Freewheelin’ Midrash: The Philosophy of Bob Dylan

Reviewing Dylan’s Latest Alongside Greil Marcus’s ‘Folk Music: A Biography of Bob Dylan in Seven Songs’

There is no introduction to Bob Dylan’s The Philosophy of Modern Song telling you what he’s going to do in the coming pages. Nor is there any conclusion telling you what he did in those prior. Instead, he drops you into Bobby Bare’s “Detroit City,” a melancholy country number written by Danny Dill and Mel Tillis about a guy who left the farm for the cit…