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Based on Elijah Wald’s hour-by-hour countdown Dylan Goes Electric!, James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown is a quirky, engaging and (thankfully) never reverential biopic that tracks the journey of Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) from acoustic folk to rock amplification. Its main concern is music and mimesis: to showcase Chalamet performing the Dylan songbook with a fidelity to the original beyond the vocal range of the lip-synching Larry Parks in The Jolson Story (1946) or Rami Malek in Bohemian Rhapsody (2018).

The imitations are all, as it were, pitch perfect, but they tend to submerge the political dimension to Dylan’s decision to crank up the volume at the Newport Folk Festival on July 25, 1965. The gesture was not about electricity but autonomy, the desire of the artist to free himself from the restrictive meters and themes of an agit-prop folk tradition. Heard retrospectively, “It Ain’t Me Babe” is no longer just...

While James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown spotlights mainly the life of Bob Dylan (portrayed by Timothée Chalamet), the lives of several other musicians intertwined with the iconic troubador’s. His visit to Woody Guthri (Scott McNairy) and Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) proved formative in his career and rise as a folk musician.

Later, Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) and Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook) came into the musician’s orbit as did Bob Neuwirth (Will Harrison). All Bob Dylan vocals in the film were performed by Chalamet, and the same goes for Edward Norton’s Pete Seeger songs, Monica Barbaro’s portrayal of Joan Baez and Boyd Holbrook’s Johnny Cash.

Below, find a list of all the songs in A Complete Unknown:

“Dusty Old Dust (So Long It’s Been Good To Know Yuh)” Written and Performed by Woody Guthrie “Oasis” Performed by Moondog, Written by Louis T. Hardin “Death,...

By Hank Reineke

When the revered folksinger and author Woody Guthrie passed away on October 3, 1967 – following a long, tragic battle with Huntington’s disease – his friends and colleagues were moved to celebrate his life and legacy with a tribute concert. The manager of Guthrie’s business affairs, Harold Leventhal, commissioned the blacklisted novelist and screenwriter Millard Lampell to re-work an old script he had earlier fashioned from Guthrie’s bountiful catalog of songs and prose. Lampell was well suited to the task, not merely an outsider looking in. In 1941 Lampell would co-found the Almanac Singers, the agit-prop folk music ensemble that featured Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Lee Hays and several others.

That original program, Woody Guthrie’s California to the New York Island, first broadcast on CBS-tv’s Camera 2 program in December 1965, would serve as the template for the proposed memorial Tribute to Woody Guthrie. The tribute concert would be staged...

Festivities are planned throughout this weekend in celebration of the 100th birthday of folk-music pioneer Pete Seeger. Born May 3rd, 1919, in Manhattan, Seeger’s songwriting and political activism would for decades go hand-in-hand, leading to the folk revival of the late Fifties and early Sixties, which were bolstered by such Seeger compositions as “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” “Turn!, Turn!, Turn!” and the civil-rights anthem “We Shall Overcome.”

One of Seeger’s earliest songs that would be a hit more than once was “If I Had a Hammer,” written with Lee Hays,...

Pete Seeger, the banjo-picking troubadour who sang for migrant workers, college students and star-struck presidents in a career that introduced generations of Americans to their folk music heritage, died on Monday at the age of 94. Seeger's grandson, Kitama Cahill-Jackson said his grandfather died at New York Presbyterian Hospital, where he'd been for six days. "He was chopping wood 10 days ago," he said. Seeger - with his a lanky frame, banjo and full white beard - was an iconic figure in folk music. He performed with the great minstrel Woody Guthrie in his younger days and marched with Occupy Wall Street protesters in his 90s,...