Greil Marcus, _Three Songs, Three Singers, Three Nations_

 THIS "VERY SHORT book" (to quote from Marcus's acknowledgments) contains three pieces based on lectures Marcus gave at Harvard in 2013, each about a song: "The Ballad of Hollis Brown" by Bob Dylan, "Last Kind Words Blues" by Geeshie Wiley (and possibly Elvie [possibly L. V. ] Thomas), and "I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground" by Bascom Lamar Lunsford.

The book has no introduction or conclusion, and thus does not present itself as thesis-oriented, but it does have a recurring idea: that the songs are not so much expressions of an individual performer's vision as they are a kind of convergence of a tradition, a performer, and an audience. Each song has recognizable antecedent songs, each has been given a distinctive stamp by the performer, and each found an audience for cherished the song, for whom became a kind of touchstone.

One of the performers, Dylan, is among the best-documented artists of our time, subject of innumerable books, including a few by Marcus; diligent research can turn up a good amount of info on Lunsford; we have nothing but ambiguous traces of Wiley. But the individual existence of the performer is only part of the story in this book, and maybe not even the most important part. The song chooses its vessel, in a way.

Three Songs, Three Singers, Three Nations is a late echo, I think, of the folk music boom of the late 1950s and early 1960s. I only vaguely remember that phenomenon, as I was in  the early primary grades at the time, but I do remember the breakout hits like "Walk Right In" by the Rooftop Singers and "Tom Dooley" by the Kingston Trio. There was even a TV show, Hootenanny (and, much later, a mockumentary, A Mighty Wind). Once the Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan in early 1964, almost everyone moved on to something else, but "folk" loomed large for a few years.

An odd thing about "folk music" is that, in most countries, attention to folk culture is a marker of romantic-conservative leanings, a slightly perverse impulse to re-create some original purity that supposedly existed before modernity contaminated everything, but in the United States, folk music has long-established connections to progressive politics. This connection goes back to the WPA and Woody Guthrie, I suppose, and the Seeger family (Pete's father, Charles, was both a musicologist and a Marxist), and was certainly still strong in the early 1960s, as folk music was joined at the hip to "protest" music, as in Dylan's 1962-63 output.

Marcus's idea that these "folk" songs are, in some ineffable but discernible way, truly the creations of the folk, not entirely those of individual performers, and that they speak in some real way to our national circumstances, strikes me as participating in that connection between folk music and progressive politics. I am all for it--grateful for it, I will even say.