About the Book
Book 9 explores the through lines of Bob Dylan's Nobel Prize-winning body of work and his continued commitment to live performance.
On October 13, 2016, news broke that the Swedish Academy had awarded Bob Dylan the Nobel Prize in Literature "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition." Dylan was only the twelfth American to win the Prize, joining Saul Bellow, Joseph Brodsky, Pearl Buck, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, Isaac Bashevis Singer, John Steinbeck, Toni Morrison, and Eugene O'Neill. More importantly, however, he was the first-ever songwriter to win the prestigious award, which had to that point been given only to "traditional authors."
Having just embarked upon another tour, Dylan didn't respond to the news for a few days. He later explained that the "news about the Nobel Prize left me speechless." Although he was unable to attend the Nobel Banquet in Stockholm that December, the US Ambassador to Sweden Azita Raji spoke in his absence, and Patti Smith performed "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" with orchestral accompaniment. The following April, when Dylan's tour passed through Sweden, Dylan met with the Academy for a private ceremony to accept his medal and diploma. In a statement from Academy secretary Sara Danius, she noted, "Quite a bit of time was spent looking closely at the gold medal, in particular the beautifully crafted back, an image of a young man sitting under a laurel tree who listens to the Muse."
Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese was the second film the director made about Dylan. Released on June 12, 2019, the Netflix film blurs the line between fact and fiction to tell a story of Dylan's famed 1975 tour.
Opening on September 29, 2019, at the Modern Art Museum in Shanghai, China, Retrospectrum collected more than 250 pieces of artwork spanning the full breadth of Dylan's work as a visual artist. Oil, acrylic, and watercolor paintings were displayed alongside ink, pastel, and charcoal drawings, which were in turn set off by Dylan's ironwork sculptures. From the original works making up his earliest published drawings (from the 1973 book Writings and Drawings), to his Mondo Scripto (at that time his most recent work), the retrospective also featured some of Dylan's most iconic artworks, including the Train Tracks of the Drawn Blank series and a monumental new version of Endless Highway from The Beaten Path series.
In early 2020, Dylan recorded songs for the album Rough and Rowdy Ways featuring his touring band including Bob Britt, Matt Chamberlain, Tony Garnier, Donnie Herron, and Charlie Sexton, with additional contributions from Fiona Apple, Blake Mills, Alan Pasqua, Tommy Rhodes, and Benmont Tench. From the tender "I've Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You" and rough-and-tumble blues of "Crossing the Rubicon," to the poem-song of "Black Rider" and the dreamlike "Key West (Philosopher Pirate)," Rough and Rowdy Ways built upon his original work through Tempest, while incorporating the atmosphere and spontaneity of his excursions into the Great American Songbook.
Following the seismic stir of the album's rollout, Rough and Rowdy Ways debuted at #1 on Billboard's charts for Top Rock and Americana/Folk Albums. On the Billboard 200 chart--which encompasses all popular music regardless of genre--Rough and Rowdy Ways debuted at #2, making Dylan the first artist to have an album chart in the Top 40 in every decade since the 1960s.
On December 8, 2019, Dylan performed his final pre-pandemic show, and did not return to the stage again until the launch of his Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour on November 2, 2021, scheduled to run for three years.
About the Author :
Parker Fishel is an archivist who served as co-curator of the inaugural exhibitions at the Bob Dylan Center. His company, Americana Music Productions, provides consulting, research, and production work for artists and estates, record labels, and other entities looking to preserve archives and share the important stories found in them. His selected credits include Ann Arbor Blues Festival 1969 (Third Man Records), the Chelsea Hotel-inspired Chelsea Doors box set (Vinyl Me, Please), and several volumes of Bob Dylan's GRAMMY Award-winning Bootleg Series (Sony/Legacy). Fishel is also a board member of the Hot Club Foundation and a co-founder of the nonprofit improvised music archive Crossing Tones.
Mark Davidson is the Curator of the Bob Dylan Archive and Senior Director of Archives and Exhibitions for the Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie Centers in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He holds a PhD in musicology from the University of California-Santa Cruz with an emphasis on folk music collecting, and an MSIS in archiving and library science from the University of Texas at Austin. He has written widely on music and archives, including his dissertation, "Recording the Nation: Folk Music and the Government in Roosevelt's New Deal, 1936-1941," and the essay "Blood in the Stacks: On the Nature of Archives in the Twenty-First Century," published in The World of Bob Dylan (2021).
Alan Licht is a musician, writer, and curator based in New York City. Appearing on nearly one hundred recordings, he is known for his guitar work in the underground rock bands Run On and Love Child and with such legendary figures as Yoko Ono, Arthur Lee, and Tom Verlaine. A frequent contributor to Artforum, The Wire, and other publications, Licht is the author of Common Tones: Selected Interviews with Artists and Musicians 1995-2020 (Blank Forms, 2021) and Sound Art Revisited (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), the revised edition of Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Categories (Rizzoli, 2007), the first full-length study of sound installations and sound sculpture to appear in English, and he edited Will Oldham on Bonnie "Prince" Billy (Faber & Faber/W. W. Norton, 2012).
Douglas Brinkley is the Katherine Tsanoff Brown Chair in Humanities and Professor of History at Rice University. He is author of Silent Spring Revolution: John F. Kennedy, Rachel Carson, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and the Great Environmental Awakening (HarperCollins, 2023), and he wrote the liner notes to Bob Dylan's The Bootleg Series Vol. 17: Fragments--Time Out of Mind Sessions (1996-1997).
