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Sean Wilenz & Greil Marcus, Eds. Death, Love & Liberty in the American Ballad. WW Norton & Company: Copyright 2005 Sean Wilenz and Greil Marcus, ISBN 0-393-05954-5 (1st edition: Hardcover). 406 pages. 24 contributors, Notes, Bibliographies, Discographies, Index. Accompanied by the Columbia/Legacy CD, Stories of the American Ballad – One Hour Radio Special, narrated by Sean Wilenz and Greil Marcus, with contributors from the book, and by a second CD providing versions of the ballads discussed in the text, in turn, perhaps modeled upon Sing Out! Magazine’s inclusion of a similar CD with each quarterly issue. From its liner notes, by Wilentz & Marcus: “The Rose & The Briar CD includes most of the songs treated in The Rose & The Briar book. For that book, we asked musicians, novelists, visual artists, and a poet, along with critics and historians, to choose a ballad and run with it. They came back with short stories, impassioned essays, a comic strip, a collage, memoirs and manifestos, true-crime reports shifting into fantasies, love stories changing into shadow plays, work that would not hold still. On this CD the saga of the American ballad unfolds much as the songs themselves appeared in the historical record, from classic recordings dating to the 1920s and 1930s to brand-new recordings, made especially for this collection, of equally traditional tunes, from such modern classics of the ballad form as Marty Robbins's "El Paso," Dolly Parton's "Down From Dover;" Randy Newman's "Sail Away," Bob Dylan's "Lily, Rosemary And The Jack Of Hearts," and Bruce Springsteen's "Nebraska," to The Handsome Family's recording of Paul Muldoon's "Blackwatertown."….We envisaged the book version of The Rose & The Briar as a stage. Here, on the CD, is one version of the show. “
So this is a three-pronged attack on ignorance of the American ballad, not only as derived from the Anglo tradition, but extending to Mexico, with “Volver, Volver,” and with an R Crumb comix illustrated version of “When You Go A-Courtin’,” a Joyce Carol Oates short story version of “Little Maggie,” Ann Powers demonstration of how the non-ballad “The Water is Wide” is too a ballad in some sense, a parallel reading of “Wreck of the Old 97” and Jan & Dean’s “Dead Man’s Curve” – all alongside essays discussing the evolution of “John Brown’s Body,” the history of Frankie & Albert which became “Frankie & Johnny,” Stanley Crouch’s magisterial brief history of the civil rights movement and its relation to American liberty, “Come Sunday,” and of course Bob Dylan, in the rocketing “Lily Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts,” as outlined by Wendy Lesser (“Dancing With Dylan”), and Bruce Springsteen’s somber “Nebraska” for good measure. Especially in the earlier chapters, it is a wonderfully mixed bag of styles and genres, approaching an often sober-sided subject, at least as taught in the more traditional classroom.
The general notes at the end of the book, together with the more or less brief bibliographies and discographies to the essays put together by the contributors, constitute Wilenz’s nod to scholarship – he teaches at Princeton, and was instrumental in getting Dylan his honorary doctor of letters there – altho they might not totally satisfy a professor of folklore. But is that academic the audience for the book? Or is it the radio audience – or programmer - courted by the accompanying CD, or even the folk music DJ whose program is offered musical or on-air lecture content (in exchange for finite airtime) in two different ways by the two CD’s, if you want to look at it like that? Chances are, Wilenz and Marcus would be happy to reach as widely as these ways of looking at the ballad suggest. So would their publisher, one of the major textbook publishers in the United States, with a booklist extending from lit survey to specialized texts for the graduate school or upper-level undergraduate audience. The result is a fairly dazzling act of virtuosic writing and a blizzard of approaches to the ballad – Marcus’ “Envoi” is worth the price of the book itself and should keep people reading for months and talking – arguing - about the book and its accompanying CD’s even longer.
(Review copyright John McLaughlin, PhD, Jan 25, 2005)