BOB DYLAN
Recorded November 20 & 22, 1961
Released 19 March 1962
Playing Time 36:50
Produced by John Hammond
Engineered by Knuerr, Dauria and Brosnan
Bob Dylan Vocals, Guitar, Harmonica, Keyboards
Liner Notes
Columbia records is proud to introduce a
major new figure in American folk music -- Bob Dylan.
Excitement has been running high since the young man with a guitar ambled
into a Columbia recording studio for two sessions in November, 1961. For
at only 20, Dylan is the most unusual new talent in American folk music.
His talent takes many forms. He is one of the most compelling white blues
singers ever recorded. He is a songwriter of exceptional facility and
cleverness. He is an uncommonly skillful guitar player and harmonica
player.
In less than one year in New York, Bob Dylan has thrown the folk crowd
into an uproar. Ardent fans have been shouting his praises. Devotees have
found in him the image of a singing rebel, a musical Chaplin tramp, a
young Woody Guthrie, or a composite of some of the best country blues
singers.
A good deal of Dylan's steel-string guitar work runs strongly in the blues
vein, although he will vary it with country configurations, Merle Travis
picking and other methods. Sometimes he frets his instrument with the back
of a kitchen knife or even a metal lipstick holder, giving it the clangy
virility of the primitive country blues men. His pungent, driving, witty
harmonica is sometimes used in the manner of Walter Jacobs, who plays with
the Muddy Waters' band in Chicago, or the evocative manner of Sonny Terry.
Another strong influence on Bob Dylan was not a musician primarily,
although he has written music, but a comedian -- Charlie Chaplin. After
seeing many Chaplin films, Dylan found himself beginning to pick up some
of the gestures of the classic tramp of silent films. Now as he appears on
the stage in a humorous number, you can see Dylan nervously tapping his
hat, adjusting it, using it as a prop, almost leaning on it, as the
Chaplin tramp did before him.
Yet despite his comic flair, Bob Dylan has, for one so young, a curious
preoccupation with songs about death. Although he is rarely inarticulate,
Dylan can't explain the attraction of these songs, beyond the power and
emotional wallop they give him, and which he passes on to his listeners.
It may be that three years ago, when a serious illness struck him, that he
got an indelible insight into what those death-haunted blues men were
singing about.
-- His Life and Times --
Bob Dylan was born in Duluth, Minnesota, on May 24, 1941. After living
briefly in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and Gallup, New Mexico, he graduated
from high school in Hibbing, Minnesota "way up by the Canadian border."
For six troubled months, Bob attended the University of Minnesota on a
scholarship. But like so many of the restless, questioning students of his
generation, the formal confines of college couldn't hold him.
"I didn't agree with school," he says. "I flunked out. I read a lot, but
not the required readings."
He remembers staying up all night plowing through the philosophy of Kant
instead of reading "Living With the Birds" for a science course.
"Mostly ," he summarizes his college days, "I couldn't stay in one place
long enough."
Bob Dylan first came East in February, 1961. His destination: the
Greystone Hospital in New Jersey. His purpose: to visit the long-ailing
Woody Guthrie, singer, ballad-maker and poet. It was the beginning of a
deep friendship between the two. Although they were separated by thirty
years and two generations, they were united by a love of music, a kindred
sense of humor and a common view toward the world.
The young man from the provinces began to make friends very quickly in New
York, all the while continuing, as he has since he was ten, to assimilate
musical ideas from everyone he met, every record he heard. He fell in with
Dave Van Ronk and Jack Elliott, two of the most dedicated musicians then
playing in Greenwich Village, and swapped songs, ideas and stylistic
conceptions with them. He played at the Gaslight Coffeehouse, and in
April, 1961, appeared opposite John Lee Hooker, the blues singer, at
Gerde's Folk City. Word of Dylan's talent began to grow, but in the
surcharged atmosphere of rivalry that has crept into the folk-music world,
so did envy. His "Talkin' New York" is a musical comment on his reception
in New York.
Recalling his first professional music job, Bob says:
"I never thought I would shoot lightning through the sky in the
entertainment world."
In 1959, in Central City, Colorado, he had that first job, in rough and
tumble striptease joint.
"I was onstage for just a few minutes with my folk songs. Then the
strippers would come on. The crowd would yell for more stripping, but they
went off, and I'd come bouncing back with my folky songs. As the night got
longer, the air got heavier, the audience got drunker and nastier, and I
got sicker and finally I got fired."
Bob Dylan started to sing and play guitar when he was ten. Five to six
years later he wrote his first song, dedicated to Brigitte Bardot. All the
time, he listened to everything with both ears -- Hank Williams, the late
Jimmie Rodgers, Jelly Roll Morton, Woody Guthrie, Carl Perkins, early
Elvis Presley. A meeting with Mance Lipscomb, Texas songster, left its
mark on his work, as did the blues recordings of Rabbit Brown and Big Joe
Williams. He speaks worshipfully of the sense of pace and timing the great
blues men had, and it has become a trademark of his work already. His
speed at assimilating new styles and digesting them is not the least
startling thing about Bob Dylan.
The future:
"I just want to keep on singing and writing songs like I am doing now. I
just want to get along. I don't think about making a million dollars. If I
had a lot of money what would I do?" he asked himself, closed his eyes,
shifted the hat on his head and smiled:
"I would buy a couple of motorcycles, a few air-conditioners and four or
five couches."
-- His Songs --
The number that opens this album, "You're No Good," was learned from Jesse
Fuller, the West coast singer. Its vaudeville flair and exaggeration are
used to heighten the mock anger of the lyrics.
"Talkin' New York" is a diary note set to music. In May, 1961, Dylan
started to hitchhike West, not overwhelmingly pleased at what he had seen
and experienced in New York. At a truck stop along the highway he started
to scribble down a few impressions of the city he left behind. They were
comic, but tinged with a certain sarcastic bite, very much in the Guthrie
vein.
Dylan had never sung "In My Time of Dyin'" prior to this recording
session. He does not recall where he first heard it. The guitar is fretted
with the lipstick holder he borrowed from his girl, Susie Rotolo, who sat
devotedly and wide-eyed through the recording session.
"Man of Constant Sorrow" is a traditional Southern mountain folk song of
considerable popularity and age, but probably never sung quite in this
fashion before.
"Fixin' to Die," which echoes the spirit and some of the words of "In My
Time of Dyin'," was learned from an old recording by Bukka White.
A traditional Scottish song is the bare bones on which Dylan hangs "Pretty
Peggy-O." But the song has lost its burr and acquired instead a Texas
accent, and a few new verses and fillips by the singer.
A diesel-tempoed "Highway 51" is of a type sung by the Everly Brothers,
partially rewritten by Dylan. His guitar is tuned to an open tuning and
features a particularly compelling vamping figure. Similarly up tempo is
his version of "Gospel Plow," which turns the old spiritual into a
virtually new song.
Eric Von Schmidt, a young artist and blues singer from Boston, was the
source of "Baby, Let Me Follow You Down." "House of the Risin' Sun" is a
traditional lament of a New Orleans woman driven into prostitution by
poverty. Dylan learned the song from the singing of Dave Van Ronk: "I'd
always known 'Risin' Sun' but never really knew I knew it until I heard
Dave sing it." The singer's version of "Freight Train Blues" was adapted
from an old disk by Roy Acuff.
"Song to Woody," is another original by Bob Dylan, dedicated to one of his
greatest inspirations, and written much in the musical language of his
idol.
Ending this album is the surging power and tragedy of Blind Lemon
Jefferson's blues -- "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean." The poignance and
passion of this simple song reveals both the country blues tradition --
and its newest voice, Bob Dylan -- at their very finest.
-- Stacey Williams