America, shaped and reflected in song
Writers explore ballads in "The Rose & the Briar: Death, Love and Liberty in the American Ballad"

By Steven Rosen

Recently on CBS's "60 Minutes," Ed Bradley was flummoxed by Bob Dylan's refusal to talk about his own influence on popular music and his generation. Dylan just didn't seem to care.

Yet if Bradley had pushed a little harder to get Dylan to talk, he probably would have gotten a far more generous and garrulous reply. For Dylan's admiration for the mysterious, lovesick tales of English and American folk and blues is what "Chronicles, Volume One" is all about.

Actually, before Dylan took pen in hand, rock-music critic Greil Marcus defined Dylan's relationship to such music in his 1997 "Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes." It placed Dylan's work in the context of an "old, weird America" of rugged-sounding "authentic" music that runs parallel to pop-culture commercialism but ultimately influences it in a profound, long-lasting way. Such music is, in Marcus' view, frequently life-and-death stuff about life and death. As such, it never gets old.

Marcus' revelation - that old folk and blues are important to us because they influenced Dylan, who is our greatest living musician - has fueled an ongoing revival of interest in such music (and in Dylan, for that matter). It predated "O Brother Where Art Thou," which itself showed Marcus' influence.

Now, in "The Rose & the Briar," Marcus and co-editor Sean Wilentz try to continue that journey into the heart of "old, weird America." They have commissioned writers - critics, novelists, songwriters, even poet Paul Muldoon - and several artists to contribute chapters on specific ballads that deal, in some critical way, with matters of death, love and liberty. Wendy Lesser even struggles to understand the meaning of Dylan's own verbose "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts" and wrestles it to a draw.

Marcus and Wilentz, who is director of the Program in American Studies at Princeton University and historian-in-residence at the bobdylan.com website, gave the writers plenty of leeway to do whatever they wanted.

Some of the essayists either struggle to make their point or, frankly, overwrite to impress - David Thomas, of the rock band Pere Ubu, wanders into the remotest areas of obscurity trying to connect an old train-accident song, "The Wreck of Old 97," with Jan & Dean's "Dead Man's Curve."

But at its best, this leeway allows for an eclectic approach that produces lively, challenging writing. In a chapter about the genteel, polished folk singer Burl Ives' version of the folk ballad "The Foggy, Foggy Dew," New York Times critic John Rockwell bemoans the way ruggedness and even vulgarity are often hailed as end-all virtues in establishing a singer's authenticity.

"If the purist folkies booed Dylan at Newport in 1965, rock critics repaid the favor by mercilessly attacking such genteel latter-day folkies as Joan Baez and James Taylor ...," Rockwell writes. "Rock, the true successor to folk, was always a boy's game, with 'chick singers' looked at askance. ... The only real folk music is the kind that slides into punk rock."

Steve Erickson looks at two ballads, "Sail Away" and "Louisiana 1927," written by a contemporary of Dylan's, Randy Newman. The first is a sardonic comment about our history of slavery; the second a mournful look at the devastation caused by a flood coming at a time - the Roaring '20s - when America was awash in prosperity. (The song is especially poignant in these post-tsunami times.)

"When people talk about American innocence ..., as though an America that wiped out its original inhabitants and built itself out slave labor was ever innocent, this is one of the moments they're talking about, deep in the Jazz Age, deep in the '20s that 'roared.' But deep in the mud of his Louisiana home, the farmer knows a deluge is coming," Erickson writes.

If there's a meat-and-potatoes to "Rose & the Briar," it consists of short histories about specific folk and blues ballads, why they were written and how they came to be standards.

Sarah Vowell contributes an outstanding account of how "John Brown's Body Lies A-Mouldering in the Grave" (about a terrorist, she wryly observes) mutated into "Battle Hymn of the Republic." And Cecil Brown's investigation of the actual murder that inspired "Frankie and Albert" (also known as "Frankie and Johnny") is a great example of both historical research and dogged police reporting.

The stories behind traditional songs like these make up nothing less than the story of how America changed and evolved. So too someday will the stories behind the newer but enduring ballads by Newman and even Dylan himself.

(This review originally ran in the Denver Post)

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"The Rose and the Briar: Death, Love and Liberty in the American Ballad"

Edited by Sean Wilentz and Greil Marcus

W.W. Norton, 406 pages, $27