Dylan in Cincinnati by Graley Herren

Dylan in Cincinnati by Graley Herren

Dylan in Cincinnati takes a fresh approach to Bob Dylan’s performance art by asking what happens when we focus on a single city across six decades.

When we think of Dylan in concert, we imagine Newport, New York, or London. But most of his shows were in places far from the spotlight—venues largely ignored by music critics and scholars. Cincinnati, a city with little fanfare in the heart of the American Midwest, becomes an ideal site for study. Its concerts and bootleg recordings tell a story of reinvention night after night, year after year.

This history requires planting a shovel in one locale and digging down, layer after layer. What emerges is a portrait of Dylan as a restless itinerant artist who never abandoned audiences in flyover states. In fact, some of his strongest performances were given there. By recovering these overlooked shows, Dylan in Cincinnati documents not only the history of one city’s concerts but also the essence of Dylan’s enduring power as a live performer.

"Dylan in Cincinnati is a masterful study of Bob Dylan’s live performances, framed through the unique lens of CincinnatiHerren captures the layered, magnetic power of Dylan’s concerts with remarkable clarity and insight." - Court Carney, coeditor of The Politics and Power of Bob Dylan’s Live Performances: Play a Song for Me

Graley Herren is professor of English at Xavier University in Cincinnati. He is author of previous books on Samuel Beckett, Don DeLillo, and Bob Dylan. He writes a Substack on Dylan called Shadow Chasing, and he serves on the editorial board of The Dylan Review.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781496863997
ISBN 10	1496863992
Title	Dylan in Cincinnati
Author	Graley Herren
Series	American Made Music Series
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	University Press of Mississippi
Year published	2026-09-15
Number of pages	288
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.