Slouching Towards Big Pink: Essays on Bob Dylan and The Band, Woody Guthrie, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt

by Adrian Smith

Overview

Slouching Towards Big Pink is a stylish blend of memoir, travelogue, and scholarship. From the West Midlands to West Saugerties, the Isle of Wight to the New York island, these essays see Adrian Smith fly the flag for folk in 'sixties Coventry, criss-cross America in the footsteps of Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie, ride a fifty-year rollercoaster of Dylan performances, trace the sad story of Bob Dylan and Rick Nelson, and look to The Band for a soundscape of his son's final illness.

The book then focuses on Bob Dylan and The Band's performances at the Woody Guthrie tribute concerts staged in Carnegie Hall on 20th January 1968, and on a deeply controversial song Dylan has never reprised: Guthrie's last complete composition, 'Dear Mrs Roosevelt'. Why Woody Guthrie wrote 'Dear Mrs Roosevelt', and how Bob Dylan rescued it from obscurity twenty years later, reflects the close relationship between 'people's music' and progressive politics in America from the 1930s to the 1960s. No president has been celebrated in song as much as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and no First Lady has loved folk music like Eleanor Roosevelt - this is as much their story as that of Guthrie, Dylan, and his sidemen.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781908837141
Publisher:	Takahe Publishing Ltd.
Publication date:	06/08/2020
Pages:	244
Sales rank:	952,877
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.51(d)

Table of Contents

Slouching Towards Big Pink

‘Don’t forget the motor city!’ – my parents and pop

Finding Woody Guthrie

The Isle of Wight, 31st August 1969

Following in the footsteps of Bob and Woody, summer ’76

Nashville – the ghost of Woody Guthrie

Bob Dylan and Ricky Nelson, an unlikely combination

DYLAN, GUTHRIE, AND ROOSEVELT – THE STORY OF A SONG

An Introduction…

Bob and The Band – the road to Carnegie Hall, 20th January 1968

Still inside Carnegie Hall, 20th January 1968

Bob plays songs about the President!

Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt – White House folkies

Woody takes on Washington – with some help from Pete Seeger

Woody and Pete go to war – and mourn the President

People’s Songs – the rise and rise of Henry Wallace

Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, the Weavers, and Un-American Activities

‘Dear Mrs Roosevelt’ – the real [new] deal

A conclusion

Postscript: ‘If you want to keep your memories, you first have to live them’

Acknowledgements

Select Sources