Village art was collaborative, with performers openly borrowing each other’s material

Evidence

By summer, fines were again levied against the Bizarre and the Wha? and Dylan was near ubiquitous. He opened for Van Ronk at the Gaslight, was a popular backup musician and a fixture at Folk City hootenannies, known for his hip, humorous talking blues and ragamuffin Chaplinesque persona. He was a quick study, absorbing people’s record collections and bookshelves, taking in Jack Elliott’s Woody Guthrie material, sponging up Dave Van Ronk’s version of “House of the Rising Sun” and adopting Hugh Romney’s catch phrase (“dig yourself”). Romney turned Dylan onto Lord Buckley and Dylan added a version of Buckley’s recitation of the anti-lynching poem “Black Cross” to his repertoire. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 361

Categorization

• XREF: Direct evidence that genre-defining invention came from open borrowing within a dense proximity network — a material condition claim the reader can test against present-day stagnation arguments.