Ephemeral by nature, the concert setlist is a rich, if underexplored, text for scholarly research. How an artist curates a show is a significant aspect of any concert’s appeal. Through the placement of songs, variations in order, or the omission of material, Bob Dylan’s setlists form a meta-narrative speaking to the power and significance of his music. These essays use the setlists from concerts throughout Dylan’s career to study his approach to his material from the 1960s to the 2020s. These chapters, from various disciplinary perspectives, illustrate how the concert setlist can be used as a source to explore many aspects of Dylan’s public life. Finally, this collection provides a new method to examine other musicians across genres with an interdisciplinary approach to setlists and the selectivity of performance. Unique in its approach and wide-ranging scholarly methodology, this book deepens our understanding of Bob Dylan, the performer.

This collection focuses on Bob Dylan's setlists from the 1960s to the 2020s. These multidisciplinary essays examine how the concert setlist can be used as a source to explore many aspects of Dylan's public life. Unique in its approach and wide-ranging scholarly methodology, this book deepens our understanding of Bob Dylan, the performer.

Teaching Bob Dylan offers educators practical, adaptable strategies for designing or updating courses (or units within courses) on the life, music, career, and critical reception of Bob Dylan. Drawing on the latest pedagogical developments and best classroom practices in a range of fields, the contributors present concrete approaches for teaching not only Dylan's lyrics and music, but also his many-and sometimes abrupt or unexpected-changes in musical direction, numerous creative guises, and writings. Situating Dylan and his work in their musical, literary, historical, and cultural contexts, the essays explore ways to teach Dylan's connections to African American music and performers, American popular music, the Beats, Christianity, and the revolutions of the 1960s, and more, and offer strategies for incorporating, and analyzing, not only documentaries and films about or featuring Dylan, but also critical and biographical studies on multiple dimensions of an American icon's long and complex career.

This work illuminates, identifies, and characterizes the influences and expressions of Bob Dylan's Political World throughout his life and career. An approach nearly as unique as the singer himself, the authors attempt to remove Dylan from the typical Left/Right paradigm and place him into a broader and deeper context.

This book embraces the multiplicity of forms of writing inspired by rock and roll. Exploring a diverse range of formats including rock autobiography and gender, race and class in American rock journalism, rock obituaries, rock literature and spirituality, rock writing and promotion/packaging, and more, this book identifies and prioritizes writing forms often excluded from the categorization of rock music writing. Vitally, the volume places rock and roll writing within a wider cultural frame often overlooked by studies of traditional white male-led music journalism.

David Boucher and Gary Browning provide a multi-faceted analysis of the political art of Bob Dylan. The contributions cover Dylan's career as a whole, dealing with such themes as alienation, protest, non-conformity and the American Dream. Dylan's work is examined from a variety of perspectives including the aesthetic theory of Kant, Adorno, Lyotard and Collingwood. The assembled authors are notable specialists in political theory, literary criticism and popular culture. They do not tackle Dylan from a single standpoint but collectively question how Dylan's work relates to the theory and practice of politics.

A brilliantly written and groundbreaking book about Dylan's music – now the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2016 – and its musical, political and cultural roots in early 20th-century America Growing up in Greenwich Village in the 1960s Sean Wilentz discovered the music of Bob Dylan as a young teenager. Almost half a century later, now a distinguished professor of American history, he revisits Dylan's work with the critical skills of a scholar and the passion of a fan. Drawing partly on his work as the current historian-in-residence on Dylan's official website, Sean Wilentz provides a unique blend of biography, memoir and analysis in a book which, much like its subject, shifts gears and changes shape as the occasion demands.