I am watching American Masters with Bob Dylan. It is bringing up interesting issues with "authenticity." Bob and friends discuss how Dylan went through various phases, playing certain songs, listening to certain artists, mimicking their sound. One of his friends talks about how much Dylan grew as an artist in a matter of months after he moved to New York. Woody Guthrie is the prime example of an influencing artist for Dylan. Dylan expresses how he felt regret when he "moved beyond" his Guthrie phase. Dylan says that he needed to express what was going on. He was trying to create and use a “language I had never heard before.”
One of the record executives discusses how “these songs sounded old and new at the time. He sang songs that affected us.”
Marvis Staples shares that she thought: "How does he know this?" about "How Many Roads Must a Man Walk Down" when she first heard it.
Isn’t this what we are always groping for, a new language to express both the old and the new as they are culminating and fulminating within our own time, within our own lives?
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