Kirstie Lynn (photo by Steve Paul)
There’s something happening here, and maybe we don’t know what it is. But I’m happy to report that the spirit of what we think of as folk music — in the general, wide-view scope of it — and the legacy of the octogenarian Nobel laureate Bob Dylan seem to be alive and well.
Although “A Complete Unknown,” the movie version of Dylan’s arrival and evolution in the early 1960s, was snubbed by Academy Award voters, the dominant praise for actor Timothée Chalamet’s performance — and for several of his co-stars — sparked new interest in both the music and that roiling period of American history. A younger generation, especially fans of Chalamet from his roles in previous films such as “Dune” and “Lady Bird,” seems to have taken his Dylan immersion seriously.
Earlier this year, not long after the movie’s theatrical release, Kansas City singer-songwriter Kirstie Lynn announced her increasing passion for Joan Baez as she took the stage for a concert presented by the relatively new Waldo Folk series. An operatically trained vocalist, Lynn proceeded to launch into a compelling take on Baez’s version of “The House of the Rising Sun,” that classic oldie about a New Orleans brothel. Monica Barbaro, as Baez, sang it dramatically in “A Complete Unknown,” although the script overlooked the true-life anecdote that Dylan had learned it from his friend and mentor Dave Van Ronk and then irked him by recording it first.
But never mind. As I mentioned in a review of the movie for KC Studio, the film presents a string of conflations and counter-facts that serve the purpose of a Hollywood production more than, say, a strict documentary usually does.
Moviegoers have scurried back to the source material, especially Elijah Wald’s more factually reliable book, “Dylan Goes Electric.” Among other things, they’re getting a better understanding of the influence and legacies of Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie and the complicated context of authenticity, tradition, commercialism and art. The movie oversimplifies Dylan’s turn to rock ‘n’ roll electricity and in the process muddles some of the more meaningful messages.
“Woody’s ideas were bigger than genre or other limits,” said Anna Canoni, Guthrie’s granddaughter, who traced the connection between Dylan and his forbear in a slide talk in February at the Folk Alliance International annual conference in Montreal. As a key representative of Guthrie’s legacy, Canoni is grateful for how the movie “so lovingly keeps a little tether to Woody.” And she was clear about its overall effect to “bring a new generation into the fold.”
Having just turned the corner at 30, Kirstie Lynn fits right in. I hadn’t heard her before she opened for singer-songwriter Kelly Hunt and the Matchsellers in January. But in diving into her background and listening to a record she made in 2021 it was instantly obvious that she had a connection to Baez. From the opening phrases of her song “Sweetest Someone” on the record “Tears and Medicine” she had the Baez touch. And she didn’t even know it at the time.
So many people told her that her soprano vibrato voice sounded much like Baez, that she decided to check out the songstress for herself. Along with a studied passion for Joni Mitchell, Lynn, a native of upstate New York now comfortably resettled in Kansas City, is learning and covering some of the signature songs of the 1960s and ’70s. She also introduced herself to early Dylan and has cultivated a practice that incorporates an eclectic approach to folk, Americana, pop and rock. “I hope we’re seeing a resurgence of folk, outlaw folk and country coming back,” she told me over coffee one day.
As for the inspiration sparked by “A Complete Unknown,” Lynn said, “The overwhelming response from my friends has been how much folk music went hand in hand with everything that was going on.”
Lynn, who still sings opera, has an active performance schedule as a solo performer and with her duo partner, Galen Clark, who recorded that first record in 2021. On May 30, for example, she’ll play in the round with Kelly Hunt and others at a music festival in Eudora, Kansas. For samples of her work and gig schedule see her website, www.kirstielynn.com. For the rewarding and never-ending influence of Dylan and company, stay tuned.
One Thing
Artists are inventors, experimenters, explorers. One of the more absorbing museum exhibits of late was “Harmony & Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910-1930” at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, which encapsulated a deep and colorful tributary of modernism. (The show closed earlier this year.) Alongside such colorist superstars as Robert and Sonia Delaunay was a single and somewhat surprising painting by a familiar name in these parts — Thomas Hart Benton. Yes, Benton had his creative Paris period in the early years of the 20th century, though his forays into “synchromist” abstraction, as seen in this painting, “Bubbles,” seem to be rather short-lived. In Paris about 1909 Benton befriended Stanton Macdonald-Wright, who influenced his turn into color-oriented abstraction. Benton apparently painted “Bubbles” a few years later when both he and Wright had resettled in New York.
Looking deeper at the painting, one can see that it is not that far removed from the “bumps and hollows” that characterize Benton’s better-known rhythmic figurative work and that later influenced the likes of his onetime student, Jackson Pollock. Early on, Benton wanted to fuse the abstract idea on canvas with sculptural lessons from Michelangelo, which may well be the source of the rhythms that he would successfully employ in his epic murals and paintings in the 1930s and beyond. By the mid-1920s, while still in New York, Benton vehemently rejected modernist abstraction. Many of his earlier abstract experiments were said to be lost in a fire, though a passel of small paintings and sketches, which he’d given to Charles Pollock, Jackson’s brother and also a student of Benton’s in New York, surfaced in a somewhat eye-opening exhibit in the early 1980s.
Hat tip to Stephanie Fox Knappe, American and global art specialist at the Nelson-Atkins, who pointed me to several useful background resources. Knappe rues the absence of any of these Benton color experiments in the museum’s collection. Benton’s well-known portrait of Stanton Macdonald-Wright remains in the holdings of the Benton family trust and it’s featured on the website of the Benton Home and Museum in the Roanoke neighborhood. Interesting factlet from the Guggenheim catalogue: “Bubbles” was acquired by the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1947, a gift from H.L. Mencken. The noted essayist and crank knew Benton, also known as a truly American crank, in the 1920s. According to the art historian and onetime Nelson curator Henry Adams, Mencken, not much of an art fancier, might have titled the painting as a joke.
