Michael Gray Writer (original) (raw)
Welcome to the website of the pioneer of Dylan Studies: author of the first critical study of Bob Dylan's work, Song & Dance Man: The Art of Bob Dylan, published in late 1972 in the UK and in 1973 in the USA and Japan.
The massive third and final edition, Song & Dance Man III, was published at the very end of 1999 in Britain and in 2000 in the USA. This was followed by the even larger Bob Dylan Encyclopedia in 2006 and 2008. All these were both hardbacks and paperbacks and published on both sides of the Atlantic.
Song & Dance Man: The Art of Bob Dylan is enjoying a revival as a 50th Anniversary Series, this time with the final 2000 text divided into three easier-to-handle volumes, published in New York in 2023 by The FM Press. See the Books page.
His previous book, Outtakes On Bob Dylan: Selected Writings 1967-2021, was published 3 September 2021 in UK hardback from Route Publishing. It had been available on pre-order direct from Route in June 2021, with the first 550 copies individually numbered & stamped. Now Route is offering a limited number of signed copies of the book, and these can be mailed to anywhere in the world by this UK publisher. For more detail see the Shop page.
Before the coronavirus pandemic, Michael Gray was also a widely-booked public speaker at arts festivals, colleges & universities and arts centres in Europe and North America (see Past Appearances in the History menu). For his live events in 2023 See Live Appearances.
He is also the author of biographies of Frank Zappa (Mother!) and the great pre-war blues enigma Blind Willie McTell (Hand Me My Travelin' Shoes), as well as co-author of The Elvis Atlas: A Journey Through Elvis Presley's America.
His books have been translated into Japanese, Italian and German.
Work by Michael Gray available from the Shop Page includes:
HARDBACK 1ST EDITION, SIGNED
These are the last signed copies of this 1st edition hardback, published by Bloomsbury UK.
This is the only biography of this great blues singer-songwriter, who recorded from the 1920s to the 1950s and died in obscurity in 1959, just before he would have been rediscovered in the Folk Revival boom in Greenwich Village etc.
His songs have been revived since then by, among others, the Allman Brothers Band, and Bob Dylan wrote his own best song of the 1980s about McTell, with the refrain "No-one can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell". The book was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography 2008 - one of tive biographies chosen out of the 90+ read by the judges.
As the sub-title suggests, this is not only the story of McTell and his times but also the story of getting the story. See the Shop Page for details and to buy.
THE AUDIO-BOOK BOB DYLAN ENCYCLOPEDIA GREATEST HITS
Recorded in a North Yorkshire studio, 2011
Digipak CD offering an hour of readings from the book The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, selected and read by the author
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