Busyness has forced me back into ‘theme’ mode this week, so it’s six covers of Bob Dylan songs by a diverse range of female artists especially for people who think they don’t like Dylan. Enjoy!
A reminder that Spotify plays from this box in the annoying ‘Preview’ mode with short excerpts of each track. Please click the icon in top right corner to open the full playlist in a separate Spotify window.
First Word
A slightly revised format for this week includes a reference to the source Dylan album with an embedded link to the original track. It also includes the track’s ranking in the 2020 list prepared by journo Alexis Petridis for The Guardian, giving one person’s view of the 50 greatest songs written by the erstwhile Robert Zimmerman. For the curious, the list can be found here and, for the deeply committed, the paper’s four hour long playlist of all fifty tunes in order can be found here. You’re welcome.
The Girl From The North Country – Roseanne Cash ( 2009)
Source: The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963) Rank: 11
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan is his second album and features the iconic cover image of Dylan with his girlfriend Suze Rotolo walking in a wintry West Village in New York with a blue VW van behind them. The record opens with Blowin’ In The Wind which went on to become a 60s anthem. His first record had gone almost unnoticed as it was full of traditional folk songs. But with this one, he started to record his own songs, sometimes writing contemporary words to traditional melodies. This track has strong echoes of the English folk song Scarborough Fair and includes the line “Remember me to one who lives there/She once was a true love of mine”. The arrangement is typical of early Dylan just his acoustic guitar, his harmonica and his voice. The vocal starts as if he is going to rush the lyric ahead of the melody which is an error he sometimes makes, in my view. However, as the song proceeds he stretches the lyric out and it becomes a more engaging and enchanting love song. In 1969, Dylan re-recorded the song as a duet with Johnny Cash for his Nashville Skyline album where his work in that city was credited with shaking up the conservative country scene.
When Johnny’s daughter Roseanne was eighteen in 1973, her father gave her his own personal list of 100 great American songs to expand her knowledge of music. There were only three on that list which Cash had recorded himself and one of these was Girl From The North Country. In 2009, four years after her father died, Roseanne recorded ten songs from the list and released it as an album dedicated to Johnny. The record featured duets with three of my favourite artists (Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello and Jeff Tweedy) but she decided to record this track on her own, even though her dad’s duet with Dylan had made her “the coolest 14 year old on the planet”. With her unmistakable voice over a clean, spare arrangement by her producer and husband John Leventhal, the result does not mimic the original, but gives it a new lease of life.
Tangled Up In Blue (Live) – KT Tunstall (2018)
Source: Blood On The Tracks (1975) Rank: 12
Like several other LPs in this blog, 1975’s Blood On The Tracks is seen as one of Dylan’s best but some critics claim it to be his greatest collection of tunes. There are others who consider it one of the greatest albums of all time whether your name was Zimmerman or not – it regularly makes the top 10 in these oft-reworked lists. It certainly is one of the best selling records in his catalogue. This track opens Side 1 and was released as a single which reached 31 in the US charts. It has the single anchor line ‘chorus’ which Dylan uses on a number of songs to focus long stanzas of complex narration, this time on failed relationships. His 1965 marriage to Sara Lownds had just failed and this may have been behind some of the scenes he paints in this song. It was recorded several times with differing arrangements and while I like the version on the LP, I have a preference for a slightly slower, single acoustic guitar version buried on one of the many Bootleg Series collections which you can find here. For me, the simple arrangement and softer vocal track lend the words so much more power.
I first heard of Fife’s own KT Tunstall through her early links to the Fence Collective in the East Neuk. But she quickly moved into the mainstream from there, with a last minute substitute slot on Later with Jools Holland to perform Black Horse and The Cherry Tree jump-starting her career. From there she went on to become one of Scotland’s most recognised artists. I have always enjoyed her music when I heard it but when I saw her play live in the Alhambra in Dunfermline a few years ago I was blown away by her artistry and her stage presence. She was backed by a full band but was the only guitarist and her playing while singing and whipping up the crowd was excellent. She used her loop pedal to build the rhythms for the start of a few songs and you can hear her do this on her live version of Dylan’s track recorded in 2005 at the Barbican in London. She brings her trademark energy to the song giving it a breath of new life.
Gotta Serve Someone – Mavis Staples (2002)
Source: Slow Train Coming (1979) Not Ranked
The late 70s were not a great time for Dylan’s career with his records and tours getting increasingly poor reviews. This album was his first since his Tucson hotel room “vision of Christ” and his subsequent conversion to Christianity in 1979 and it is fair to say that the evangelical nature of the record alienated many of Dylan’s existing fans. However, the album was generally well-reviewed by music critics and this track became his first hit in three years and won him a Grammy. Like the other tracks on the record which was recorded in Muscle Shoals Alabama, it features Mark Knopfler on lead guitar and you can hear his licks in this rolling organ-led blues. Knopfler was unaware of Dylan’s new found faith when he agreed to take part and while initially unsettled by it, he was impressed with Dylan’s professional approach to writing and recording and stayed on. The track has one of my favourite Dylan vocal performances, a clean, sharp well-phrased take which contrasts nicely with the richness of the backing singers. And I enjoy the rhythm in the short lines of the song narrative, especially the wry self-awareness in the lyric: “You may call me Bobby/You may call me Zimmy”.
In my humble opinion, Mavis Staples is worthy of that overused word: legend. Her fame came from singing with the family gospel band The Staple Singers from the 50s to the 70s – their brilliant UK hit I’ll Take You There will feature on this blog one day. Inspired by Pop Staples’ close friendship with Martin Luther King Jr., they became the spiritual and musical voices of the civil rights movement. They covered a number of contemporary hits by other artists with positive messages including Dylan’s A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall. Mavis has had a stellar solo career over the the last four decades and artists paying tribute to her at her 80th birthday concert included Emmylou Harris, Aaron Neville, Patty Griffin, Bonnie Rait, Jeff Tweedy and Arcade Fire. Her sublime voice raises your spirits and she is a well deserving recipient of the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. So it is no surprise that she takes this track of Dylan’s and absolutely owns it from start to finish. The blues arrangement has more of a contemporary polish than Dylan’s grittier sound but is all about the voice. As I said, sublime.
Blind Willie McTell – Chrissie Hynde (2021)
Source: The Bootleg Series Volume 1-3 [Rare & Unreleased] (1983) Rank: 6
Bob Dylan was born in Duluth, Minnesota but his soul seemed to come from further down Highway 61 in the Mississipi Delta where the blues was played by men like Charley Patton, Jimmy Reed and Blind Willie McTell. All three were addressed in songs by Dylan but in the latter’s case, his song was inexplicably left off the 1983 album Infidels for which it was recorded. It only came to light in the ther first of Bootleg Series releases in 1991 but, once out there, it was quickly seen as one of his best songs. It conjures up vivid imagery of the deep South in positive and negative senses – “Smell that sweet magnolia blooming/See the ghost of a slavery ship”. Dylan’s voice can sometimes grate and is rarely a thing of beauty but, against the sparse arrangement of piano and acoustic guitar, he gives one of his best vocal performances and the lyrics shine through. His old mates in The Band picked up on it and played it live frequently before Dylan started to perform it.
As Dylan approached 80 there was a bit of a rush of recorded tributes to him and Chrissie Hynde got in on the act with her Standing In The Doorway set. No spring chicken herself, she seems to start and stop The Pretenders at will these days, and appears happier performing her more recent songs under her own name. Her Dylan collection is a fairly lo-fi, paired back recording (complete with her studio count-ins) where she mostly steers clear of the familiar and chooses a really interesting collection of lesser known tracks. The exception is this track where her interpretation is not a million miles from Bob’s original – it is very slightly slower with an organ and mandolin providing the accompaniment. To me, her trademark world weary voice really suits the mood of the lyric.
Not Dark Yet – Shelby Lynne & Allison Moorer (2017)
Source: Time Out of Mind (1997) Rank: 8
Time Out Of Mind saw a re-awakening of Dylan’s artistic credibility which with had been on the wane throughout the 80s and early 90s. It’s atmospheric sound came courtesy of producer Daniel Lanois who had previously produced the Oh Mercy album back in the late 80s. It won three Grammy awards and is seen as one of his best records. This great track is at the heart of it all with its delicate rolling percussion from two drummers while Lanois lets the organ and guitar parts entwine in the mix with the bass right down low at the bottom end. This is another of Dylan’s best vocal performances, showing some real restraint in its delivery to the overall benefit of what is a beautiful song. The fortitude heard in the lyrics has been compared to works by Keats and is often seen as the great man confronting his mortality – he was 59 at the time and is still with us twenty five years later.
Shelby Lynne and Allison Moorer are sisters who have both independently had long careers as singer/songwriters. Born in Alabama, they have a tragic life-defining backstory. When they were teenagers, their alcoholic and abusive father killed their mother and then killed himself. After 13 years in the business and six albums, Lynne won a Grammy Award for Best New Artist in 2001 for her blues and jazz influenced LP, I Am Shelby Lynne which gave her a minor UK hit with Leavin’. Moorer has had her successes too – her beautiful pedal-steel driven song A Soft Place To Fall was nominated for an Oscar after being used in the Robert Redford movie The Horse Whisperer. She opened for Steve Earle on his 2006 European tour and famously became Mrs Earle No 7 shortly after. You’ll not be astounded to hear that the marriage didn’t last but the couple did get a Grammy nomination in 2008 for their duet Days Aren’t Long Enough so it wasn’t a complete waste. It seems a no brainer that the sisters would bring their golden voices together to sing in harmony at some point in their careers and their brilliant duet album of covers dutifully appeared in 2017, produced by Teddy Thompson, son of Richard and Linda. Taking one of Dylan’s most beautiful songs and making it even more beautiful takes some doing but I think you’ll agree they pull it off magnificently.
I Contain Multitudes – Emma Swift (2020)
Source: Rough And Rowdy Ways (2020) Not Ranked
I can still recall the shock when, out of absolutely nowhere, Bob Dylan released the brilliant head-spinning madness of the 17 minute long Murder Most Foul single slap in the middle of corona-virus lockdown. A surreal song for surreal times, it was ranked 33 in the Guardian list and I am hopeful it will get its own slot in the blog at a future date. [In case it doesn’t, here’s a link to the JFK themed playlist I created around it – hey, I was doing nothing else!]. The Rough And Rowdy Ways album that followed opened with this second (much shorter!) lockdown single, another great stream of consciousness track where he seems to compare himself to Anne Frank, Indiana Jones, the Rolling Stones and William Blake, among others. It also contains the obligatory Mott the Hoople reference that all great songs need.
I stumbled across Emma Swift by chance wandering aimlessly through Spotify. Like Chrissie Hynde and others in recent years, I discovered she had released a full album of Dylan covers titled Blonde On The Tracks (we see what you did there, Emma!). When I found out it was produced by Wilco multi-instrumentalist Pat Sansone and features the wonderful Robyn Hitchcock on guitar, it was a must listen. Turns out Hitchcock is her partner and they live in Nashville where the LP was recorded. The work on the record commenced in 2017 but took longer than planned allowing them to add this brand new 2020 track to the record. I think her rendition of Bobby D’s love letter to culture is quite beautiful with the instrumentation and her voice taking those amazing lyrics to a new level.
Last Word
I was slightly nervous writing about Dylan this week as many, many words have been written about him by thousands of people more qualified than me. So to any Zimm-o-philes out there, please accept my apologies if I’ve got anything wrong. To those Dylan sceptics, I’d love to hear if you have been swayed by these covers in the blog comments.
For those put off listening to the Master Playlist as it contains tracks you weren’t keen on, there is a solution in the Spotify mobile app. Open it on your phone and tap the heart button at the top of the playlist to like it. This will add the playlist to your Library. Once there, open it and tap the ‘three dots’ against any song you don’t like. Choose ‘Hide Song’ from the drop down menu and it won’t play this track when when you are listening. Simples.
AR
Week In Sound 
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