championed in proto-fanzine Little Sandy Review, published by Paul Nelson and Jon Pankake in Minneapolis from 1960 to 1965. Across thirty issues, the Review drew attention to traditional folk songs recorded at the time by the New Lost City Ramblers (“When First Unto This Country”) and songs recorded in the 1930s by such Little Sandy heroes as Vera Hall (“Another Man Done Gone”)—a whole country of songs that were at once part of the Village milieu and that Bob Dylan had already begun mapping for himself when he arrived there.
For this evening program, Marcus will play and discuss a selection of songs favored in the pages of the Review and indicative of an essential tradition that, as he lined out in his 2022 Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs, have remained as a dynamic core of Dylan work ever since.
For nearly five decades, Greil Marcus has one of our most innovative commentators on Dylan’s work has unearthed again and again its often secreted yet always surprising connections to American history and popular popular culture. In addition to operating both his Substack newsletter [greilmarcus.substack.com] and his eclectic website,both of which collect his new and past writing in an ever-expanding cyber universe, he has written extensively on Dylan, from Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music (1975), through the landmark Old Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes(1997), to the celebrated 2022 Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs.
Register today to join us for this talk as well as dozens of other sessions featuring keynotes, artist conversations, roundtable discussions, musical performances, and much more. The conference will be held on the University of Tulsa’s campus, as well as various locations in the Downtown Tulsa Arts District.