Bob Dylan To Be The Subject Jan. 30 at Monmouth University
The second annual President’s Lecture on Music History and Contemporary America will be held at Monmouth University on Cedar Avenue in West Long Branch at 3:00 p.m. in the on-campus Pollak Theatre. The subject will be Bob Dylan. The event is free. Advance registration is required.
Monmouth University President Pat Leahy will introduce the guest speaker. Princeton American History Professor Sean Wilentz (pictured), wrote, arguably, the greatest Dylan book of all, Bob Dylan In America (2010). His presentation, “I Don’t Write Protest Songs: Bob Dylan, 1963,” comes complete with rare and uncirculated recordings.
Wilentz, in a press release from The Bruce Springsteen Archives & Center for American Music, says, “To this day, Bob Dylan’s early work gets tagged as political or topical or protest music, despite his own protests about it. He has always refused to be categorized as a protest singer or a political spokesman or anything else other than a songwriter and performer. ‘I don’t write protest songs,’ he declared to the audience at a Monday night hootenanny at Gerde’s Folk City… Yet that renunciation served as Dylan’s introduction to his first-ever public performance of ‘Blowin’ in the Wind,’ a song that within months would become an anthem of the burgeoning civil rights movement. Although he spoke only for himself, the shifting politics of Dylan’s early output expressed a strong point of view that was essential to his emergence in Greenwich Village, perhaps the most rapid leap into genius of any artist in modern times. That development accelerated early in 1963, led to an extraordinary burst of creativity beginning in the middle of the year, and culminated in a landmark concert at Carnegie Hall on Oct. 26, the end of the beginning of Dylan’s long career.”
To register for this event, visit https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeEqLRS65MnBzOb0FUVjmrzLTUyP3IO9M09TCaKs38Yi5zkSQ/viewform
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