Elijah Wald

Elijah Wald (born 1959) is an American folk blues guitarist, music journalist, and a blues, pop, and cultural music historian. He is a 2002 Grammy Award winner for his liner notes to The Arhoolie Records 40th Anniversary Box: The Journey of Chris Strachwitz. Wald's 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties served as the basis for the film A Complete Unknown.

Life Wald, who is of Jewish heritage, was born in 1959 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His parents were George Wald (co-recipient of the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine) and Ruth Hubbard, a biologist, with whom Elijah co-authored Exploding the Gene Myth.

At age 18, Wald departed for Europe to try to make a living as a folk-blues guitarist. For approximately the next 12 years, he traveled the world. He fronted a blues band in Seville, Spain, a swing trio in Antwerp, Belgium, and a rock band in Colombo, Sri Lanka, and studied with Congolese guitarist Jean-Bosco Mwenda. Returning to the United States, he played in "low dives and honky-tonks", and recorded two albums: the LP Songster, Fingerpicker, Shirtmaker and the CD Street Corner Cowboys (Black Rose Records, 2000).

By the time he and the Globe parted ways, he was already becoming an increasingly established writer. He had been a major collaborator in the Smithsonian Institution's multimedia project River of Song, a survey of contemporary music along the Mississippi River, and had just finished Josh White: Society Blues, a biography of the folk-blues singer Josh White.

"Myths", Wald remarked in 2002, "are marvelous things, the keys to understanding a culture.

Indeed, his first book was a collaboration with his biologist mother entitled Exploding the Gene Myth, in which they wrote that "The myth of the all-powerful gene is based on flawed science that discounts the environment in which we and our genes exist." "There are no definitive histories," he would come to write in How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll (2009), "because the past keeps looking different as the present changes."