*Starred Review* Wolff (The Fight for Home, 2012) first heard Bob Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone when he was 13 and in search of the truth. He responded viscerally to the anger in Dylan's nasal, unconventional voice. Hearing Dylan lash out at what? at everything was like hearing an alternative national anthem, he writes. Dylan led him to Woody Guthrie and his song, 1913 Massacre, about the death of 73 striking copper miners and their families, including 59 children, on Christmas Eve, 1913, in Calumet, Michigan. Wolff realized that Dylan borrowed the melody for his own Song to Woody from Guthrie's 1913 Massacre and found that Guthrie took the melody from the seventeenth-century English ballad, To Hear the Nightingale Sing. In this book of connections, Wolff links Guthrie's Dust Bowl refugees to Jewish refugees from Hitler's Germany to today's refugee crises. Other paths lead to Joan Baez, the activist-martyr Joe Hill, the Industrial Workers of the World, the Works Progress Administration, Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, the Students for a Democratic Society, the folk revival, and the civil rights movement as well as themes of labor relations, socialism, authenticity, and the importance of bearing witness. Wolff has crafted a fascinating and relevant whirlwind examination of music, economic injustice, and two American icons.--Sawyers, June Copyright 2010 Booklist

In this bold and moving history, author and songwriter Wolff follows a path of memory and resistance through the labor struggles and music of 20th-century America. Wolff argues here that the mass murder of 74 men, women, and children (mine workers and members of their families-most of the victims were children) during a bitter strike in 1913 in Michigan reverberated through the careers of two remarkable American musicians. Using Woody Guthrie's elegy for the massacre as a launching point, Wolff examines how the dust bowl and the Depression transformed the hillbilly entertainer into a radical artist. Linked to Calumet through his own Midwestern origins and his wholesale imitation of Guthrie, the young Bob Dylan inherited his role model's hobo crown. Yet the very different conditions of post-WWII prosperity and teen rebellion in which he came up led Dylan to reject the pious expectations of the folk scene for a more personal rebellion, one that remade rock and roll. Without surrendering insight or authority, Wolff spans a remarkable range of material, including 19th-century copper mining on the Upper Peninsula, the origins of folk out of traditional genres, and the '60s counterculture. Wolff's descriptions of Guthrie are particularly engaging, as are his forays into music criticism and labor history. At times, the anger that Wolff foregrounds appears too amorphous to convincingly unify such diverse subjects and eras. Yet in a scathing finale that sends him to the postindustrial ghost town of Calumet, Wolff makes clear that by forgetting the past that Dylan and Guthrie passed down to us-and the injustices that motivated their art-we are in danger of losing our futures. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

On Christmas Eve, 1913, 73 people (mostly children) were killed in a stampede at a Christmas party in Calumet, MI. This tragedy, related to a bitter copper miners' strike, was commemorated in Woody Guthrie's 1945 song "1913 Massacre," and is at the core of this book. Wolff (4th of July, Asbury Park; You Send Me: The Life and Times of Sam Cooke) weaves Calumet and early labor strife into a dual biography of Guthrie (1912-67) and Bob Dylan (b. 1941). It alternates chapters relating Guthrie's and Dylan's formative years, emphasizing how injustice and older folk and blues music influenced their songs. His chapter on the stampede, its aftermath, and Guthrie's song, is very effective and moving. Two personal essays bookend this work. In the first chapter, Wolff writes about his discovery of Dylan as a high school student and the profound impact of "Like a Rolling Stone." He concludes with an almost Orwellian account of a 2013 visit to -Calumet, where he visited the cemeteries and saw the remains of a once-thriving mining town. VERDICT Readers with an interest in American political and labor history will most appreciate this book. Fans of Dylan and Guthrie will be in familiar territory but will also learn about strands of influence on their work.-Thomas Karel, Franklin & Marshall Coll. Lib., Lancaster, PA © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.