“The music on the record is built around the familiar fiddles, mandolins and harmonies of rural Appalachia, and yet there’s no regionalism to speak of in Ms. Jones’s supple, loamy alto. She sings of the hard times, murderous urges and chilling loneliness that haunt the old Anglo-Celtic ballads but, with one exception, sets her plain-spoken narratives resolutely in the present. She approaches the mountain-ballad tradition not as a curiosity or antique but as a renewable vernacular that’s just as capable of speaking to the human condition now as it was 80 years ago.” BILL FRISKICS-WARREN, New York Times
“Some writers sit down every day for two or three hours, at least, to write, whether they are in the mood or not. Others wait for inspiration. Dylan scoffs at the discipline of daily writing.
“Oh, I’m not that serious a songwriter,” he says, a smile on his lips. “Songs don’t just come to me. They’ll usually brew for a while, and you’ll learn that it’s important to keep the pieces until they are completely formed and glued together.”
He sometimes writes on a typewriter but usually picks up a pen because he says he can write faster than he can type. “I don’t spend a lot of time going over songs,” Dylan says. “I’ll sometimes make changes, but the early songs, for instance, were mostly all first drafts.”
He doesn’t insist that his rhymes be perfect. “What I do that a lot of other writers don’t do is take a concept and line I really want to get into a song and if I can’t figure out for the life of me how to simplify it, I’ll just take it all — lock, stock and barrel — and figure out how to sing it so it fits the rhyming scheme. I would prefer to do that rather than bust it down or lose it because I can’t rhyme it.”
Themes, he says, have never been a problem. When he started out, the Korean War had just ended. “That was a heavy cloud over everyone’s head,” he says. “The communist thing was still big, and the civil rights movement was coming on. So there was lots to write about.
“But I never set out to write politics. I didn’t want to be a political moralist. There were people who just did that. Phil Ochs focused on political things, but there are many sides to us, and I wanted to follow them all. We can feel very generous one day and very selfish the next hour.”
Dylan found subject matter in newspapers. He points to 1964’s “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” the story of a wealthy Baltimore man who was given only a six-month sentence for killing a maid with a cane. “I just let the story tell itself in that song,” he says. “Who wouldn’t be offended by some guy beating an old woman to death and just getting a slap on the wrist?”
Other times, he was reacting to his own anxieties.
“A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” helped define his place in pop with an apocalyptic tale of a society being torn apart on many levels.”Robert Hillbum, LA Times
“And then there’s the title song, which is a fast-paced bopper featuring Hicks and the ladies scat-singing. It’s an impressive display. That comes right before the album ender, “Let It Simmer,” which slows things down as Hicks advises listeners to slow down and take it easy. As the song winds down, a male chorus sings in the background “Where’s the money? Where’s the money?,” which hearkens back to the early days of Hicks’ career.
Hicks knows by now that there ain’t no money in the music biz for the likes of him. Thankfully, he still does it for the love.” Steve Terrell, No Depression
“In July (1934) they acquired a state-of-the-art, 315-pound acetate phonograph disk recorder. Installing it in the trunk of his Ford sedan, Lomax soon used it to record, at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, a twelve-string guitar player by the name of Huddie Ledbetter, better known as “Lead Belly,” whom they considered one of their most significant finds. During the next year and a half, father and son continued to make disc recordings of musicians throughout the South.” Big Road Blues
“”Some people they tell me I have the blood of the land in my voice,” sings Bob Dylan on I Feel A Change Coming On.”
“Dylan is the greatest poet songwriter of the modern era. In his 68th year (on his 33rd studio album) we continue to pay revenant attention, even though he wheezes and croaks, offers up Tin Pan Alley rhymes and oft-used melodies. Together Through Life is a beautifully played collection of antique blues pop. A warm, wheezy accordion (played by David Hidalgo of Los Lobos) lends a borderline Tex Mex flavour. The rocking Shake, Shake Mama has the gaudy spirit of some great forgotten 45 Dylan might pull out on his Theme Time Radio Hour.”
“Part 1 (of 2) in a look at Atlanta’s Grammy-winning Dust To Digital Records, a small label specializing in folk music, roots music, and historically significant recordings. This story was featured on “This is Atlanta with Alicia Steele,” a Telly Award-winning and Emmy-nominated magazine show on PBA, Atlanta’s PBS Station.”
Elvis Presley: Little Sister (Live at MGM Studios)
“Bill Flanagan: This Dream of You has this wonderful South of the Border feel, but at the same time, I detect echoes of Sam Cooke, the Coasters, the Brill Building, and Phil Spector. Were those records from the 50’s and 60’s important to you? Did you try to capture some of that flavor in This Dream of You?
Bob Dylan: Those fifties and sixties records were definitely important. That might have been the last great age of real music. Since then or maybe the seventies it’s all been people playing computers. Sam Cooke, the Coasters, Phil Spector, all that music was great but it didn’t exactly break into my consciousness.
Back then I was listening to Son House, Leadbelly, the Carter family, Memphis Minnie and death romance ballads. As far as songwriting, I wanted to write songs like Woody Guthrie and Robert Johnson. Timeless and eternal. Only a few of those radio ballads still hold up and most of them have Doc Pomus’ hand in them. Spanish Harlem, Save the Last Dance for Me, Little Sister … a few others. Those were fantastic songs. Doc was a soulful cat. If you said there was a little bit of him in This Dream of You I would take it as a compliment.” Bill Flanagan, The Telegraph
“The country-blues songbook as written by Son House, Blind Willie Johnson, Mississippi John Hurt, and Charley Patton seems like natural, if previously unexplored, territory for this folk legend. Add producer Joe Henry and a crack band including pianist Van Dyke Parks, Los Lobos’ David Hidalgo, and Boston drummer Jay Bellerose and the results are soulful, moody, and entrancing.” The Official Website of Ramblin’ Jack Elliott’s
“Today Elliott simply states “Dylan learned from me the same way I learned from Woody.” ANTI- Records
