Politics & Power Quote by Alan Lomax

Name-dropping Dylan is almost beside the point; Lomax is really sketching a power map. By calling him "Bobby Dylan", he shrinks a future myth into a kid in the Village, someone who shows up at your door and asks, in effect, for placement. The line has the casual authority of a gatekeeper who never has to say he’s a gatekeeper. Lomax doesn’t brag outright, but the posture is clear: Dylan wanted entry into the archive, into legitimacy, into the lineage.

The genius is in the double framing. Lomax is the documentarian of "American folk music", the man who treated songs like artifacts worth rescuing before modernity paved them over. Dylan, meanwhile, is presented as hungry, strategic, almost deferential - not yet the electric renegade, but a young performer testing how close he can stand to the altar. When Dylan suggests his songs "ought to go" into Lomax’s next collected book, it’s ambition dressed as reverence: a bid to be certified as traditional even while writing new material.

Context does the rest. The Village folk scene in the early 60s ran on authenticity the way today’s culture runs on brand. Lomax’s recollection carries a faintly amused skepticism about that economy - a reminder that "authenticity" often begins as an application, filed with the right person. It’s not a takedown of Dylan so much as a sly origin story: the making of a legend as an act of networking with the archivist of the nation’s conscience.