Robert Shelton , born Robert Shapiro , born June 28, 1926, Chicago , Illinois , USA - December 11, 1995, Brighton , UK ) is an American music and film critic . Best known as a journalist for The New York Times and author of No Direction Home, The Life and Music of Bob Dylan, which he worked on for 20 years.
| Robert Shelton | |
|---|---|
| English Robert Shelton | |
 | |
| Birth name | |
| Date of Birth | June 28, 1926 |
| Place of Birth | Chicago , Illinois , USA |
| Date of death | December 11, 1995 (69 years old) |
| Place of death | Brighton England |
| Citizenship |  USA |
| Occupation | music critic , film critic |
In the early 1960s, Shelton launched the career of the then-unknown 20-year-old musician Bob Dylan . In 1961, Dylan performed at Gerdes Folk City in West Village , one of New York ’s most famous folk centers, at the opening of The Greenbriar Boys bluegrass group . Shelton’s positive article in The New York Times brought Dylan fame and led to a contract with Columbia Records [1] . Prior to this, on July 29, 1961, Shelton also noted Dylan in a review of the Hootenanny radio program ( WRVR ): “Among the promising new talents worth mentioning, there is a 20-year-old Guthrie student named Bob Dylan, with amazing a breathtaking mumble riddled with country style. ” This was the first appearance of Dylan’s music on the air [2] .
Content
Biography
Shelton (real surname Shapiro) was born in 1926 in Chicago in the family of Joseph and Hannah Shapiro, Russian Jewish immigrants. His father, a research chemist, was born in Minsk and came to the United States in 1905. Shelton grew up in Chicago, served in the American army in France from 1944-45, and attended journalism school at Northwestern University . In the 1950s, he moved to New York and was soon hired by The New York Times . In 1955, Shelton was one of 30 employees of the publication, summoned to court by a subcommittee of the internal security of the Senate who were informed by Times lawyer Louis M. Loeb that they would be fired if they took advantage of the fifth constitutional amendment . Shelton refused to answer the committee's questions about any relationship with the US Communist Party or about Times employee Matilda Landsman and was accused by the grand jury of contempt of court. Since he did not take advantage of the fifth amendment, he was allowed to continue working in the newspaper, but was transferred from the news department to a less scrupulous entertainment department, where he became a music critic. Meanwhile, Shelton was convicted and sentenced to six months in prison, he appealed his sentence and quashed it thanks to a loophole in the law, after which he was again charged, but he was again able to cancel them. After several years of appeals, in which he was represented by a well-known lawyer specializing in civil liberties, Joseph L. Rauch, Jr. , the case was finally dismissed in the mid-1960s.
For a decade (from 1958 to 1968), Shelton was a music columnist, particularly in folk music , as well as pop and country style music . During this time, he made friends with many artists and spread his influence beyond the pages of The New York Times . In particular, he wrote a review of the first Newport Folk Festival in for The New York Times and The Nation newspapers [3] and edited the program of the same 1963 festival under the pseudonym "Stacey Williams" ( Eng. "Stacey Williams" ) [3] . In addition, he is the author of introductions (introductory word) and notes for the albums of many famous musicians, including the first album of Bob Dylan (as "Stacy Williams") [3] . In the early 1960s, Shelton co-authored Hootenanny magazine [3] , and was also the editor of ABC-TV Hootenanny magazine, along with his girlfriend, Linda Solomon .
Shelton spent 20 years writing and transcribing Dylan’s biography, “No Direction Home, The Life and Music of Bob Dylan,” which was published in 1986 after years of debate with publishers about the style and size of the book. Shelton's original intention was to write serious cultural research, rather than a typical biography of a show business star; in the end, he stated that his life’s work had been “reduced to non-ceasing disputes” ( English “abridged over troubled waters” ). The title of the book was a reference to Dylan’s famous song “ Like A Rolling Stone ”. The same name, "There is no turning back: Bob Dylan" , was used by director Martin Scorsese for his documentary about Bob Dylan (2005), covering the life of the musician from the very beginning of his career until the motorcycle accident in 1966. Shelton is also the author of Electric Muse: The Story Of Folk Into Rock and The Face of Folk Music.
In the late 1960s, Shelton moved to the UK, where he lived in South London, and then (since 1982) in Brighton - on the south coast. There he worked as an editor of the cultural section of the Brighton Evening Argus newspaper [4] , and then wrote, mainly about cinema, for a number of other British media until his death. In 1996, Shelton's work and his collection of books, records, and research materials were donated to the University of Liverpool Popular Music Institute [5] .
Bibliography
- No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan , 1986, Da Capo Press reprint 2003, ISBN 0-306-81287-8 .
- No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan: Revised and Updated Edition , 2011, Omnibus Press, ISBN 9781849389112 A new edition, with some 20,000 words of Shelton's original text restored, published in 2011 to mark Dylan's seventieth birthday.
Notes
- ↑ Gilliland, John Show 31 - Ballad in Plain D: An introduction to the Bob Dylan era. [Part 1 ] (audio). Pop Chronicles . Digital.library.unt.edu (1969). Track 2.
- ↑ Folk Music Heard on 12-Hour Show .
- ↑ 1 2 3 4 Wald, Elijah. Dylan Goes Electric !. - HarperCollins Publishing , 2015 .-- ISBN 0062366688 .
- ↑ Obituary by Karl Dallas in the Independent December 14, 1995
- ↑ Strachan, Rob. New Archive Collection . Popular Music Journal (January 1997). Date of treatment June 15, 2014.