Positively 4th Street

De: David Hajdu

Narrado por: Bernadette Dunne

Positively 4th Street is a mesmerizing account of how four young people (Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Mimi Baez Farina, and Richard Farina) gave rise to a modern-day bohemia and created the enduring sound and style of the 1960s.

The story of the transformation of folk music from antiquarian pursuit to era-defining art form has never fully been told. Hajdu, whose biography of Billy Strayhorn set a new standard for books about popular music, tells it as the story of a colorful foursome who were drawn together in Greenwich Village in the early 1960s and inspired a generation to gather around them.

Even before they became lovers in 1963, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez were seen as the reigning king and queen of folk music; but their songs and their public images grew out of their association with Joan's younger sister, Mimi, beautiful, haunted, a musician in her own right, and Richard Farina, the roguish, charming novelist Mimi married when she was 17. In Hajdu's candid, often intimate account (based on several hundred new interviews), their rise from scruffy coffeehouse folksingers to pop stars comes about through their complex personal relationships, as the young Dylan courts the famous Joan to further his career, Farina woos Mimi while looking longingly on her older sister, and Farina's friend Thomas Pynchon keeps an eye on their amours from afar.

Positively 4th Street is that rare book with a new story to tell about the 1960s: the story of how some of the greatest American popular music arose out of the lives of four gifted and charismatic figures.

©2001 David Hajdu (P)2002 Blackstone Audiobooks

Reseñas de la Crítica

"A hauntingly evocative blend of biography, musicology, and pop cultural history." (The New York Times)
"One of the finest pop music bios." (Booklist)

Frustrating

I couldn’t finish it. The reader if frustrating and the pace very slow. I had to speed up the reading speed to get it to sound normal.

Best music-culture book I've ever experienced.

Gripping, exhaustively researched and masterful. Simply a tour de force. I'd read The Ten-Cent Plague, and was dazzled, but this was something else altogether...

The story was well written. I enjoyed the detailed description of the time and places.

Dislike the reader's reading in voices approximating characters in the book. It took away from the story and descriptions.

Positively gripping

The book was surprisingly good and interesting.

The story of the rise of folk music in the 50's and 60's is like a big puzzle, as it came on the heels of McCarthyism, and a long poltical chill.

David Hadju's book, which tells the story of Richard Farina and Mimi Baez, provided a vital piece to that puzzle, and in so doing fashioned a dramatic frame with which to make this account compelling.

The rise of folk music, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and this milieu has a special place in contemporary social history, besides its entertainment value. The sudden popularity of folk music is an often overlooked story of that generation. Not only does it describe an aspect of a protest movement, but also the evolution of a niche of mass culture.

I chose this book reluctantly because the reader's voice had been denigrated by a previous review.. At first I thought perhaps there was merit to the criticism, but I became accustomed to the reader's voice, and felt her dramatic inflections and vocal characterizations added considerably to this book's many merits. I would have no hesitation to chose another book performed by this reader.

Anyone who has read Bob Dylan's Chronicles, would certainly find this this book a fascinating companion volume.

Folk music tangled up in blue

The characters are fascinating and the story reveals so much about interconnections and creative forces in music and literature that it's a wonder the author could have known so much, let alone presented it in such a compelling, coherent narrative. Just as important, Bernadette Dunne makes it all come alive. She was an ideal choice to read this book and she takes the listener through thick and thin. Hearing her was much better than reading it myself.