The Rose & the Briar: Death, Love and Liberty in the American Ballad - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393328252 ISBN 13: 9780393328257

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005

Synopsis

A devastatingly original work that plunges into the emotional heart of the American psyche.

Praised by Robbie Robertson of The Band as "a classic & a ticket to ride," The Rose & the Briar assembles an astonishing group of writers and artists: Paul Muldoon, Stanley Crouch, R. Crumb, Jon Langford of the Mekons, Sharyn McCrumb, Luc Sante, Joyce Carol Oates, Dave Marsh, and more than a dozen other novelists, essayists, performers, and critics; to explore the ineffable power of the American ballad. From "Barbara Allen" through "The Wreck of the Old 97" to contemporary ballads by Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, The Rose & the Briar is, as Geoffrey O'Brien hailed in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, "a book full of internal echoes and provocative coincidences," featuring "historical investigation, shamanistic trance-journey, memoir, novella and cartoon," where "names and costumes change, soldiers become cowboys, demon lovers become backwoods murderer; the voices are unmistakably distinct but they share a common ground." 25 illustrations

About this title

About the Author:

Greil Marcus is the author of Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads, Lipstick Traces, and Mystery Train. An Old Dominion Fellow at Princeton University in 2002, he lives in Berkeley, California.

Sean Wilentz is the George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History at Princeton University and author of the Bancroft Prize–winning The Rise of American Democracy, Bob Dylan in America, and many other works. He is completing his next book, No Property in Man, on slavery, antislavery, and the Constitution, based on his Nathan I. Huggins Lectures delivered at Harvard in 2015.

From Booklist:

*Starred Review* Defining ballad loosely as a song with narrative content or reference, coeditors Wilentz and Marcus, a historian and a rock critic, respectively, asked 22 nonacademic writers to each pick an American ballad and expatiate on it. Their responses are wonderfully varied, from John Rockwell on the performance style of Burl Ives' recording of "The Foggy, Foggy Dew" to poet Paul Muldoon's brand-new variant, "Blackwatertown," of "The Unfortunate Rake" and its cognate, "The Streets of Laredo"; from Anna Domino's historical research on the real murder behind "Omie Wise" to Ed Ward's knockout new-journalism-style excavation of an obscure 1960s soul song. Novelists Sharon McCrumb and Joyce Carol Oates respond with fiction, artists R. Crumb and Jon Langford with cartoons. Paul Berman's "Mariachi Reverie," inspired by Vicente Fernandez's "Volver, Volver," which opens up a new world of Mexican pop music for most Anglo readers, is as good, and rants by Rennie Sparks (intemperate, p.c.) and Pere Ubu's David Thomas (over-the-top, incoherent) are as bad as the collection gets. The accompanying CD of 20 of the chosen songs often suggests that a good writer is hung up on trash (there are better Bob Dylan ballads than Wendy Lesser's choice).Generally, the newer the song, the paltrier it is. But even the least of the essays makes good, if irritating, reading. The best are terrific. Ray Olson
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About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0393328252
• ISBN 13: 9780393328257
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 418
• Editor: Marcus Greil, Wilentz Sean