Flagging Down The Double Es : Last Night Riverfront Richmond VA USA | RAY PADGETT

Last Night in Richmond (by Anne Margaret Daniel)

2026-07-23, Allianz Amphitheater at Riverfront, Richmond, VA

RAY PADGETT JUL 24 ∙

Last night, Bob Dylan brought the Long Hot Summer Tour to Richmond, Virginia. Scholar and writer Anne Margaret Daniel was on hand to tell us about the show, and about the city’s importance in Dylan’s—and the country’s—history. Here’s Anne Margaret Daniel reporting in from Richmond:

Among its other names, they call my hometown of Richmond, Virginia the River City—or to be more accurate, Rivah City, since that’s how we say it. Richmond was named for Richmond upon Thames, since the aspect of it from the bluffs on the north side of town overlooking the James River is similar. It has other nicknames, many based on its time as the capital of the Confederacy from 1861 to 1865. In 2021, Richmond was in the news as protests following the 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis resulted in the removal at last of a row of Confederate generals along Monument Avenue, installed there from the 1890s and long towering over the broad street with its parklike mall down the center. The statues and their plinths are gone now, with the space where they stood either paved, or occupied by grass and flowers. But the names on the land remain, all over Richmond’s history and all over town: Davis, Stuart, Jackson, Lee, Maury… Faulkner knew it all too well, and had a character say it in Requiem for a Nun (1919): “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Bob Dylan, not a mere Civil War buff but, as we know from Chronicles and from many interviews and songs, a scholar of America’s darkest war, has made the city a regular stop on his tours since 1966.

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