Bob Dylan: A Retrospective

The first time I heard of Bob Dylan was when Pete Seeger was touring Australia.

It was back in the early sixties, and I was writing on pop, jazz and folk music for the Sydney Morning
Herald. At his opening concert in Sydney, Seeger sang mostly traditional songs; but towards the end he began singing some contemporary songs by Tom Paxton, Malvina Reynolds, and one by 'a young New York songwriter called Bob Dillon' (I had to check with Seeger later even to get the name right).

It was Who Killed Davey Moore?', and Seeger sang it superbly. It knocked me out. I still think it is one of the best of Dylan's early songs, with a moral concreteness that in too many of his other political' songs fades off into melodrama and rhetoric. (A couple
of years later, when composer/musicologist Wilfrid Mellers was in Australia, he wound up a lecture on the development of Western pop music by playing Ray Charles, the Beatles, and Seeger's recording of Who Killed Davey Moore?' - he liked it too. I got to know Mellers, who is the most perceptive of the academic commentators on pop music; his article on Dylan is the last in this book.)

When I reviewed the concert for the following morning's paper I was lukewarm about Seeger's treatment of traditional songs but excited by Dylan's reworking of the old 'Cock Robin' ballad.

Who the hell, I asked, was Dylan?