I sorta liked “A Hard Rain Is A’Gonna Fall,” but otherwise. Folk music was a joke. And the hard rain didn’t really fall. LBJ retired to the ranch. The only people who got really wet were us veterans of his fuckedup war. Howsomeever.
“We are not a folk but a church, and our native music is church music–the Battle Hymn with its quotation of Isaiah 63, for example, or “The Year of Jubilo,” whose hymnal roots I analyzed here. Our popular poetic language is that of our national epic, the King James Bible. We sang the go-to-meeting songs of the Methodists and other Protestant denominations. This informed the spirituals of black slaves who gave us our first original art form. American folk music? Gospel is as close as we get to such a concept.”
The most authentic thing Dylan ever did—besides going electric—was to refuse to go accept his Nobel Prize for Literature. He knew he was a phony.
Read the rest from a practicing Modern Orthodox Jew.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 