Robert Shelton was a music and film critic.

Shelton's most enduring claim to fame was that he helped launch the career of a then unknown 20-year-old folk

Folk music

Folk music is an English term encompassing both traditional folk music and contemporary folk music. The term originated in the 19th century. Traditional folk music has been defined in several ways: as music transmitted by mouth, as music of the lower classes, and as music with unknown composers....

 singer named Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan is an American singer-songwriter, musician, poet, film director and painter. He has been a major and profoundly influential figure in popular music and culture for five decades. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s when he was an informal chronicler and a seemingly...

. Dylan was performing at Gerdes Folk City in the West Village, the ne-plus-ultra

Siege of Bouchain

The Siege of Bouchain , following the Passage of the Lines of Ne Plus Ultra , was a siege of the War of the Spanish Succession, and the last major victory of John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough. Marlborough broke through the French defensive lines without losing a man to enemy action, and took...

 of New York City

New York City

New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

 folk venues, opening for a bluegrass

Bluegrass music

Bluegrass music is a form of American roots music, and a sub-genre of country music. It has mixed roots in Scottish, English, Welsh and Irish traditional music...

 act called the Greenbriar Boys. Shelton's positive review, in the New York Times, brought crucial publicity to Dylan, which led to a Columbia

Columbia Records

Columbia Records is an American record label, owned by Japan's Sony Music Entertainment, operating under the Columbia Music Group with Aware Records. It was founded in 1888, evolving from an earlier enterprise, the American Graphophone Company — successor to the Volta Graphophone Company...

 recording contract and a Peter, Paul and Mary

Peter, Paul and Mary

Peter, Paul and Mary were an American folk-singing trio whose nearly 50-year career began with their rise to become a paradigm for 1960s folk music. The trio was composed of Peter Yarrow, Paul Stookey and Mary Travers...

 cover of "Blowin' in the Wind

Blowin' in the Wind

"Blowin' in the Wind" is a song written by Bob Dylan and released on his album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan in 1963. Although it has been described as a protest song, it poses a series of questions about peace, war and freedom...

".

Shelton was born in Chicago in 1926 under the name Robert Shapiro, the son of Joseph and Hannah Shapiro, Russian Jewish immigrants. His father, a research chemist, was born in Minsk

Minsk

- Ecological situation :The ecological situation is monitored by Republican Center of Radioactive and Environmental Control .During 2003–2008 the overall weight of contaminants increased from 186,000 to 247,400 tons. The change of gas as industrial fuel to mazut for financial reasons has worsened...

 and came to the US in 1905. Robert was raised in Chicago, served in the US Army in France during 1944-45, and attended the School of Journalism at Northwestern University

Northwestern University

Northwestern University is a private research university in Evanston and Chicago, Illinois, USA. Northwestern has eleven undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools offering 124 undergraduate degrees and 145 graduate and professional degrees....

. He moved to New York in the 1950s, joining the staff of the New York Times not long after. In 1955 he was one of 30 New York Times staffers subpoenaed by the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, who were informed by Times counsel Louis M. Loeb that they would be fired if they took the Fifth Amendment. Shelton refused to answer questions from the committee about any affiliation with the Communist Party

Communist Party USA

The Communist Party USA is a Marxist political party in the United States, established in 1919. It has a long, complex history that is closely related to the histories of similar communist parties worldwide and the U.S. labor movement....

 or about fellow Times staffer Matilda Landsman

Matilda Landsman

Matilda Landsman was a New York Times employee in the 1950s. She was subpoenaed by the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee in November 1955 during their investigation into Communists in the media. She was one of 34 news media employees to be subpoenaed by the Senate after the testimony of...

, and was indicted by a grand jury for contempt. Because he did not plead the Fifth he was allowed to continue working at the Times but was transferred out of the news department to the less sensitive entertainment desk, where he became a music critic. Convicted and sentenced to six months in prison, he appealed his conviction and had it reversed on a technicality, only to be indicted, retried, convicted, and have the conviction overturned on a technicality again. After several years of appeals in which he was represented by noted civil liberties lawyer Joseph L. Rauh, Jr.

Joseph L. Rauh, Jr.

Joseph L. Rauh, Jr. was one of the United States' foremost civil rights and civil liberties lawyers. He was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, by President Bill Clinton on November 30, 1993.-Early life:Rauh was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, the...

 the case was finally dropped in the mid-1960s.

For a decade (1958–1968), Shelton reviewed music, in particular folk music

Folk music

Folk music is an English term encompassing both traditional folk music and contemporary folk music. The term originated in the 19th century. Traditional folk music has been defined in several ways: as music transmitted by mouth, as music of the lower classes, and as music with unknown composers....

, but also pop

Popular music

Popular music belongs to any of a number of musical genres "having wide appeal" and is typically distributed to large audiences through the music industry. It stands in contrast to both art music and traditional music, which are typically disseminated academically or orally to smaller, local...

 and country music

Country music

Country music is a popular American musical style that began in the rural Southern United States in the 1920s. It takes its roots from Western cowboy and folk music...

, becoming a good friend of many of the artists and extending his influence beyond the pages of the Times. His other work included writing the programs at the Newport Folk Festival

Newport Folk Festival

The Newport Folk Festival is an American annual folk-oriented music festival in Newport, Rhode Island, which began in 1959 as a counterpart to the previously established Newport Jazz Festival...

; and doing album notes for several artists, including Dylan, as "Stacey Williams." During the early 1960s, he co-edited a magazine, Hootenanny, at the same time his friend Linda Solomon

Linda Solomon

Linda Solomon is an American music critic and editor. Although she has written about various aspects of popular culture, her main focus has been on folk music, blues, R&B, jazz and country music...

 edited a different magazine titled ABC-TV

American Broadcasting Company

The American Broadcasting Company is an American commercial broadcasting television network. Created in 1943 from the former NBC Blue radio network, ABC is owned by The Walt Disney Company and is part of Disney-ABC Television Group. Its first broadcast on television was in 1948...

 Hootenanny.

Shelton spent decades writing and rewriting his Dylan opus, No Direction Home, The Life and Music of Bob Dylan which was published in 1986, following years of wrangling with publishers over taste and length. Shelton's intention from the outset was to write a serious cultural study, not a showbiz biography; as a result, he always said his life's work had been "abridged over troubled waters". The title is taken from the lyric of a Dylan song, "Like a Rolling Stone", from the Highway 61 Revisited

Highway 61 Revisited

Highway 61 Revisited is the sixth studio album by singer-songwriter Bob Dylan. It was released in August 1965 by Columbia Records. On his previous album, Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan devoted Side One of the album to songs accompanied by an electric rock band, and Side Two to solo acoustic numbers...

album. The title of Shelton's biography of Dylan was borrowed by Martin Scorsese

Martin Scorsese

Martin Charles Scorsese is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, actor, and film historian. In 1990 he founded The Film Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to film preservation, and in 2007 he founded the World Cinema Foundation...

 for his 2005 film about Dylan's early career. Other books include "Electric Muse: The Story Of Folk Into Rock" and "The Face of Folk Music".

In 1982 Shelton moved to Brighton, England, where he wrote mostly about films for a number of publications up to the time of his death. Much of the collection of his early work has been donated to the University of Liverpool

University of Liverpool

The University of Liverpool is a teaching and research university in the city of Liverpool, England. It is a member of the Russell Group of large research-intensive universities and the N8 Group for research collaboration. Founded in 1881 , it is also one of the six original "red brick" civic...

.

Books

• No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan, 1986, Da Capo Press reprint 2003, ISBN 0-306-81287-8. A new edition, with some 20,000 words of Shelton's original text restored, will be published in spring 2011 to mark Dylan's seventieth birthday. (UK: Omnibus Press; US: Backbeat/Hal Leonard; Australia: Hardie Grant; Germany: Edel; Brazil: Larousse.

External links

• Introduction to The Mitchell Trio Song Book, 1964
• http://www.bobdylanroots.com/shelton.htmlRobert Shelton with music critic Linda Solomon
  Linda Solomon
  Linda Solomon is an American music critic and editor. Although she has written about various aspects of popular culture, her main focus has been on folk music, blues, R&B, jazz and country music...
  
   in 1964]
• Robert Shelton on the Kingston Trio
• Rock Book Show interview with Liz Thomson, Co-Editor of Shelton's "No Direction Home" updated re-issue
• The Robert Shelton Archive at the Institute of Popular Music, University of Liverpool