Ebook: Three songs, three singers, three nations

Inflection : "Ballad of Hollis Brown," Bob Dylan -- Disappearance and forgetting : "Last kind words blues," Geeshie Wiley -- World upside down : "I wish I was a mole in the ground," Bascom Lamar Lunsford.;Greil Marcus has been one of the most distinctive voices in American music criticism for over forty years. His books, including Mystery Train and The Shape of Things to Come, traverse soundscapes of folk and blues, rock and punk, attuning readers to the surprising, often hidden affinities between the music and broader streams of American politics and culture. Drawn from Marcus's 2013 Massey Lectures at Harvard, his new work delves into three episodes in the history of American commonplace song: Bascom Lamar Lunsford's 1928 I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground, Geeshie Wiley's 1930 Last Kind Words Blues, and Bob Dylan's 1964 Ballad of Hollis Brown. How each of these songs manages to convey the uncanny sense that it was written by no one illuminates different aspects of the commonplace song tradition. Some songs truly did come together over time without an identifiable author. Others draw melodies and motifs from obscure sources but, in the hands of a particular artist, take a final, indelible shape. And, as in the case of Dylan's Hollis Brown, there are songs that were written by a single author but that communicate as anonymous productions, as if they were folk songs passed down over many generations.