Eric Lott, author of Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, talked to Dylan Review editor Paul Haney in July 2026, via video call. Eric Lott is an American cultural historian and Distinguished Professor of English at The Graduate Center, CUNY in New York City. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

 

Dylan Review: Bob Dylan famously borrowed the title of your book, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy in the American Working Class¹ for his 2001 album, “Love and Theft”, as Larry “Ratso” Sloman later confirmed in the liner notes to Tell Tale Signs, Bootleg Series Vol. 8. What do you think drew Dylan to your work?

Eric Lott: I think the resonance of those terms, the “love” and the “theft,” captures something of the bittersweet, melancholy vibe of the romantic or love relations evoked on the record. And it’s catchy. In that Rome 2001 press conference, the interviewer asks Dylan if love and theft are opposites or the same, and everybody laughs; they have a repartee back and forth, and they conclude, basically, that love and theft are pretty much the same. So the way one is shot through with the other is key to some of the narrative material and the love relationships invoked on that record.

Robert Polito’s right in After the Flood² that there’s also a theory of culture on the record, which I have also argued, a theory of cultural relations behind those terms. And I think Dylan might have appreciated my account of blackface performance as being this mixed-up scene of cross-racial love and desire and interest, as well as exploitation, social dominance, and racism. And all across the record, as many have pointed out, are any number of multitudinous references to texts, titles, and cultural items invoked, borrowed from, and addressed.

So he’s really thinking about “love” and “theft” as larger terms for the culture he’s coming out of. There’s a mixed-bag appropriation of the cultural materials that are around him, the blues in particular, that grounds most of those songs, twelve-bar forms, but also the unavoidably exploitative relations that structure those interests and those borrowings.

 

DR: In your chapter “Love and Theft,” from your book Love and Theft, you talk about the love part being “twitchy” and anxious, and the theft being more economic and cultural, like an identitarian kind of theft. Do you think Dylan was playing on that too, that he’s a little bit twitchy about what he loves and then steals?

EL: I don’t know about “twitchy.” I think he’s kind of brusque about people [calling him] a thief, certainly a borrower, a plagiarist, and he ascribes it all to folk process: “That’s just the tradition I come out of; that’s simply the way it works.” And he’s got some harsh words for people who get too heavy with him in that vein. So that’s a “maybe” on the “twitchy,” on the affective embodiment of those usages. It’s just what he does, all the way back to the masks in those interviews in the early 60s. “You know I was on the road with the circus for six years” and stuff like that. There’s a kind of shifty-eyed, circumspect, watch-your-back element that I don’t think is only a consequence of the borrowing, I think that’s just kind of the M.O. that he operates by.

 

DR: What first piqued your interest in blackface minstrelsy? How did you choose that as a topic of focus?

EL: I was, from my teenage years, really interested in jazz. Growing up and semi-maturing in the 1970s, Richard Pryor was another big influence. I felt drawn to those arts and worldviews. I wanted to write about them in graduate school. Ralph Ellison was another, Amiri Baraka, jazz-adjacent writers, Jayne Cortez. And then I began to get twitchy, if you will, about simply sitting down to write about those figures, wondering what sort of right or authority I had to do so as a white guy. I began, therefore, to wonder about the pre-history of interests like mine across the color line in Black arts, which takes you straight to Tambo and Bones, the first public stage presentation of white interest in Black stuff. And I got very interested in white appropriation, white cross-racial interest, that kind of borrowing, theft, its roots in the actual enslavement of human beings and the stealing of Black labor. It seemed to me that blackface performance, particularly at a moment when it was at its peak of popularity in the 1840s and 1850s, when so much is going on and when it congealed so many social and cultural factors of its time, ultimately leading to the revolutionary 1860s and war between the states, was a subject that could hold all that. It was a place where you could account for all those factors at once through an art form.

DR: It’s interesting that an art form, or an aesthetic mode, could have an impact on something like the Civil War, which is a topic Bob Dylan showed fascination with from his earliest days in Greenwich Village.

EL: Absolutely. And it explodes across the album “Love and Theft”, and then into the picture Masked and Anonymous, which is apparently about some kind of, quote unquote, “third world hassles” in a post-Cold War period, but is everywhere invoking Civil War stuff from Abraham Lincoln to Lee and Sherman. Civil strife of that kind has a hold on his imagination for sure.

DR: It seems to me that the film Masked and Anonymous is also in conversation with your book Love and Theft, engaging this idea that music and art are running through the conflict between two warring halves that are tearing the country apart.

EL: I’m always struck by Dylan’s choice of the song “Dixie” in Masked and Anonymous. He’s read a ton. He knows a lot. He’s thought deeply about what he knows. And I wouldn’t put it past him to know that “Dixie,” despite being a celebration of the Confederacy, was a favorite of Lincoln’s. And that Lincoln used it at campaign rallies and to celebrate the surrender at Appomattox. That there’s controversy—a whole book was written by Howard and Judith Sacks³—over the authorship of that song. Did Dan Emmett steal it from a Black musician in Ohio, though it’s credited to blackface performer Dan Emmett of the Virginia Minstrels? So the warring halves are all over that song, even in that one instance. He sings the heck out of it in Masked and Anonymous.

DR: Such a great performance. But it’s unsettling. Maybe even “twitchy” comes to mind again to watch him perform that.

EL: Absolutely. That’s exactly right. And Polito [in After the Flood] has this funny and apt description of Dylan’s performance of that song. All the other stuff [in Masked and Anonymous] kind of makes sense. There’s a lot of talk about protest songs. At this supposed benefit concert, “Why don’t you do some of your protest stuff?” “What about these other songs?” And then: “Dixie.” That’s the one that Polito describes as “a jab in your eye.” And Dylan does sing it in that kind of twitchy way. It’s very uncomfortable. I think it’s intentionally so.

 

DR: You mentioned that Dylan has harsh words for people who accuse him of plagiarism, and in that Rolling Stone “Unleashed” interview in 2012, he calls them “wussies,” “pussies,” and “evil motherfuckers.” But he also speaks [in that interview] about industrialization and the conflict between the North and the South. One line is “this country is just too fucked up about color” and he goes on to say that,

It’s doubtful that America’s ever going to get rid of that stigmatization. It’s a country founded on the backs of slaves. You know what I mean? Because it goes way back. It’s the root cause. If slavery had been given up in a more peaceful way, America would be far ahead today. Whoever invented the idea “lost cause.…” There’s nothing heroic about any lost cause. No such thing, though there are people who still believe it.

And so it seems like he’s clearly not sympathetic to the Southern cause, even though he’s performing “Dixie” in a film that he wrote. It feels of a piece to me with his quotations in Modern Times and elsewhere of Henry Timrod, who was the poet laureate of the Confederacy. So I wonder, what does it do for the history of America and American art for an artist like Bob Dylan to be performing renditions of these separatist works?

EL: Nothing’s off limits, and Dylan’s perfectly happy to embrace the contradictions and think them through. “I Contain Multitudes” on Rough and Rowdy Ways is rooted in Whitman’s line, “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / I contain multitudes.” So he’s hip to all that and is willing to take it on, even some persistent myth like the Lost Cause—which is more than a persistent myth. Constituencies have organized around it and done very damaging, socially damaging, personally damaging things to people in this country.

Dylan won’t cancel anybody, is another way to put it. Timrod won’t get canceled. He’s interested in how you could embrace such a thing, even as he thinks the thing itself, the Lost Cause ideology, is bankrupt. Because he doesn’t often speak his mind about that except in more general terms, it’s fascinating to hear him [in Rolling Stone] come out and slam the Lost Cause. I mean, it’s not super controversial, but to hear him wax historiographical about the Lost Cause and say that and smack it down is fascinating.

 

DR: It must be amazing for you as a scholar to have your work cited by Bob Dylan, even put into quotation marks, which he’s done for virtually no other person. So what is that like? What effect does that have on you on a scholar, on how you perceive yourself and your work?

EL: I was thrilled by it, but I try not to let it go to my head, which is to say that it’s great to be in this shadow relationship to Dylan, but it hasn’t affected how I think or what I do. I didn’t become a Dylanologist; quite the contrary. I just remain interested, and I saw it as an occasion to write about that fact [with] the chapter in Black Mirror⁴ that addresses “Love and Theft”, the album. I remain interested in Dylan’s second act work, like Masked and Anonymous, but most recently, Rough and Rowdy Ways and “Murder Most Foul,” which is what I spoke about in Tulsa last year. But Dylan will always be an enduring influence for me in thinking about the relation of culture and historical processes.

Beyond that, not much of an effect. The one really gratifying effect it’s had is to produce a community of interlocutors, relations with people who are interested in Dylan, but not only Dylan, who are wonderful to talk to and have been great to have as another community of thinkers and writers to engage with. That’s been a really great thing, but it hasn’t really changed what I do or how I do it.

DR: It strikes me now that in doing so, Dylan has also brought his own fervent fan base into the world of American cultural studies, and introduced them to your own work on blackface minstrelsy. He knows that whatever he does is going to be picked apart and that Dylan scholars or Dylanologists are going to explore every avenue. So by making a reference to your book, perhaps he was sending a horde of people to that title so that they could learn more about blackface minstrelsy themselves.

EL: That’s interesting. I suppose so. I’ve thought a little bit about that factor, and I just don’t know. First of all, [in 2001] the internet hadn’t developed to the degree that it has now. Whether people were throwing up the set lists every night, maybe they were. I certainly wasn’t following them. But even he says in interviews, like when Time Out of Mind came out, he was off the media radar. People just weren’t paying as much attention to him. And when Greil Marcus called me in the summer of 2001—I first heard from Greil that Dylan had a new record coming out. This is four years after Time Out of Mind, and Greil left me a voice message that said, “It’s got an interesting title. It’s called “Love and Theft.””

I thought, “Well, that’s interesting.” But I wasn’t like, “Holy cow.” In 2001, I don’t think people thought, “Oh my God, I’m going to rush out and buy this book now.” Or, “I’m going to do what Bob tells me to do.” Maybe I’m wrong about that, but it wasn’t true for me.

 

DR: I’ve got another quote from the 2001 Rome press conference. Your book Love and Theft contains a vast set of references to various cultural theories. And so when promoting his album, “Love and Theft”, Dylan was asked, do you worry about how people will analyze the songs? And he answered, “No, I’ve got no idea what other people might discover in the things I produce. Or do you mean analysis like Freudian or idealist or Marxist? I really have no idea.” So how familiar do you think he really is with this field of critical studies, with these theories that come up? What’s his relationship to critical theory, do you think?

EL: I think he certainly knows it exists. He’s got a kind of bemused and jocular sense in the way he laughs when he says, “Freudian, German, you mean like German idealism?” And then he goes, “You mean, like, Freudian Marxist?” Which is super funny. And then it all breaks down. On the other hand, with his invocations of Fitzgerald and Eliot over the years, I think he doesn’t mind being taken as seriously as those people. I think he was shocked by the Nobel, but he fully knows what he’s worth.

And books like Christopher Ricks’s Dylan’s Visions of Sin, I think are important to him. Ricks takes him seriously and does intelligent and accessible readings of the work on its own terms. And I know he likes Greil’s stuff also. He’ll pooh-pooh it because he has to.

 

DR: Greil Marcus seems to be a friend, a colleague, maybe even a mentor of yours, but you’ve written about “wishful fantasies of musical racelessness that sometimes mar Greil Marcus’s invocations of the old, weird America.” What might a deeper attention to blackface minstrelsy add to Marcus’s The Old, Weird America? And how might that attention help open up work like The Basement Tapes?

EL: Greil has been a foundational influence for me forever. He’s one of the few people who made it possible for me to do what I do. The Old, Weird America was originally called Invisible Republic—and there’s a lot of talk around the change of title, the “old, weird” borrowing from Kenneth Rexroth, the Invisible Republic title the one the publisher apparently preferred. Invisible Republic actually better captures what Greil talks about as Smithville. In Smithville, you can’t tell who’s singing what. It’s all mixed up. It’s a freer place, this older, weirder thing, Greil wants to say. And it strikes me as a willed America without the ugly social dominance that the songs are in fact full of. And you can’t wish those relations away by embracing the songs. Greil is very smart about a lot of that stuff, and I don’t think that it’s a fatal flaw, but he doesn’t account for it as much as he might.

There’s a less well-known, more recent text by Allen Lowe, “Turn Me Loose, White Man,”⁵ that covers the same material. Greil likes Allen Lowe, and there’s no disagreement, really. But Allen Lowe, it seems to me, is more aware of—in both musical inheritance and rhetorical address—the issue of race, is more alive to it than Greil can be. On the other hand, there’s no evoking a cultural landscape as Greil does so well, so ravishingly.

In terms of mentorship, not so much personally, but certainly distantly. In terms of study, I studied Greil Marcus hard. And then I’m lucky to have met up and become friends later.

I know my perspective may rankle Sean Wilentz. It rankles Greil sometimes to thrust race up in the middle of it so much. But I can’t not do it. As to The Basement Tapes, I’d have to think about it more. It’s interesting that that bootleg was billed as the Great White Wonder.

DR: That would be an interesting critical reading, to put a racial consciousness back into Greil Marcus’s reading of The Basement Tapes through The Old, Weird America.

EL: If The Basement Tapes lies in the background of Music From Big Pink the following year, and Greil’s chapter in Mystery Train on Big Pink has these Canadians and Levon summoning an Old South, thinking very consciously about American history, then there’s something there. But that’s the Timrod question, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” basically a song from the standpoint of Timrod.

 

DR: Going several years past that, do you ever think about the Rolling Thunder Revue and what Dylan was doing in whiteface on that tour?

EL: Michael Denning is good on this, in his piece that was in the Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan.⁶ And it’s fleeting, but it’s certainly a sign of race consciousness at a moment when he’s stumping for Rubin Carter and calling attention, I think, to his own whiteness. It’s not unlike self-consciousness about minstrelsy later, only in reverse, and it’s quite striking.

DR: It strikes me that Rolling Thunder Revue is the tour where Dylan is singing the N-word from the stage. And it’s also the tour where he’s wearing whiteface. So you have that contrast happening once again.

EL: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s a performative gesture, a racial address. I’m not sure how it lands, but he’s not letting himself off the hook. And there are moments, like the famous picture with “Hurricane” in jail. Dylan’s looking around for bars: “Can we get some bars in? Can we bring these bars down and make these bars more apparent?” He’s doing benefits for Carter in whiteface and making the jail bars plain. He’s all there. Certainly we can write it off as performative, but that’s what he is, a performer. And they’re political gestures that matter.

DR: And it’s almost of a piece, too, with his visit to [the Tuscarora Reservation in New York] on that tour, where he plays the “Ballad of Ira Hayes” for the Native Americans there, who seem grateful to have him.

EL: It’s so interesting that you say that. One of the signature moves of this big second act, the last thirty years, is his faith in the songs, that truths are in the songs—all the way out to the book The Philosophy of Modern Song—and he’s committed to the songs, playing them night after night. Evidenced again recently by when he’d be in whatever town and he’d play a song that spoke specifically to that location. And people were shocked. For him not to do the same set list every night, but to insert a song that will speak to that town, it was cool.

 

DR: In your second book, The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual, you start by quoting Dylan’s “Highlands” in that, “I think what I need might be a full length leather coat / Somebody just asked me if I’m registered to vote.” In the book you take on the so-called Boomer Liberals whose supposed 60s progressivism shrank into a feeble 90s Clintonian liberalism. So how does Dylan and his work fit into this dynamic of the disappearing liberal intellectual?

EL: Dylan might, if he was pushed, come out and say things similar to what the boomers I was critiquing would say. He might align himself more or less with those positions. He appears to be a fan of Douglas Brinkley. But the corrosive political gestures in the songs quite outstrip the kind of liberal nationalism that I found rather disappointing in any number of thinkers and was trying to criticize from the left.

What underlies that book is that they wouldn’t just be their left-liberal, centrist selves, but they would also try to police the left. They would try to police people like me and talk about the futility of identity politics, or the secondary or tertiary importance of sexuality, or [say that] what really matters is class. And they don’t even think about class very interestingly. It’s basically rich and poor [to them], and poor people should have more money. There’s no real class analysis or dialectical address of any serious kind. So it got tiresome to be criticized by the likes of these people.

I really thought of the book as a response to centrist liberal Paul Berman’s Tale of Two Utopias,⁷ his book about 1968 and the student left. His account of Stonewall, for instance, is shockingly bad, and it got a lot of play. You know, [this idea that] the student left of ‘68 are spoiled middle class kids. It’s astounding. There’s no real analysis or serious consideration of the way sexuality is a vector of social dominance and subordination that needs to be analyzed seriously in its own right, as opposed to secondary to class and the welfare state.

 

DR: Because you write about this too, that race and sexuality and even gender are all part of the formation of class itself.

EL: Totally.

DR: And so while one could argue class is the most important thing to focus on, you can’t focus on class without these intersections, all these identity factors that go into it. And Dylan, at the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee speech in 1963, said, “There’s no black and white, left and right to me anymore. There’s only up and down, and down is very close to the ground. And I’m trying to go up without thinking about anything trivial, such as politics.” It almost sounds like he’s voicing a similar notion there, that you either have it or you don’t. It’s the haves and the have-nots.

EL: It’s interesting, because I hear the aspirations to something higher that would result in Dylan’s late-70s conversion to some higher power than mere politics. Whether you consider that the Democratic Party, or civil liberties, I mean, there he is sitting next to Jimmy Baldwin, or playing at the March on Washington. He clearly believes in that kind of intervention, but somehow party politics, even old left Marxist stuff leaves him cold—though he seems as invested as his friend Allen Ginsberg was in that stuff. It doesn’t register for him as much as the ultimate, the soul, and God, these invocations, or the conversion in the late-70s, or ultimate judges. He’s impatient with this more trivial stuff.

DR: Dave Van Ronk talked about that too, where Van Ronk was into a materialist Marxist thing, that these are the conditions we’re living under now. And how Dylan was learning that stuff, especially from Suze Rotolo, but he moved on from it quite quickly.

EL: Dylan’s imagination about politics is to think in more mythic terms, as opposed to party political terms. This would make sense given that he wanted to become, and still is, this mythic figure. It’s an engagement with politics at the level of JFK, and mythography, and national figuration, like he himself figures into, as opposed to positions, politicians, party politics, and ideology.

And Suze Rotolo, even though she’s a red diaper baby, she’s got a moment [in A Freewheelin’ Time⁸] when they’re all sitting watching Lee Harvey Oswald being arraigned on TV, and he gets shot. And as Suze says, there’s no videotape replay then. They just had to absorb it in real time, and she has this nice depiction of them sitting on the couch on West 4th Street watching this, and she says Bobby was riveted. They couldn’t believe it, as who could? It’s totally shocking, but it’s an evocation of real-time engagement with politics.

 

DR: I need to go back to Masked and Anonymous to ask you about the appearance of the “blackface muse,” as you call him. And he appears only to Jack Fate up in the rafters about two-thirds of the way through the film. So what is that about? What is he doing there? What effect does that have on the film?

EL: Ed Harris’s Oscar Vogel: “Hello, Jack. Do you know me?” And Jack Fate says, “I think so, yeah.” Immediately, it’s Love and Theft territory, the relationship to the minstrel tradition—and Al Jolson, who Dylan cares about. And there’s a story that Polito conveys about [producer Daniel] Lanois. Dylan’s talking to Lanois again for Time Out of Mind, having done Oh Mercy in 1989. And Lanois gets a tape in the mail and it’s all Al Jolson songs, which is a hilarious joke. Dylan’s taking the piss out of Lanois time and again is pretty funny, but I was tickled by that. So it’s acknowledging how this [film] can’t not be, at some level, a conversation with the minstrel tradition. And then, I haven’t seen the film again lately, but I think Ed Harris dissolves and is replaced by a Black man, not in blackface. I still think about how to read that moment. Another layer of it is Oscar Vogel talking to [Jack Fate] about having been involved in his father’s, the President’s, death in Masked and Anonymous, like he is somehow key to the death of his father.

And apparently—again, this is from Polito—the script has a parenthesis that says, “think JFK and John John.” Jack Fate and his president father, right? “Think JFK and John John.” That makes Jack Fate as John John, JFK Jr. And it makes his father… that takes you straight to “Murder Most Foul.” And that’s what I was talking about in Tulsa.

DR: Let’s go there. What was your paper about at the World of Bob Dylan conference, and what are you doing with “Murder Most Foul”?

EL: It was an attempt to move on from the love and theft, appropriation and exploitation dialectic to something more in terms of surrogation, as Joseph Roach, the performance studies scholar, refers to it as in his book, Cities of the Dead.⁹ Surrogation being the way all culture is made. Occupy a place and you recreate out of borrowed materials, you create this new thing. You step into a place and you become the new thing, a surrogate for the old, which is the warp and weave of cultural creation. Roach has this complicated and elegant and fascinating account of this surrogation. And it seemed to me that in “Murder Most Foul,” Dylan is meditating on these issues so that the creation of the new thing out of the death of the old becomes the way culture is made, the way politics continually gets made, and the way, with the death of JFK as it is presented in “Murder Most Foul,” Trump gets made.

That was my claim about politics, that “Murder Most Foul”—if you’re going to take the title seriously, and I do—takes us to Hamlet’s Claudius killing his brother and usurping the throne. That’s the “murder most foul,” because it’s Hamlet’s father’s ghost who comes back and says, “I was killed in my sleep by Claudius pouring poison into the porches of mine ear.” That’s how Hamlet Senior gets killed. Claudius takes his place. I see Claudius pretty transparently as Trump. It’s not a lament for Kennedy’s killing. It’s that story as a template or a device to think about usurpers taking the place of forebearers. So Trump is very much a clownish Claudius figure stealing the throne. But the twist is, it’s about the king being killed and replaced by a usurper, Trump or Claudius. And then the king of the radio is part two of the song. Wolfman Jack is the other area of cultural thought behind the song.

So I was trying to think, what’s that list of song titles, by way of Wolfman Jack, and one request after another, ending with the song you’re listening to, “Play ‘Murder Most Foul’”? And that is a dimension of surrogation. If the political one is JFK down to Trump, the next level of surrogation has to do with Dylan thinking about himself subsumed into the radio, if you will, and being replaced by whoever comes next. If it’s a Theme Time Radio Hour episode: 1963, Kennedy goes. Dylan goes, “Who comes after?” It’s thinking about himself in the grand flow of radio time, taking his place in the roll call of the radio. It’s an elegant way to think of yourself in time.

DR: Fascinating. I think some of us are often looking for the Trump analysis in Dylan’s work, because he’s not going to talk about it directly, or about politics as they stand today. So we’re looking for inferences. And you delivered this paper at the 2025 World of Bob Dylan, on a panel with Scott Warmuth and Brian Roberts. What was that experience like? What did you think of the conference in Tulsa and that whole scene?

EL: It was great to be in a context in which everybody is thinking very seriously about this artist. It was exhilarating, the level of discussion. And whether it was the papers or the keynotes, Greil Marcus talking about Little Sandy Review, or Terri Thal, or Elijah Wald, or Adam Bradley. All those keynotes were really interesting. I learned a ton from the scholarly devotion of the assembled into all different parts of Dylan’s career.

Tulsa is a great place to be. I hadn’t visited the archive yet, and that is really incredible. I haven’t worked in the archive, but to go to the museum and to see the stuff… Now, back to where I’m sitting here, in Springfield, Illinois, there’s an Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum and Library. The comparison is not without interest, because as I see it, what they did with the Lincoln Museum is the way not to do it. It’s a Disney spectacle. And Tulsa is the opposite. It’s a fascinating, endless procession of great archival material. Even that letter that George Harrison writes to Dylan that he sends along with the rough tracks for the first Traveling Wilburys record: “Don’t worry, Bob. They fucked up the mix. We’re going to fix it.” It’s totally interesting and great.

Scott [Warmuth] kicked ass. Brian [Roberts] kicked ass on Huck Finn. Scott’s always talking about where the bodies are buried in these fascinating ways. I mean, I’m thunderstruck by Dylan’s collage, assemblage constructions of his second act, the aughts to the present. Scott is wonderful on the way Dylan builds Chronicles, Masked and Anonymous. It would be so much quicker and easier for Dylan simply to write something. The collage constructions that Dylan has made, not unlike the iron work, the welding stuff, is mind boggling. What he’s processing and melding and trying to get us to follow him thinking through. And then to have the Dylan Review being so thoughtful and careful. I met someone there who had done the piece you all did on “Brownsville Girl.”

DR: Bill Latanzi.¹⁰

EL: Yes. Thinking through those constructions, redactions, reconstructions, “New Danville Girl” to “Brownsville Girl” and all that is just so great. So I’ll be back.

[Tulsa] has been valuable for so many people, like Brian Roberts. He was working on something completely different, at a really high level, on African American writers who had been ambassadors of African American writing. Now he’s got all this new stuff on the archipelagic imagination in American quote-unquote “literatures,” and he’s found all these connections between U.S. writing from Mark Twain to Dylan. And you always think, well, this is going to be a stretch. But then it’s like, bingo! He’s right every time. So it’s not just a hobby horse. As impressive as Dylan is, the figure gets bigger and bigger. And to have this quality of intellectual work happening around that development is just really unprecedented.

DR: Absolutely. In terms of the future of Dylan studies, what kinds of questions would you like people to ask going forward?

EL: You know, all the usual ones. The way he gravitates to key moments for his work, to the late 20s and early 30s, the roots. To the Harry Smith stuff—and he tends to dismiss the Harry Smith anthology, because [he says] “I knew those people, I had heard those people,” and indeed he did. But what that moment did for him, and the next big moment for him, the mid-50s, when he’s a kid coming up, starting bands. Little Richard and Buddy Holly, the Minnesota vibe, always and everywhere, his engagement with the song form as a way of engaging with history.

And it’s never not interesting to set down at a particular point in U.S. history, either before him, in the Civil War, or during his life. Name a historical period and his engagement with it—that’s always interesting. And all the aspects of intersectionality that come up when that happens, whether it’s queer sexuality, as you’ve demonstrated, to gospel music and racial politics, as Gayle Wald has talked about, or as Adam Bradley was talking about at the Tulsa conference last year. There’s so much stuff!

 

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¹ Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy in the American Working Class. Oxford UP, 1993.

² Polito, Robert. After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan’s Memory Palace. Liveright, 2026.

³ Sacks, Howard L. and Judith Rose Sacks. Way Up North in Dixie: A Black Family’s Claim to the Confederate Anthem. U of Illinois Press, 2003.

4 Lott, Eric. “Just Like Jack Frost’s Blues.” Black Mirror: The Cultural Contradictions of American Racism. Harvard UP, 2017, pp. 195-208.

⁵ Lowe, Allen. Turn Me Loose White Man Or: Appropriating Culture: How to Listen to American Music 1900-1960. Constant Sorrow Press, 2020.

⁶ Dettmar, Kevin J. H., editor. The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan. Cambridge UP, 2009.

7 Berman, Paul. A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968. Norton, 1997.

8 Rotolo, Suze. A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties. Crown, 2009.

⁹ Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead. Columbia University Press: 2006.

10 Lattanzi, Bill. “The Drafts of ‘Brownsville Girl,’ Lost and Found. Dylan Review 7.1: Spring/Summer 2025.

Odetta on Bob Dylan

Interviewed by Griffin Ondaatje and Craig Proctor

 

Writer and filmmaker Griffin Ondaatje interviewed legendary folksinger Odetta in Toronto on November 18th, 2001 for an unreleased documentary he made with colleague Craig Proctor. The transcript is published in the Dylan Review for the first time, ahead of a future collection of Ondaatje’s interviews and essays.

 

Generally, interviews published in the Review are conducted by our editors with contemporary subjects. In this case, however, we have made an exception because of the historical significance of Odetta’s relationship to Dylan’s career and because the interview has remained unpublished until now. The Dylan Review has taken suitable steps to confirm its veracity.

 

It has been edited for length and clarity.

 

This interview with Odetta took place one morning in November 2001. She had played a concert the night before at Hugh’s Room, a small music club in Toronto. Born in 1930, in Alabama, Odetta was 70 the day of this interview, but she was up early, suggesting we meet at 8am at her motel. We were nervous, waiting in the lobby by 7:30am. A vital artist committed to social justice for over fifty years, Odetta was a groundbreaking singer who motivated the American folk music revival. She was also an intrepid civil rights activist who helped change America. In 1963 she sang two songs at the March on Washington, joined the Selma to Montgomery march in 1965, and had a deep influence on figures such as Martin Luther King Jr., Maya Angelou, and Harry Belafonte. Rosa Parks, when asked in an interview what songs she listened to during the civil rights movement, said: “All the songs Odetta sings.” When she came down the hall she smiled, shook our hands, and asked for a cup of coffee.

 

My friends, Craig Proctor and Simon Dragland, and I were making a film on Bob Dylan. At age 18, Dylan was inspired by Odetta when he went to a Minneapolis record store and found her album Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues. In his memoir, Chronicles, Volume One, Dylan recalls: “I went into the listening booth to hear it. Odetta was great. I had never heard of her until then. She was a deep singer, powerful strumming and a hammering-on style of playing. I learned almost every song off the record.” Dylan recounts, in one interview, getting the same model of guitar as Odetta: “Right then and there, I went out and traded my electric guitar and amplifier for an acoustical guitar, a flat-top Gibson.” By 1965, six years later, Odetta had recorded Odetta Sings Dylan – one of the first Dylan cover albums made. That same year Odetta performed at the Newport Folk Festival, the night before Dylan performed his legendary electric set. In the biopic A Complete Unknown, there’s a glimpse of her at Newport – standing alone offstage – during the climactic scene. Yet the real Odetta, who had such a formative impact on Dylan, was actually in the audience listening that night he “went electric.”

 

Odetta inspired numerous artists early in their careers – including Joan Baez, Eric Bibb and Tracy Chapman. Singer and multi-instrumentalist Rhiannon Giddens said of her: “She was a soulful force for good in both the folk world and the civil rights world.” The day we met Odetta she was concerned about what was happening in the States, reflecting on war and conflicts overseas. It was just two months after 9/11, and events following the terrorist attacks were on her mind, including The Patriot Act which had just been enacted. Revisiting our transcript from twenty-five years ago – for a book on Dylan’s music – it’s clear Odetta’s concerns still resonate today.

 

We finished our documentary film on Dylan – Complete Unknown – in 2002. I mailed a DVD screener of it to Dylan’s manager Jeff Rosen – who kindly watched our rambling 86-minute first-movie and later assisted with various music permissions we requested. Yet as new filmmakers, with no real budget, we ultimately couldn’t afford archive footage rights from a large American visual media company – and so our film wasn’t distributed or released. Complete Unknown screened in only a few small film festivals and has remained shelved ever since. Yet the journey making it was an amazing experience as we met dozens of “known” and “unknown” musicians, writers, artists, and fans. We spoke with Kate and Anna McGarrigle, Steve Earle, Martin Carthy, Billy Bragg, Gillian Armstrong, Robert Creeley and many others, including LeRoy Hoikkala (Dylan’s highschool friend and drummer from The Golden Chords) and Keith Butler (who claimed to have shouted “Judas!” in Manchester in 1966). Although we knew when first we set out that Dylan would remain a complete unknown, we sought to include a diverse mix of characters – even consulting an astrologist who “deciphered” Dylan’s chart. We plan to give footage from our interviews to the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and this talk with Odetta seemed like a wonderful and essential interview to share with others.

 

Odetta passed away on December 2, 2008, at the age of 77.  The following is a shortened version of our one-hour conversation with her that morning in 2001. Passing along Lakeshore Boulevard in Toronto, where Odetta stayed, there’s a sixty-story condo tower where that small motel used to be. I remember her warm humor and strong sense of calm. A generous person with a gentle power.

 

– Griffin Ondaatje

 

 

Griffin Ondaatje: Thanks for meeting us this early Odetta. We’ve been working on this documentary for two years, and hope to go down to New York again soon to interview more artists and musicians. Emmylou Harris is another musician we hope to speak with.

 

Odetta: I wonder, how about Dave Van Ronk? Of course he’s just had an operation, he may not be strong enough by the time you get there. It’s a terrible piece of news – cancer – [his] operation happened I guess about a week ago.[1]

 

GO: Is Dave Van Ronk a musician friend you’ve often kept in touch with?

 

Odetta: No, we just live in the same city. We have to be on the road or at a festival to meet up with each other. That’s the way it always is. Once he and Andrea [Vucuolo, Van Ronk’s wife] had me over for dinner, and that was really lovely. But generally speaking we meet on the road. Not just Dave – that whole community. When I have free time I don’t want to hear about a suitcase, a plane, a train, or a bus! [laughs]

 

GO: Did you always feel that way, Odetta, when you were touring? Even in the 1960s?

 

Odetta: Well, I’ve been looking for the glamour of travel for over fifty years, yet I haven’t found it. I’m ready for the transporter room as in: “Beam me up, Scotty.” The travelling itself at times can get really tedious. But the getting there is the dessert – and the people you start working with. Within this area of music there are aware people that have gone out further than the pap that is given to them on regular radio and television programs. And you meet families – kindred kinds of spirits. That’s the joyous part. The travel ain’t such-a-much, unless you’re in a vehicle that’s going through a beautiful piece of topography. That can be a joy.

 

GO: You were already established and touring in the late 1950s when Bob Dylan was first being influenced, in a deep way, by your music. Were you aware of your influence on him?

 

Odetta: Bob never told me, but I’d heard that he had told people that he was playing the electric guitar and he heard me and my guitar. And then he went and got an acoustical guitar. Through that, I think, he discovered Woody Guthrie [who] was closer to his area – especially being a writer. But at one point I heard that his repertoire was a record that I had done [Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues]. He’d learned all the songs. That’s a wonderful thing to hear. Whatever I did helped him on a step towards what he has developed into.

 

One hears a lot of stories that are filled with imagination; but I am not sure I ever met Bob until he got to New York. There were certainly encouraging words – there and then – when I met him. It was perfectly obvious the man was thinking – and brilliant – through the songs that he had written.

 

GO: Dylan travelled to England in 1962. I’d wondered if you had encountered him at all in England around that time?

 

Odetta: No, it was in Rome. Albert [Grossman] was with me in Italy. And Bob and Mary Travers were in England. I think that Bob had been doing a concert or something there. Anyway, Mary and her daughter and Bob came to Italy and we all hung out together. Golly, there was a dance that was very popular in those days. It was a group dance, everybody did the same steps, you know? I’ve forgotten what that dance was called. Anyway, I think many performers are basically shy people – basically introverts. Now that is just a contradiction. When they’re into whatever it is they’re doing, it’s almost like they’re another person who is more outgoing than the person they are as a civilian. And I think Bob and I – as I look back on it – are shy of each other.

 

Maybe one of these days we might get into the same room, when there’s not a lot of people around, and we could actually sit down and talk together. It happened once. You must know about his motorcycle accident? Well, friends of mine were the Thalers. Dr. Ed Thaler is not only a doctor but he’s a physician – he doesn’t just have that piece of paper on the wall. He’s quite wonderful. Albert [introduced] Bob [to] Eddie Thaler – to help keep track that doctors were doing right. When Bob was recuperating, the Thalers had their attic fixed up for him to stay there. Their kids had already been trained not to talk about  famous people that were coming over to their house.

 

So Bob was there. I had gotten back off of a tour. [The Thalers] are like my adopted family, so I went up to see them. Mom and Pop and the kids had gone to sleep. Bob and I were  sitting around the kitchen table. It was after I’d done an all-Bob Dylan record [Odetta Sings Dylan] and Bob was wondering –  it wasn’t by way of complaint –  but he was wondering why it was that people did his songs other than the way he wrote them. We went into the fact that, as someone hears your song, your song goes into what their experience has been. You cannot take your experience out of how you approach anything, including a song. And you don’t do a song the same way twice –  because of experiences you’ve had between the last time you [sang] it and this time.

 

GO: What was your experience of recording Odetta Sings Dylan in 1965?

 

Odetta: Bob came to RCA when we were recording that record. Recording in those days was really frightening to me. And he and his entourage were there. He had sent tapes to the publisher and someone transcribed the words. And he heard a few things that were not quite right. So he took the words and changed whatever needed to be changed or corrected. And then I said, “Okay Bob, you’re gonna have to leave. I am so nervous of this microphone and the tape picking up every mistake. I don’t need the composer here saying: I didn’t mean it like that.” He understood. And they left! [laughs]

 

GO: Interpreting those songs, were you content with how it all went?

 

Odetta: Yeah, I can say I was. Dylan had, up to that point, written the song and then almost “recited” it. Whatever emotion was in his early recordings, you put in there yourself. He wasn’t interpreting his songs, you know? I find many music songwriters like that. There was Lynn Gold. Gorgeous voice. She had a voice in the area of a Joan Baez. High soprano, really quite warm and lovely.

 

She was coming to New York and wanted me to come hear her. Every song she sang that somebody else wrote was crystal clear, [but] when she got to her own songs you couldn’t make out the words. When she finished I said: “You were brave enough to expose yourself writing, but there’s this last wall protecting yourself by not letting us understand what you’ve written.”

 

Bob is really singing more now than he did in his early days. It was like precision in his early days. It is our response to him that makes us think he was emoting something. The words were. But he’s more, now, an interpreter of his songs, I think. Well, he must’ve been a scared kid too. And with the brilliance of Albert Grossman –  those were two “brilliants” together; I mean, there was no one around at that time dressing like Bob was and recording songs that went up to three and four minutes and played on the radio! [Radio] only wanted something 2:50 or under so they could get their ads in. They really crashed a wall. In many respects Bob was responsible.

 

GO: He changed that side of things.

 

Odetta: Before Dylan, as we would get together and tune our guitars doing hootenannies in somebody’s living room, someone would sing a song we’d all know, and we would be singing and harmonizing together. But with the advent of Bob Dylan, we started hearing singer-songwriters where you just sat and listened –  because you didn’t know the song. Audience participation [in hootenannies], some felt it was hokey; I never did. I felt that that good healing stuff for me, in singing, is good healing stuff for others to sing –  to get that vibration going all the way through their own bodies.

 

GO: We interviewed Peter Guralnick a couple of years ago, a wonderful writer and music historian. He wrote a biography of Elvis Presley and apparently Presley, with the advent of Dylan, preferred to listen to Dylan’s music through your voice, through your album Odetta Sings Dylan. He found Dylan’s own voice a bit too … gravelly.

 

Odetta: That’s the first time I’m hearing that. Someone did introduce me to a song Presley did [“Tomorrow Is a Long Time”] and it was my arrangement exactly, which surprised me. But this is the first time that I’ve heard that. Isn’t that something?

 

GO: Yeah, apparently at one point on his tour bus Elvis was listening constantly to your record Odetta Sings Dylan. He liked Dylan’s lyrics but preferred your voice singing them. What do you think about people complaining about Dylan’s voice, the gravelly aspect?

 

Odetta: People complain, but he’s out there, isn’t he? [laughs] There’s something there that keeps [audiences] coming towards him. What do you think of his singing now?

 

GO: We just saw him in concert a week ago. There’s a new song where he sings: “You can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way”— it’s kind of poignant the way he sings it. What do you think of his voice on the new album? [“Love and Theft”]

 

Odetta: I’ve not listened to the whole record. He sings “gravelly” yes, but he sings more now than he did before. I don’t know if I can explain it. I think before he was reciting, and now he is involved with the music. He feels comfortable enough to go that next step and be that vulnerable.

 

GO: The Newport Folk Festival in 1965 has become sort of controversial because of Dylan’s performance of “Maggie’s Farm” when he played electric guitar.

 

Odetta: What do you mean “sort of” controversial? [laughs]

 

GO: Well I guess “sort of” in the sense that half the time I read people who said things like: “Well the booing wasn’t as bad as it sounded,” or “Yeah, the booing was as bad as it sounded.” So you were there, quite close by?

 

Odetta: Yeah I was there.

 

GO: So what was your feeling at the time?

 

Odetta: Well to start a little before that summer festival at Newport, as I would go around doing concerts, there would be youngsters asking me all about Bob Dylan. He was a hero, he was a hero to his audience. And it seems, within the United States anyway, as one becomes a hero of an audience, it’s like the audience is betrayed if the performer goes in another direction –  or does something that they’re not used to. I think we all feel that everything is changing around us and we can’t depend on anything, including ourselves. But the performer, they’re supposed to stay right there, because that’s their touchstone. And then when their touchstone moves –  they’ve been betrayed and hurt. Actually very hurt. You didn’t have to wait for a review to find out what that audience felt about this electric guitar.

 

Craig Proctor: Was that not only because the music had shifted to electric, but also because the nature of the songwriting was becoming less public and more –

 

Odetta: There was so much noise I’m not quite sure that we could hear what the nature of the writing was.

 

CP: But, generally, at the time when Dylan started writing Another Side of Bob Dylan, when he started moving away from topical songs, protest songs, traditional folk songs I’m wondering if there was a bit of resistance?

 

Odetta: That’s quite possible. That’s quite possible that he was deserting areas that people were very concerned about and going into [the] personal. Most of our music was the personal stuff anyway –  maybe not written as well as he would write.

 

GO: Your feeling at that time in 1965 at Newport then, there was a controversy…

 

Odetta: Well I heard it. I heard from the audience. I didn’t object to it –  I had no problem  with it.

 

GO: Were you backstage at the time?

 

Odetta: No, I was right in the audience. I’ve heard about what went on backstage but I wasn’t there. Thank heavens! [laughs] Well, remember Sinead O’Connor? Remember that? She said something about the Pope or Catholicism or something and they booed her.[2] That’s that same area of feeling betrayed.

 

GO: Do you think it’s fair for an audience to expect a performer – obviously it’s not –  to be the same throughout?

 

Odetta: If they think that life goes on the “same old,” “same old,” “same old” … then it’s fair. If they know that life changes and they change, then it’s not fair. I’ve heard people say to me: “You haven’t changed.” That’s supposed to make you feel good I suppose. “You were dumb then and you stayed dumb!” [laughs] I’m just poking fun –  but it was said to me last night [in Toronto] and I said to the lady: “No. We haven’t. We’ve improved.” You haven’t changed. What is that? Some kind of “Let’s pretend” stuff?

 

GO: When you have free time to listen to music, what do you like to listen to?

 

Odetta: When I’m on the road I used to carry a radio. I’m a “radio baby.” There were no pictures when I was growing up, except at the moving picture show. So I grew up with the radio. Nowadays in motel rooms and hotel rooms they have a clock radio. So whenever I get anywhere I turn on the radio and I look for Country Western stations. That’s where occasionally you get some words very well put together. It isn’t “I love you I love you I love you” on one chord, or hollering at somebody. We live in another time but I consider it a continuation of what folk music was. It’s not a continuation of Tin Pan Alley or Radio City Music Hall –  there’s nothing wrong with any of them –  it’s just that they’ve been germinated by folk music and they’re carrying on the tradition of writing something that has something to do with themselves and the world around them.

 

CP: Going back to Odetta Sings Dylan, I was wondering how that came about. Did it come about through Albert Grossman?

 

Odetta: No, that came about through Odetta. It was time to record. I don’t know what it is like now but in those days you sort of owed two records a year. That was very difficult, especially since I would be out on the road three months at a time. You do the road and you come back in. So where do you go to find the songs? I thought: Bob Dylan. Plus, I don’t have to go around looking for different writers; it’s all the same writer. And also there’s some songs in there that I would like to second the motion to. So that’s how that one turned out.

 

GO: After Dylan’s motorcycle accident, he did John Wesley Harding and the country album Nashville Skyline. Did you listen to those too?

 

Odetta: It was his earlier political [songs], “Masters of War.”

 

GO: He sang “Masters of War” on TV at the [1991] Grammy Awards during the Gulf War. It felt like an important statement since when a war machine gets going –

 

Odetta: Which is what’s going on now. How dare they bomb … and all this flag stuff. The stroke of a pen has just about got rid of the Bill of Rights. What the terrorists don’t do in terrifying us, our government is gonna do, or those who represent the government. We’re going for some dark, dark time. People being arrested because of the way they look? And they don’t have to be charged? They can’t see any lawyers? I’m afraid it’s going to be like [prewar] Germany in that it’s a factor that is spoiling that will spread, and spread, and spread. And we’re not going to really realize it until we get to a point where that poison is coming towards us. Our government –  they have spin doctors –  they put a spin on it. It seems anything they say, a bulk of the U.S. people believe it. Even when they say one thing and contradict it two minutes later.

 

CP: When we saw Dylan last week he was singing songs like “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” which seem timeless. His concerns in 1962 seem to be the same concerns now. The music’s timeless, and the struggle also seems timeless.

 

Odetta: I’m afraid it is timeless.

 

CP: There seems to be times when there’s disillusionment with the presidency –  President Nixon resigned, etc. –  but the mass majority of people don’t want to know the truth, the ugly truth, or what have you.

 

Odetta: Well they have enough problems on their own, you know what I mean? I mean, which of us goes right into the firefight? There are some who do –  but there are most who don’t. Some of us have been fortunate enough to be influenced by, or around, people who take responsibility for their concerns. And their concerns are beyond a roof over the house, and food on the table, or a car every year, or a new television set, you know?

 

[Pauses]

 

They’re dumbing us down and we don’t know. And we are the victims. Because as it is happening over there, it’s gonna happen in our country. That net is gonna come in and in and in.

 

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[1] Dave Van Ronk died on 10 February 2002 at the age of 65, shortly after this interview took place.

[2]At Bob Dylan’s 30^th Anniversary Concert Celebration on October 16, 1992.