Mark Davidson was an adjunct professor at the University of Texas and working for historian Douglas Brinkley as a research assistant in the summer of 2017 when he found a job in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that seemed like the right fit.
The previous year, Bob Dylan had sold his vast archive to the George Kaiser Family Foundation and the University of Tulsa for $20 million. The archive needed a collections manager and Davidson applied.
“Because I’m willing to go to stupid lengths to do big projects, I found myself where I’m at now,” says Davison, the senior director of archives and exhibitions for American Song Archives, which oversees the Woody Guthrie Center and the Bob Dylan Center.
Over the past eight years, Davidson has co-edited and co-written (with Parker Fishel) Bob Dylan: Mixing Up the Medicine. Published in October 2023, the massive book — three inches thick — showcases the archive in rare images and never-before-seen manuscripts, with essays by 29 writers and the work of more than 100 photographers, artists, and filmmakers included.
Davidson also helped with the design and curation of the Bob Dylan Center, which opened in the Tulsa Arts District down the street from its Guthrie counterpart in May 2022. And in addition to overseeing all the archives and exhibitions, he has curated three, including the current “Going Electric: Bob Dylan ‘65” that runs through spring 2026.
Here are excerpts from our interview, lightly edited and condensed for clarity:
Americana Highways: Let’s start with the book. What were the challenges in putting it together?
Mark Davidson: It started off as a pretty modest idea that’s now three inches thick. The original curator of the archive, Michael Chalkin, and a colleague of his, Robert Polito, were working to get people down to Tulsa to see the archive and they started doing events here. The hope was that they would choose something that piqued their interest in one way or another and write an essay about it. It was going to be a book of essays with pictures of the objects they chose.
This was taking place until the pandemic hit, which is when we started working on the book and got a publisher. And the publisher wanted us to make it into a magnum opus “Inside the Bob Dylan Archive Book” so we end up with this 607-page book that I’m looking at in front of me.
AH: So how did the pandemic affect the building of the center?
MD: The early story of the center was these public programs that we were holding to generate excitement, but when the pandemic hit, we shifted to curating and designing the center. During this intense period, we were designing it over Zoom.
Olsen Kundig out of Seattle was the architectural firm that designed the center, and we chose 59 Productions as our lead media designer. They had done a fantastic exhibit called “David Bowie Is” that we had seen and were impressed by. And then we all of these other partners working on the project, and we were putting it together literally over Zoom.
AH: That must have been tough.
MD: Designing a space that contains objects in cases when you can’t go outside to even get at the artifacts was a particular challenge. The archive was originally over at the Helmerich Center for American Research at Gilcrease Museum. I had some masked-up moments where I’d run over there, make sure nobody was in the building, and rush into the vault and wrestle through things.
AH: So the center opens to much fanfare, and you get this great boost from the Dylan movie “A Complete Unknown.” Has that drawn more attention to the archive and the center?
MD: Absolutely. No question. It’s brought in a new wave of people, either longtime fans who hadn’t come to Tulsa or people who didn’t know much about Dylan until they saw the movie. It’s been a big boost for us.
The timing was great for the 1965 exhibit, which focuses on the period that concludes the movie, the Newport Folk Festival performance where Dylan famously went electric. Let’s talk about that and some of your plans for future exhibits.
The nice thing about telling these stories is that we’re taking a first pass on all of this right now. The 1965 exhibit is the first time we’ve really been able to pull out all the stops and bring this stuff out. Curating this exhibit, more and more people have come out of the woodwork with things that they have that are amazing to put on display.
AH: Julian’s auctioned off three original drafts of “Mr. Tambourine Man” that had been previously unknown. These were TypeScript drafts. And due to happenstance, somebody got it and reached out to us and asked if we wanted to borrow them. It was perfect timing because “Mr. Tambourine Man” is a pivotal moment in the folk rock 1965 moment.
MD: I’m really excited about this exhibit. It all feels like it has been falling into place.
AH: Your dissertation was on the WPA and the rise and preservation of folk music, and now you’re steeped in all things Dylan. Do you have a preference between the two?
MD: I don’t know if I have a leaning one way or another. When I was doing my research, I really got into that era of the United States, which will never happen again. Not the Great Depression, but the desire people had to come together and preserve our history. We live in such a different era now.
I love them both. There are commonalities, not just Dylan kind of doing the Woody Guthrie thing early, learning all of his songs and calling himself a Woody Guthrie jukebox at one point. It’s their approach to creativity, how they doodled and marked up manuscripts, and how they were very invested and constantly worked at their craft in different ways. I think that is fascinating.
AH: The late 1960s is such an interesting period in Dylan’s life — the tour of Great Britain, Europe and Australia captured in “Don’t Look Back,” the motorcycle accident, the Basement Tapes. You don’t have any shortage of content to draw from.
Given the number of opportunities that we have right now, the challenge is that we’re trying to be precise and focused and not let our eyes be bigger than our stomachs. We have a relatively small staff and budget compared to other institutions our size, so we’re doing a lot with a little here.
It would be easy for us to keep just hitting the anniversaries. 1966 would be a fantastic exhibit because that is Bob Dylan at his sort of pinnacle of hipness. You’ve got the post-Newport moments of him pulling together the band that would become The Band and then going and doing the big international tour. That is one of the most photographed and visually exciting moments. Then he recorded Blonde on Blonde and put that out before the motorcycle accident.
So there’s a lot, if we decided to remain on that course. But I’m not certain that we will. We’ve done a number of great non-Bob exhibits, like the Jerry Schatzberg photo retrospective called “25th and Park” that had been up at fotografiska in New York and that fit really well. And there are Bob ties there (Schatzberg shot the cover of Blonde on Blonde). And we’ve had the exhibit on (guitarist and Oklahoma native) Jesse Ed Davis, which was fantastic. There are Bob ties there, but it was more about Davis as an artist and the lives he touched and people he influenced.
So there’s any number of directions we can go. The same can be said of the Woody Guthrie Center. He represents so much more than just the Dust Bowl era. Finding other key people to showcase in our exhibits is not a big stretch for us.
AH: The full Dylan archive has about 100,000 items and is available to credentialed researchers only. Given the swirl of interest in Dylan’s work for more than a half century, is there anything that you’re on the hunt for that is “missing”?
MD: There are some things on our radar that would be great to have. Some pieces have been on our radar that didn’t end up here, and that sort of goes back to the challenges of all the opportunities. It was a decade or so ago that a few drafts of “Like A Rolling Stone” went for $2.5 million or something astronomical like that, so there’s definitely a market there.
But we do occasionally get lucky with people donating some really amazing pieces. Here’s a side story: Dylan went to England for the first time late 1962/early 1963 and was part of a BBC telecast called “The Mad House on Castle Street.” As is the case with so much of the TV from that time, the BBC wiped their tapes and reused them, but a few people had their tape recorders out and captured this play.
Somebody just reached out and donated to us the tape that their brother had made, so we’ve become a magnet for people have been holding onto these things for decades. It’s really great to be the central repository for all of this stuff.
Thanks very much for chatting with us, Mark Davidson. Find more details and information here:
Enjoy some of our previous coverage here: Interview: Bob Dylan Center Director Steven Jenkins
