Bob Dylan @ 80

To mark Dylan’s eightieth birthday on March 24, 2021, the University of Tulsa’s Institute for Bob Dylan Studies hosted a virtual symposium called Bob Dylan @ 80. One keynote speaker, Sean Wilentz, a historian who teaches at Princeton University, referenced the song “Day of the Locusts” when he told the online audience that the cicadas now swarming Princeton might become a distraction during his talk. In that song, whose title no doubt invokes Nathaniel West’s novel The Day of the Locust (1939), Dylan recounts an occasion when he accepted an honorary degree from Princeton on June 9, 1970 (pictured):

There was little to say, there was no conversation
As I stepped to the stage to pick up my degree

And the locusts sang off in the distance
Yeah, the locusts sang such a sweet melody
Oh, the locusts sang off in the distance
Yeah, the locusts sang and they were singin' for me.

In fact, what Dylan heard that day were cicadas, not locusts, which are a different species of insect. After his clever reference to the song, Wilentz proceeded to give a wonderful lecture about Dylan’s longstanding engagement with American history. For example, Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020), his first album of new material in eight years, was hailed by critics for its complex and deeply human exploration of American history, music, and identity. This was the second symposium held by the Institute for Bob Dylan Studies, which is the repository for Dylan’s archives. The Institute’s director, Sean Latham, has just published a volume of essays titled The World of Bob Dylan (Cambridge, 2021). One of the contributors is James English, the author of The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (Harvard, 2005), who wrote a delightful chapter on Bob Dylan receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016. Another contributor, Devon Powers, wrote an illuminating chapter about what she calls the Bob Dylan brand. Now that Dylan himself is an octogenarian, it seems clear that Bob Dylan studies has come of age.

Image credit: Bob Dylan at Princeton University, June 9, 1970. Honorary Degree Records (AC106), Box 6. Firestone Library, Princeton University.