What I’m Reading
Title: Dylan Goes Electric: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night that Split the Sixties
Author: Elijah Wald
Published: 2015, by Dey Street Books
Pages: 368
Completed: August 2025
Nonfiction
Genre or topic: History of folk music, rock music, popular music, music criticism, cultural history
Why read this? You’re interested in the life or music of Bob Dylan, or want to learn about the history of folk, popular or rock music, folk festivals, American cultural history, or the sixties. Overall, I found it informative, readable and engaging.
I didn’t like: No critiques – there was nothing that annoyed me while reading this book.
Quick thoughts and reactions
- I hadn’t appreciated the full importance and influence of the Newport Folk Festival before reading this book and enjoyed learning about this. Wald treats the Newport Festival as one of the three main threads of the story – the other two being Dylan himself and Pete Seeger. By this account, Newport was the first American folk festival (at least the first one named as such), and its workshop format, as well as its general ethos, were adopted by many other folk festivals – some of which received start-up funding from the Newport festival.
- Wald delves into all the various strands and camps that made up the folk music revival movement, and I found this interesting as well. As a longtime devotee of the Vancouver Folk Music Festival, I could relate to or recognize some of these subgroups and cliques.
- This is the second Dylan-related book I’ve read this year (the first being Suze Rotolo’s A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties) after enjoying the A Complete Unknown film in late 2024. I’m now interested in reading an actual Dylan biography that covers his childhood and youth, and also interested in reading more by Elijah Wald.
- In further Dylan-inspired reading, I learned that the Newport Folk Festival, after some interruptions, continues today and had a fantastic lineup this year. Also, I learned that he left the guitar he played in 1965 there behind in the private plane he departed in, but it was later recovered and returned to the festival. Cool story.