One of the music world's preeminent critics takes a fresh look at the day Dylan "went electric" at the Newport Folk Festival, timed to coincide with the event's fiftieth anniversary in 1965.

"Hard Rain is an exploration of how oral culture and the ballad tradition shaped Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan's 1962 classic "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall." The song was written at the apex of the folk music revival and harkens back to the British traditional ballad "Lord Randal" and the 17th-century Italian ballad "Il testemento dell'avvelenato." Its theme is relevant to the post-nuclear nightmares and youth movements of the 1960s, prefiguring contemporary...

"Listening to Bob Dylan seeks to reposition music and musical performance as central, essential aspects of Bob Dylan's art. Countering the tendency on the part of many scholars, journalists, fans, and casual listeners to regard Dylan primarily or even exclusively as a poet, or as a writer of lyrics, Starr presents Dylan's work as a complete package and a personal, unique synthesis of words, music, and performance. Starr aims to provide an unpretentious...