Bob Dylan

Sound DNA

• Folk
• Singer-Songwriter

• stripped-back
• earnest
• southern

About

In the late 1960s, in the basement of the upstate New York house they called Big Pink, members of The Band would marvel at just how many old tunes Bob Dylan remembered. “You could hardly name a song he didn’t know all the words to,” Robbie Robertson wrote decades later, “and you didn’t have to ask twice.” Indeed, before Dylan’s typewriter channeled the transformations of a generation and its troubled country, he was a deeply invested folk singer. He gobbled up Delta blues records, the Child Ballads of England and Scotland, and the kind of early American oddities that the likes of John Lomax and Harry Smith had collected in very different ways, funneling them back through his young Midwestern bleat and emphatic guitar strums. Those songs are the basis of his 1962 self-titled debut, recorded in two single-day sessions in November 1961. A Minnesota kid obsessed with the eternal cool of James Dean, the endless hijinks of Charlie Chaplin, and the ceaseless allure of Brigitte Bardot, Dylan dropped out of college soon after he started. He summarily headed east, finding another hero, Woody Guthrie, laid up in a New Jersey hospital in the early days of 1961. They became fast friends. Dylan, meanwhile, also became the talk of New York’s teeming folk scene—his mix of energy, wit, and observational insight catapulted him through the ranks. By that fall, he’d signed a record deal with Columbia, thanks to the enthusiasm of impresario John Hammond. By the end of the year, the record was done. The 13 tunes on <i>Bob Dylan</i> crisscross the Atlantic or dip into the Delta, head into the hollers of Appalachia, or journey out west for frontier worries. Dylan offers up two of his own, too, riffing and joking his way through the urban lament of “Talkin’ New York” and giving his icon, Guthrie, a tender thanks during “Song to Woody.” But whether he was easing his way through “Man of Constant Sorrow” or sliding up and down the strings during “Highway 51 Blues,” the central thing about Dylan was his vim, or just how much spirit and restlessness he brought to these songs. “Columbia Records is proud to introduce a major new figure in American folk music,” the liner notes began. <i>Bob Dylan</i> doesn’t quite betray just <i>how</i> major he would become, but the hints are there, in every live-wire retelling of these standards.

via Apple Music

Tracklist

Credits