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DYLAN REVIEW 2.2, WINTER 2020 – Contributors

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Larry Campbell and Teresa Williams, acclaimed Americana musicians, are a powerhouse of vocal and instrumental virtuosity. Their performing partnership was molded during ten years of recording and touring with Levon Helm, iconic drummer and voice of The Band. The couple’s two albums, 2015’s Larry Campbell and Teresa Williams and 2017’s Contraband Love opened doors and ears as they toured with Jackson Browne, Emmylou Harris, and John Prine. Mojo dubbed the pair “The first couple of Americana,” and American Songwriter wrote: “[Larry and Teresa] have created a unique sound inspired by the past, that is spirited, stirring and timeless.”

Michael Hacker is the creator of A Bob Dylan Primer, a fifteen-episode podcast dedicated to Dylan’s life and work (www.abobdylanprimer.com).  He is a writer, photographer, and filmmaker, raised and currently living in Los Angeles with long stints in San Francisco, Livingston, Montana, and Vienna. At present, Michael works mostly in television producing documentary content for a wide variety of providers.  He’s seen Dylan in concert many times, starting with the 1974 tour and including The Last Waltz, the “gospel” shows in 1979, and the last night of Dylan’s run at the Beacon Theater in NYC in December 2019.

Bob Keyes writes about arts and culture for the Portland Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram. He’s written about Bob Dylan since the early days of the Never Ending Tour and presented a paper about Dylan’s visual language at the World of Bob Dylan Symposium in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 2019. He received an inaugural Rabkin Prize for Visual Arts Journalism in 2017 in recognition of his essential voice in the regional arts conversation and is currently working on a book about the artist Robert Indiana.

Matthew Lipson is an independent scholar from Montreal, Canada. His graduate studies focused on Dylan’s performance of age from Time Out of Mind (1997) to Tempest (2012) and Dylan’s twenty-first century role as elder statesman of traditional American genres. His future work will examine this topic from the perspective of Dylan’s roles in television commercials. Lipson is currently based in Toronto, where he curates and manages music for a range of brands.

Quentin Miller is Professor of English at Suffolk University in Boston where he teaches courses on contemporary American literature, including one on Dylan and the Beat generation. He is the author or editor of a dozen books, most recently Understanding John Edgar Wideman (UP of South Carolina, 2018), James Baldwin in Context (Cambridge UP, 2019), and The Compact Bedford Introduction to Literature (Palgrave/MacMillan, 2020).

Thomas G. Palaima, Robert M. Armstrong Professor of Classics at University of Texas at Austin and a MacArthur fellow, has long thought and taught about evil, suffering, and injustice in human societies, ancient and modern. In 1963–68, Bob Dylan and James Brown changed his life. He has written over 500 commentaries, reviews, book chapters, feature pieces, and poems on what human beings do with their lives. These have appeared in such venues as the Times Higher Education, Michigan War Studies Review, Arion, Athenaeum Review, The Texas Observer, the Los Angeles Times, and commondreams.org.

Tommy Shea teaches in the MFA program at Bay Path University in Longmeadow, Massachusetts. He was an award-winning columnist for The Republican in Springfield. He co-authored Dingers: The 101 Most Important Homers in Baseball History. He’s been a Bob Dylan fan since 1974.

John Radosta teaches high school English in Milton, Massachusetts. He is the co-author, with Keith Nainby, of Bob Dylan in Performance: Song, Stage, and Screen. A board member of the New England chapter of the Mystery Writers of America, he has also, under a pseudonym, published a noir novel and many crime stories. He lives in Boston with his wife, son, and rescue dog.

Walter Raubicheck is a professor of English at Pace University in New York, where he teaches American Literature, film, and college composition. He is the co-author of Scripting Hitchcock (2011) and co-editor of Hitchcock’s Rereleased Films (1991), both with Walter Srebnick. He also edited Hitchcock and the Cold War (2019). He has published essays on British crime fiction authors including Arthur Conan Doyle, Dorothy Sayers, and G. K. Chesterton, as well as essays on American authors such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, and Dashiell Hammett.

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REVIEW OF BARRON WORMSER’S SONG FROM A VOICE

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Baron Wormser. Songs from a Voice: Being the Recollections, Stanzas, and Observations of Abe Runyan, Songwriter and Performer. Norwalk, CT: Woodhall Press, 2019. 178 pp. $17.95.

​REVIEW BY Tommy Shea

When you’re making yourself up, there’s no map.

– Abe Runyan

​He’s a kid from Somethingsville, Minnesota, a place where the wind hits heavy on the borderline, where the rivers freeze and the summers end way too soon.

Before the age of twelve, Abe Starker’s hobby was stamp collecting. But then he was gifted a beige transistor radio. And he started hearing voices.

Hank Williams, Ma Rainey, the Carter Family, Bessie Smith, Lead Belly, Howlin’ Wolf, Jimmy Reed . . .

They became another family, different from his mother, father, sister, and grandmother, but no less real.

The new voices sounded like “they were coming a long distance. . . . They weren’t perfect, but that’s why the songs existed, because things weren’t perfect.”

Something then started to change inside Abe Starker.

He was already taking life seriously. He thought a lot but felt even more. His wanting became different. Then Abe diagnosed himself with an incurable case of the metaphysical blues. He had a guitar in his hands when he did.

Abe decided he wanted to take himself home, “to my truest place—my imagination.” He wrote a song, then another.

“What I wanted to do wasn’t taught in any college,” he said.

Abe ended up in Greenwich Village.

Under a personal construction, believing he was in need of a new name, Abe came up with Runyan.

It rhymed with that of his childhood hero, Paul Bunyan, and was also the name of a dead New York writer who wrote about guys and dolls and didn’t need it anymore.

If this all sounds vaguely familiar, it is.

Sort of.

But this is a new story, as alive as today.

Weaving fact, fiction, and a rare sensitivity, Baron Wormser is a storyteller who’s a master at crafting revealing moments, growing pains, discoveries, and, in prose as smooth as a rhapsody, explores how deep a song can go.

In his novel Songs from a Voice: Being the Recollections, Stanzas, and Observations of Abe Runyan, Songwriter and Performer, Wormser uses the young and old Bob Dylan as his muse.

And those of the Dylanish main character.

Along with Man and God and law, the rest of the sparks to his flames are all here: William Blake, Little Richard, Lord Randall, Odetta, Dostoevsky and Modigliani, just as they all are on Montague Street in the basement down the stairs.

Baron Wormser must have been there, too, leaning close, listening, thinking, taking it all in and all down, merging the music and the art into Abe Runyan, someone who sings from the pages as real as your favorite song.

Dylan fans will nod along to the familiar journey. Readers who don’t know a thing about the North Country will nod as they reflect on the captivating tale of self-reinvention via art that goes on to reinvent the world.

Both camps will find the lyrical in Wormser’s style, but it shouldn’t be a surprise. This Maryland-born, Vermont-based author of seventeen previous books is also an acclaimed and longtime poet who served as the 2000 poet laureate of Maine, where his life included nearly twenty-five years living off the grid, a timespan and experience gorgeously chronicled in The Road Washes Out in Spring: A Poet’s Memoir of Living Off the Grid. He’s very much at home dipping his pen into political topics, as he did so deftly in the poems that fill Carthage, a timeless and timely look at the toxic combo of top-level power and ignorance. And fiction set against historical events is not a new avenue for Wormser—find his novel Tom o’Vietnam for his view from a fictional veteran’s boots and journey. Songs from a Voice sings to the author’s ability to take the winds of the old days that are an inspiration and make it his character’s own, to make us want to follow each step Abe Runyan takes, and have the front row seat for not only each song but each sentence.

Wormser has said his goal was to have the reader “feel the complexity of an artistic imagination as it issues from one particular life.” That might be the only time he erred on any of these pages, because we take not just one but two men’s creativity and gifts with us when we close this book, feeling keenly the complexity of both Runyan’s and Wormser’s gifts to the world.

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