Elijah Wald: “Bob Dylan in Greenwich Village”
- Blues
- Folk
Bob Dylan arrived in Greenwich Village in January, 1961, joining a vibrant musical world from which he emerged as one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century.
Through songs and stories, Elijah Wald brings audiences into that world, tracing Dylan’s progress as he met and traded songs with Woody Guthrie, Dave Van Ronk, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Eric Von Schmidt, Jean Ritchie, and less familiar figures like Paul Clayton, who provided the song he rewrote as “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.”
An expert guitarist, singer, and raconteur, Elijah Wald is also a writer and historian whose book, Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night that Split the Sixties, is the basis for the hit movie A Complete Unknown. He grew up on the folk scene and has been close with many of the people featured in this program, hanging out with Elliott, performing with Von Schmidt, and becoming particularly close with Van Ronk, whose couch served both Dylan and Elijah as a bed over many nights (though not the same nights). Elijah also co-authored Dave’s memoir, The Mayor of MacDougal Street, which inspired the Coen Brothers’ movie, Inside Llewyn Davis.
This program ranges from old folk songs (“The Cuckoo,” “Nottamun Town”) to obscure early Dylan compositions (“The Old Man,” “If I had to Do It All Over Again”) and familiar masterpieces (“Masters of War,” “Mr. Tambourine Man”), tied together with stories about the Village scene, the musicians, the ever-changing parade of characters and times, and Dylan’s evolution from a raw folk and blues singer into a mature artist who became the voice of a generation.
Elijah Wald
- Blues
- Roots
Elijah Wald started playing guitar at age 7, went to New York at age 17 to study with Dave Van Ronk, and spent much of the next twenty years hitchhiking and performing all over North America and Europe, as well as much of Asia and Africa, including several months studying with the Congolese guitar masters Jean-Bosco Mwenda and Edouard Masengo. He has worked as an accompanist to Van Ronk, Eric Von Schmidt, and the African American string band master Howard Armstrong, and recorded two solo albums: Songster, Fingerpicker, Shirtmaker and Street Corner Cowboys.
In the early 1980s Elijah began writing on roots and world music for the Boston Globe, publishing over a thousand pieces before he left in 2000, and his work has appeared in numerous newspapers and magazines. His dozen previous books include Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues; 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; and The Mayor of MacDougal Street, a memoir with Dave Van Ronk that inspired the Coen Brothers’ movie Inside Llewyn Davis. He has won a Grammy Award for his album notes to The Arhoolie Records 40th Anniversary Box, for which he was also nominated as a producer, and his books have won many awards, including an ASCAP-Deems Taylor award and an honorable mention for the American Musicological Society’s Otto Kinkeldey award. He has an interdisciplinary PhD in ethnomusicology and sociolinguistics, and taught for several years in the musicology department at UCLA. He is currently based near Boston, writing, traveling to speaking engagements around the US and abroad, and performing in a duo with his wife, clarinetist Sandrine Sheon.
