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

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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.