Finished reading: Dylan Goes Electric! by Elijah Wald

I’ll be honest here: I’ve never been a big Bob Dylan fan. I like a few of his songs, but have somehow never managed to get into him as an artist. (I’ll keep trying.) Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night that Split the Sixties by Elijah Wald is a short history of the American folk music scene in the early 1960s, leading up to that night in 1964 when Dylan brought an electric guitar on stage at the Newport Folk Festival and shook up the folk music scene for good.

Dylan Goes Electric is very readable, and does a nice job of filling in the musical history of the era for people like me who have heard the names Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Peter, Paul and Mary, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, and the like, but know very little about most of them.

Nothing too deep or too profound, but a nice snapshot of a particular short era in American folk and popular music.