Like A Complete Unknown

"I don't think she was familiar with his entire body of work." - Long Branch business administrator Howard Woolley

The quote above is from this story, where two young police officers in New Jersey encountered Bob Dylan but had no idea who he was. I'm not surprised but I am disturbed. This isn't simply a story about the ignorance of two young kids. It's endemic among the kids' generation. The young today have no familiarity with traditional American music and no interest in learning about it. They have left behind many of the treasures of their cultural heritage - jazz, blues, standards, and now even the founding generation of rock and roll. It's been rejected, if only through ignorance, in lieu of the execrable tuneless over-emoting of modern day pop music. Call them the American Idol generation.

There are four American musical performers/artists whose works rise above everyone else, four men who could plausibly lay claim to the title of "Greatest American Musician." One of them is Bob Dylan. Can you guess the other three?

When my generation finally dies off, will there still be an audience for jazz or the blues? Probably not. There's something around today called "cool jazz" but what relationship does it have to traditional jazz? As for the blues, I'm not sure many kids today would be able to recognize it or enjoy it. Even if they encountered them, Muddy Waters or Howlin' Wolf would seem awfully exotic to a generation raised on synthesizers, lip-syncing, and light shows. As for classical music, it's as good as dead for the current youth generation; American standards ala Rodgers and Hart, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, etal. are on life support too. These genres are all essentially niche markets in today's musical universe. Twenty years from now they'll probably exist only as revival material. Thus one of the great American cultural contributions of the twentieth century (along with the movies and the Broadway musical) dies out.

So who are the other three who could lay claim to the title “Greatest American Musician”? If you read this blog regularly you'll probably be able to guess. Here are two of them side by side, having a ball. Sinatra is jazzed be able to perform with Pops:

Here’s the other one, in an electrifying performance:

And, finally, here’s Dylan, at his peak: