David P. Goldman has his say about Robert A. Zimmerman.
What passed for “folk music” in the 1940s and 1950s, by contrast, was the remnant of English ballad preserved in isolated Appalachian communities, as rediscovered by musicologists. Joan Baez made a specialty of such things. John and Alan Lomax gathered Appalachian music, African-American music, and other scraps and shards distant from the American mainstream as an expression of authentic “folk” culture. The entire “folk” movement was Stalinist through and through (including Woody Guthrie, who was a Communist Party hanger-on and probably a member. How do I know this? My late mother was Arlo’s nursery-school teacher in the Red Brooklyn of the 1940s).
and,
Dylan understood the biblical self-creation that stood at the heart of American culture, and how easily American devotion could turn silly. His first electric efforts produced what I still think his funniest line: “God said to Abraham: ‘Kill me a son’/Abe said, ‘Man, you must be puttin me on.’” Dylan was clever and insightful, but also lazy and contemptuous of his audience. One gem per song was enough, he seemed to think. The gems tend to be buried in the predictable filler that makes up most of his lyrics. The genre he chose was in part responsible: it was lampoon of a lampoon, a send-up of a mock-up.
and,
And so it is with Bob Dylan, parodist, satirist, scammer and snake-oil salesman par excellence. He never hid from us what he had in mind: he’s been playing with our heads since high school, finding the lever that loosened our tears, and our wallets. He caught a wave in the early 1960s with the folk revival movement, itself a hoax. We Americans are not a “folk,” not in the sense that Johann Gottfried Herder used the term. We do not have the deep memory of autochthonous roots that characterizes European cultures, the hand-me-downs of long-lost pagan experience. We are a people self-created by religious and political impulse.
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