Dylan's Early Christmas Present - The Daily Beast

News of Bob Dylan's album of Christmas songs shocked fans. But his official historian-in-residence, Sean Wilentz, detects not a single ironic or parodic note in Christmas in the Heart-just a sincere homage to American Christmases past.

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In fact, making this record is a generous act that is fully in keeping with Dylan’s past and with his ever-developing art. The crass reason for artists to release special albums of Christmas songs had always been to cash in on the lucrative Christmas sales market. Dylan understands as much—but in the Christian spirit of caritas, he has donated all of his royalties from the album ahead of time, and in perpetuity, to buy meals for millions of needy persons through the organizations Feeding America, Crisis (in Great Britain), and the United Nations’ World Food Program.

The artistic reason for cutting special Christmas collections had always been that there are so many wonderful Christmas songs, old and new—not least those in the American songbook of the past century and a half—and ambitious musical artists have been tempted to take them on. This is Dylan’s motivation as well. Some