Please note: This event took place in Jan 2025
An illustrated talk exploring the influence of the spiritual/gospel tradition on Bob Dylan’s music accompanied by special guests and spoken word.
‘Here’s the thing with me and the religious thing, this is the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music.’
Bob Dylan would tell Newsweek in 1997. ‘I don’t find it anywhere else.’ Nonetheless, Dylan’s full force embrace of gospel and God in the early 1980s caused as much outrage from his fans as when he plugged in his Stratocaster at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. However, for those closely following Dylan’s musical journey, you could see the spiritual train coming.
Like his earlier transformation(s), Dylan’s ‘Gospel Trilogy’ — Slow Train Coming (1979), Saved (1980), and Shot of Love (1981)—demonstrates a period of increased creative freedom and renewed live energy, the exuberance of which has only recently been revealed by way of the Trouble No More entry in Dylan’s ongoing bootleg series, 2017.
Inspired by Trouble No More, Dr Edson Burton will place Dylan in a tradition inhabited by Little Richard, Aretha Franklin, Prince and many more who were torn between the spiritual and the secular, the world and the world to come, flesh and spirit. At the heart of this struggle is a urgent search for meaning having scaled the height of human experience.
The event will include spoken word responses, including from the recent Tenement Press publication Six Sermons for Bob Dylan (2024), a sequence of sermons written by Lucy Sante—as commissioned by Dylan—and read by Michael Shannon in Jennifer Lebeau’s film accompaniment to the Trouble No More recordings.
