Invisible Republic (book): Difference between revisions

Marcus quotes [[Robbie Robertson]]’s memories of recording the ''Basement Tapes'': "[Dylan] would pull these songs out of nowhere. We didn’t know if he wrote them or if he remembered them. When he sang them, you couldn’t tell."<ref>Marcus, p. xvi</ref> Marcus called these songs "palavers with a community of ghosts."<ref>Marcus, p. 86</ref> He suggests that "these ghosts were not abstractions. As native sons and daughters they were a community. And they were once gathered in a single place: on the ''Anthology of American Folk Music'', a work produced by a 29-year-old of [[no fixed abode|no fixed address]] named [[Harry Everett Smith|Harry Smith]]."<ref>Marcus, p. 87</ref> Marcus argues Dylan’s basement songs were a resurrection of the spirit of ''Anthology'', originally published by [[Folkways Records]] in 1952, a collection of blues and country songs recorded in the 1920s and '30s1930s, which proved very influential in the folk revival of the 1950s and '60s1960s. ''Anthology'', initially titled ''American Folk Music'', was reissued by [[Smithsonian Folkways]] as a [[box set]] of [[compact disc]] in the same year as the book's publication, with portions of the book excerpted as [[liner notes]].