“In My Time of Dyin’” by Bob Dylan
(Words/Music: Traditional, Album: Bob Dylan, Columbia 1962)
Looking back on the 47 years that Bob Dylan has been recording, his first eponymous album doesn’t seem to have many of the qualities we think of when we think of Bob Dylan. The album was filled mainly with covers of traditional songs or blues songs and had none of Dylan’s surrealist lyrics featured so prominently on the albums of his heyday like Blonde on Blonde. Bob Dylan is the only musician on the album, playing his acoustic guitar in various tunings and sometimes with a slide, so the album has a much more personal and intimate feel than his latter discs with a full band behind him. Finally, Dylan has yet to fully develop his distinctive voice which would become so well-known and so often imitated. The overall result is an album which stands aside from all other Dylan albums and announces his emergence onto the professional music scene not with a grand flourish, but rather with an unassuming tap on the shoulder.
Although it doesn’t have any of what would be considered Dylan “classics,” exploring this album gives the listener a special insight into the early musical tastes and influences of Bob Dylan. Today we think of Dylan as a folk singer or a folk-rock musician (a genre Dylan pretty much invented), but in the album’s liner notes, Columbia’s Stacey Williams describes him as “one of the most compelling white blues singers ever recorded.” In addition, his guitar abilities are more on show here than on any of his other albums as he plays a “[fretted guitar] (i.e., he plays slide guitar) with the lipstick holder he borrowed from his girl, Suze Rotolo, who sat devotedly and wide-eyed through the recording session.” Today we tend to think of Bob Dylan simply strumming along and providing a background for his vocals, but in this arrangement of a traditional blues song, we see Dylan as a guitarist and a fan of early blues music.
Transmissions from the McMillan Sand Filtration Plant.
94 Plays
Source: shelterfromthenorm
