Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Face of Folk Music by Robert Shelton The Face of Folk Music by Robert Shelton. bright new face in folk music is appearing at Gerde’s Folk City. Although only 20 years old, Bob Dylan is one of the most distinctive stylists to play a Manhattan cabaret in months. Resembling a cross between a choir boy and a beatnik, Mr. Dylan has a cherubic look and a mop of tousled hair he partly covers with a Huck Finn black corduroy cap. His clothes may need a bit of tailoring, but when he works his guitar, harmonica or piano and composes new songs faster than he can remember them, there is no doubt that he is bursting at the seams with talent. Mr. Dylan’s voice is anything but pretty. He is consciously trying to recapture the rude beauty of a Southern field hand musing in melody on his porch. All the “husk and bark” are left on his notes and a searing intensity pervades his songs. Slow-Motion Mood. Mr. Dylan is both comedian and tragedian. Like a vaudeville actor on the rural circuit, he offers a variety of droll musical monologues: “Talking Bear Mountain” lampoons the over-crowding of an excursion boat, “Talking New York” satirizes his troubles in gaining recognition and “Talking Havah Nagilah” burlesques the folk-music craze and the singer himself. In his serious vein, Mr. Dylan seems to be performing in a slow-motion film. Elasticized phrases are drawn out until you think they may snap. He rocks his head and body, closes his eyes in reverie and seems to be groping for a word or a mood, then resolves the tension benevolently by finding the word and the mood. He may mumble the text of “House of the Rising Sun” in a scarcely understandable growl or sob, or clearly enunciate the poetic poignancy of a Blind Lemon Jefferson blues: “One kind favor I ask of you--See that my grave is kept clean.” Mr. Dylan’s highly personalized approach toward folk song is still evolving. He has been sopping up influences like a sponge. At times, the drama he aims at is off-target melodrama and his stylization threatens to topple over as a mannered excess. But if not for every taste, his music-making has the mark of originality and inspiration, all the more noteworthy for his youth. Mr. Dylan is vague about his antecedents and birthplace, but it matters less where he has been than where he is going, and that would seem to be straight up. Return to the Books Home Page. No Direction Home: Robert Shelton’s essential insider account of Dylan’s early years. It is rare that a music critic’s appraisal of a live performance can claim to have changed the face of pop culture. Yet that is exactly what occurred following the publication of a review in the New York Times on September 29, 1961. Written by Robert Shelton, it alerted readers to “a bright new face in folk music”, a singer and performer whose songs bore the hallmarks of “originality and inspiration”. T he songwriter was — spoiler alert — Bob Dylan, but what makes the story all the more interesting are two points. On the basis of that review, Dylan signed a deal with Columbia Records, the label he is still with almost 60 years later, and Shelton, viewed in the 1960s as a pioneer of rock journalism, developed a genuine friendship with the singer. It was a friendship so solid that when Shelton broached the idea of a biography in 1965, Dylan paved the way for unrestricted contact with people in virtually all areas of his life: parents, childhood friends, university colleagues, girlfriends, Greenwich Village musicians, poets and hangers-on. “I’ll go along if it’s a respectful book,” Dylan said. “I resent it when they try to treat me like a kid.” Not only that, but Shelton was an inner-circle witness to early pivotal performances in Dylan’s career: Newport Festival 1963, Philharmonic Hall 64, and Newport Festival 65, when Dylan notoriously went ‘electric’ and all pop culture hell broke loose. That Shelton’s groundbreaking biography wasn’t published until 1986 tells us something about him. While he and Dylan stopped communicating in the late 70s, Shelton clearly wasn’t hanging around for a quick cash-in job. Rather, in a tortoise-and-hare manner, he assiduously gathered notes and interviews and viewed many performances along the way, meticulous in his portrayal of Dylan as “an artist of transcendent historical importance”. It shows how Dylan would outgrow relationships and friends. One of these was Dave Van Ronk, a Greenwich Village folk singer whose early mentoring of Dylan was central to his success. “The part of Dylan that was the sponge could function on all eight cylinders,” Van Ronk says. “He got whatever he could absorb here, and he moved on.” Another musician, John Sebastian of the Lovin’ Spoonful, tells Shelton that “you can’t get too close to Dylan. He burns with such a bright flame you can get burned.” It gets personal, too, when Carla Rotolo — sister of Suze Rotolo, a key figure in Dylan’s early development, and the woman who appears alongside him on cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan — labels him a classic Gemini: “split, flashes of brilliance, contradictions, and the inability to stay in one place”. The major difference, inevitably, between Shelton’s book and countless other biographies written before and after 1986 is the authenticity that jumps from its pages. At its core are Shelton’s first-hand reports and interviews, which provide a broad range of contextual detail. Examples are thrown into the air like fistfuls of confetti, and if they aren’t Shelton’s own observations, they are from other people. The former includes such personal insights as “whether in action or repose, in front of me or distanced, Dylan astonished me with his sense of intense life, and astonished me further by not burning himself out. We saw him dying young, like poets and stars… He beat the rap, a writer who decided he’d rather be read than dead”. The latter includes the less rapturous view of a University of Minnesota counsellor, whose memory of Bobby Zimmerman from 1959 was that he was “hard to know, kept very odd hours, and moped a lot”. OBITUARY: Robert Shelton. Since Stephen Sedley put away his pen and decided to concentrate on the law, we haven't had a popular music critic worthy of the name on this side of the Atlantic - apart, that is, from the rubicund, genial presence of Robert Shelton, who brought to his craft the more considered, literate techniques that had previously graced the pages of the New York Times. In the eyes of history, of course, Bob Shelton will be remembered as the first critic to bring to international prominence the name of Bob Dylan, when he ignored the bill-toppers at Gerde's Folk City in Greenwich Village to concentrate upon the support act, a young man whom he described as "resembling a cross between a choirboy and a beatnik", whose voice was "anything but pretty". But Dylan wasn't the only new singer to get the benefit of Shelton's perceptive encouragement. It was his review in 1959, two years earlier, of an 18-year-old Joan Baez whose "achingly pure soprano" he lauded at the Newport Folk Festival that pitched her into the stardom that was to put her on the cover of Time magazine in 1961. Phil Ochs, Peter Paul and Mary, Judy Collins and Jose Feliciano were also helped on their way, not to mention the 15-year-old Janis Ian. Ian's controversial ballad of cross- racial sex, "Society's Child", couldn't find a record company with the courage to issue it until Shelton's advocacy brought her to the attention of Leonard Bernstein, who featured her in a television special devoted to the new music emerging from the coffee bars and cellars of Greenwich Village. Shelton wasn't merely an advocate, however, because he could get involved. It was he who persuaded Mike Porco, proprietor of the six-storey late- 19th-century brownstone building on West 4th Street, to run Monday-night amateur talent nights at Gerde's Folk City, and it was he who suggested calling them hootenannies, the name Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie and the Almanac Singers had given to their 35-cents-a-head Sunday- afternoon singarounds 20 years earlier. The term passed into the jargon of the burgeoning folk scene, lending itself to a magazine and a television show (which, ironically, blacklisted Seeger, because of his left-wing views). Unlike some critics, who habitually laud their own percipience, not to mention omniscience, Shelton was quick to admit that he missed Dylan's first appearances at Gerde's, because he was more interested in the bill-topping blues singer, John Lee Hooker. And while his description of Dylan in the New York Times of Friday 29 September 1961, as "one of the most distinctive stylists to play in a Manhattan cabaret in months . . . it matters less where he has been than where he is going, and that would seem to be straight up", probably did for Dylan what he had done earlier for Baez, in his biography of Dylan Shelton claimed that it was an accidental space at the top of the review page which gave the piece undue prominence: "The layout, the picture and the headline trumpeted Dylan even louder than my story." He was working on the biography when he came to London in the late Sixties, and for many years it seemed like an ungainly albatross around his neck. He wanted to produce a measured, literary appreciation of a great popular poet, but publishers wanted the personal minutiae that are supposed to make good pop books. Unusually, for someone who shunned the press unless he could play mind games with them, Dylan was fairly co-operative in its creation, encouraging family, friends and acquaintances to co-operate as well, and the result was a fascinating melange, moving swiftly between critical judgements of his subject's words and music to deftly sketched word pictures of places like Hibbing, Dylan's home town, "a running sore" from which "was extracted a billion gross tons of earth - more than was dug for the Panama Canal - which yielded 500 million tons of iron ore". Shelton was not an analytical critic in the tradition of George Bernard Shaw, or even of Wilfrid Mellers, whose musicological analyses of the Beatles' cadences caused his highbrow colleagues to scoff. He was rather an enormous enthusiast, who conveyed with the accuracy of a great reporter exactly what it was like to be there, and how great it must have been. He was also a great professional. I remember that when Dave Laing assembled the unlikely quadrumvirate of Shelton, Robin Denselow, himself and me, to collaborate in documenting the development of folk rock from folk in The Electric Muse, it was Shelton who went through the proposed contract with an old pro's eye, and spurred us on to demand a larger advance, which to our surprise was promptly agreed by Methuen, the publishers. What was amazing was that this great, historic documenter of a turning- point in the history not only of popular music but of world music was not given a British platform worthy of his eminence when he came to live in England. He wrote for the Times for a while, but then settled for a lowly arts-page editing job on the Brighton Evening Argus, leaving that as he struggled with diabetes to contribute film reviews to the Birmingham Post. Eventually, in 1986, his book on Dylan had come out, under the title No Direction Home, and it turned out to be well worth waiting for, not merely creating a fully rounded portrait of its subject, but also of the era that gave him birth. But even the book's success did not land him the sort of work his eminence deserved. Strange are the ways of commissioning editors. It was not Shelton's only book. He also wrote the text for Dave Gahr's wonderful collection of photographs The Face of Folk Music, as well as the somewhat pot-boiling Country Music Story, in collaboration with Burt Goldblatt. But his true monument exists, not in hard covers, but in the yellowing files of newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic, the history of how when the mode of the music changes, the walls of the city shake. Robert Shelton, journalist: born Chicago, Illinois 28 June 1926; died Brighton 11 December 1995. Join our new commenting forum. Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies. Robert Shelton. Robert Shelton was a folk and rock critic for The New York Times in the '60s, also writing about youth culture in general for that paper, although he was already in his mid-thirties when the '60s began.… Read Full Biography. Biography ↓ Songs ↓ Credits ↓ facebook twitter tumblr. Artist Biography by Richie Unterberger. Robert Shelton was a folk and rock critic for The New York Times in the '60s, also writing about youth culture in general for that paper, although he was already in his mid-thirties when the '60s began. He wrote several books, but will be primarily remembered for his Bob Dylan biography, No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan. Shelton also played a significant part in Dylan's early career, as the very first writer to give him major media coverage. Before he'd met Dylan in 1961, Shelton was already a mover and shaker of the burgeoning Greenwich Village folk scene. He suggested to Mike Porco, who ran the Village folk club Gerde's Folk City, that Porco institute a Monday hootenanny night to allow amateurs to take the stage. The hootenanny was an important showcase for emerging New York folk talent, including Judy Collins, Dave Van Ronk, Tom Paxton, and Bob Dylan. In September of 1961, Dylan was engaged for a two week stint at the club. After opening night, Shelton ran a rave review in the New York Times. Part of this read, "Dylan's voice is anything but pretty. He is consciously trying to recapture the rude beauty of a Southern field hand musing in melody on his porch. All the 'husk and bark' are left on his notes and a searing intensity pervades his songs. His music-making has the mark of originality and inspiration, all the more noteworthy for his youth." The Electric Muse Revisited: The Story of Folk into Rock and Beyond. Folk music has been evolving and adapting for centuries, but in the 1960s and 70s came an extraordinary period of change and innovation. Rock musicians borrowed from traditional songs, while folk musicians re-worked ancient ballads using electric guitars and drum kits. From Dylan to Fairport Convention, Richard Thompson and Steeleye Span, the fusion of old and contemporary created a powerful new style: folk-rock. Since then, new and experimental folk fusions have continued, involving anything from rap to electronica. First published in 1975, at the height of the folk-rock boom, the critically acclaimed Electric Muse chronicled the story of the folk movement, from roots to revival. With new chapters on the eras of Eliza Carthy, Billy Bragg, June Tabor, Bellowhead, Sam Lee, Stick In The Wheel and others, and featuring new interviews and photographs, this edition brings the fascinating narrative up to date. As in 1975, The Electric Muse Revisited is published with a new album set of the same title, on Good Deeds Music, released on 21st June. It can be ordered here. ​ Publication Date: 27.05.21 ISBN: 9781913172084 Extent: 320 pages Format: Paperback. ***Please note, if out of stock at our warehouse, this title can be purchased at all good high street and online booksellers***