According to 92.5 XTU, a new book published October 7 argues that country music has run beneath Bob Dylan's entire six-decade career, from coffeehouse folk through electric rock and beyond. *Country Bob: Dylan and Country Music* is by Don Cusic, a Belmont University professor and longtime country music historian, and is out from the University Press of Mississippi as part of its American Made Music Series.

Dylan has always been discussed as folk's great transformer — the Greenwich Village songwriter who 'went electric' — so a book insisting the genre never stopped shaping him cuts against the standard telling.

The 92.5 XTU report says Cusic traces the thread from the records and radio that captured Dylan's attention as a boy, through his Village years, and on to Nashville itself.

For devoted country readers, the surprise is the reversal of the usual framing: not Dylan borrowing from country, but country as the throughline of his whole sound, stagecraft and songwriting.

The heart of the case, per 92.5 XTU, is the trio of landmark albums Dylan recorded in Music City — *Blonde on Blonde*, *John Wesley Harding*, and *Nashville Skyline* — with Cusic examining why Dylan kept returning to Nashville and its sound.

Cusic also reportedly shows that country songs still make their way into Dylan's live sets today, extending the argument into his current touring era. The 160-page paperback sells for $25 under ISBN 978-1-4968-6440-6, a slim volume carrying a weighty claim about America's most examined songwriter.

The book has an early champion with real standing in the field.

Ken Burns, who brought Cusic on as a consultant for his documentary series *Country Music*, is quoted by 92.5 XTU: "No one understands the intersection of country music and culture better than Don Cusic, and here he takes us on a fascinating journey linking this iteration of our roots music with the greatest of all American songwriters."

That endorsement links Cusic to the same documentary project that, as The Santa Barbara Independent notes, made Marty Stuart a spokesperson for country's traditionalist legacy — a sign of how the genre's historians are consolidating their canon.

If Cusic's reading holds, Dylan belongs in the lineage country fans argue over — alongside figures like Merle Travis, the Everly Brothers, and John Prine, whom Bandcamp Daily's September country roundup also places in Western Kentucky's songwriting tradition.

The stakes are canon-shaping: the book positions the greatest of American songwriters inside Nashville's story rather than beside it, and it arrives from a university press, giving the argument scholarly framing.

Readers can press the argument in person. According to 92.5 XTU, Cusic will take part in a free Q&A on the book and Dylan's Nashville connection at 11 a.m. on November 7 at the Musicians Hall of Fame and Museum, 401 Gay Street, in Nashville, with copies of *Country Bob* available for purchase.

It caps a busy stretch for Cusic, whose recent work includes *Chet Atkins: Mr. Guitar* (2025) and *Howdy! The Minnie Pearl Story* (2025) — the latter winning the 2025 Tennessee History Book Award.