Sante, Lucy & Marcus, Greil: Six Sermons for Bob Dylan

‘In August 2016 I received an email from Jeff Rosen, Bob Dylan’s majordomo. I had been getting occasional writing assignments from Bob through Jeff for years, and they were extremely various: speeches, press kits, prefaces, a Buick commercial. Now he explained that he and Bob had been discussing a film project, to focus on his ‘Gospel Years,’ 1979-1980. They had some great footage—not the rather stiff performances intended for an unmade TV special, but the rougher takes made for pick-ups. Bob had the thought that he’d like to interrupt the footage with sermons delivered by an actor. Would I consider writing [them]?’ —Lucy Sante, MMXXIV (from her introduction to these texts.)

An unabridged collection of Sante's six commissioned sermons, the Tenement edition also carries an afterword by Greil Marcus. Edited iterations of these collated pieces were delivered by actor Michael Shannon, as directed by Jennifer Lebeau, on the DVD included in the deluxe edition of Bob Dylan’s Trouble No More: The Bootleg Series Vol. 13—1979-1981 (2017); a film broadcast in the UK as an entry in the BBC’s ongoing Arena series.

Lucy Sante’s books include Low Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), Kill All Your Darlings (Verse Chorus Press, 2007), The Other Paris (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015), Maybe the People Would Be the Times (Verse Chorus Press, 2020), and the memoir, I Heard Her Call My Name (Heinemann, 2024).

Greil Marcus is the author of Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Harvard University Press, 1989). He contributed an introduction to the New York Review Books edition of Constance Rourke’s 1931 American Humor: A Study of the National Character. He was born in San Francisco and lives in Oakland.