Elijah Wald is a musician, writer, and historian who has published on a broad range of music and related cultural subjects. He started playing guitar after seeing his first Pete Seeger concert at age seven, went to New York at seventeen to study with Dave Van Ronk, and spent many years traveling and performing in North America, Europe, Asia and Africa, studying with the Congolese guitar innovator Jean-Bosco Mwenda, and touring with the African-American string band master Howard Armstrong. His recordings include an LP, Songster, Fingerpicker, Shirtmaker, and a CD, Street Corner Cowboys.

     In the early 1980s he began writing for the Boston Globe, first covering gospel and other “roots” styles, then becoming the newspaper’s regular “world music” reporter throughout the 1990s. He has published well over a thousand articles for a wide range of popular and academic journals, and his dozen books include Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night that Split the Sixties; How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ’n’ Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music; Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues; The Dozens: A History of Rap’s Mama; Global Minstrels: Voices of World Music; Dave Van Ronk’s memoir of the New York folk revival, The Mayor of MacDougal Street (the inspiration for the Coen Brothers’ movie, Inside Llewyn Davis); and Narcocorrido, a survey of the modern Mexican ballads of drug smuggling and political corruption.

Wald has an interdisciplinary PhD in ethnomusicology and sociolinguistics, has taught in the musicology department at UCLA, and travels widely as a speaker on the history and culture of popular music. He is particularly known for exploring musical styles within broader sociocultural contexts, as well as for original research on early blues, Mexican ranchera, and the folk revival. His awards include a Grammy for the album notes to The Arhoolie Records 40th Anniversary Box, an ASCAP-Deems Taylor award, and special mention for the American Musicological Society’s Otto Kinkeldey award.  There is voluminous further information at his website: http://www.elijahwald.com.

Photo by Sandrine Sheon

--

Dylan Goes Electric! Music, Myth, and History

Bob Dylan’s electric set at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 is an iconic moment in 20th century music: the folk revival’s prophet and “voice of a generation” took the stage with an electric band, and an audience of dedicated folk fans reacted with dismay and booing. The confrontation is often compared to the reaction that greeted Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in 1913, and signaled a new understanding of rock as a modern art form and of rockers as innovative rebels. More broadly, it signaled fundamental changes in American culture—soon to spread around the world—a split between the old and new lefts, and the rise of the counterculture, and its ripples are still being felt fifty years later.

Through recordings, images, and new research, Elijah Wald explores the world that shaped Dylan and his music, as well as the varied worlds of the people who loved him, hated him, ignored him, or felt he was betraying them, seeking to understand both the changes happening in that moment and the reasons some people found those changes so threatening. A central figure in that story is Pete Seeger, a complex artist and activist whose work has frequently been oversimplified, including his role in creating the Newport Folk Festivals. It is a story that reaches back to the populist communal movements of the 19th century, and remains as relevant as ever.

Elijah Wald is a musician, historian, and writer who has taught at UCLA and lectured widely on pop, roots, and Mexican music. His books include the recent Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Dylan, Seeger, and the Night that Split the Sixties, which builds on his earlier Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues and How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ’n’ Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music. His many awards include a 2002 Grammy, and his memoir with Dave Van Ronk, The Mayor of MacDougal Street, was the inspiration for the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis.