In 1969 banjo virtuoso and bluegrass innovator Earl Scruggs parted ways with his
longtime musical partner
Lester Flatt and the band they led to
great popularity and acclaim,
The Foggy Mountain Boys. Scruggs wanted to push his musical gifts as far as they could go. In 1970 he was the subject of a PBS documentary where he played with artists such as Bob Dylan, Doc Watson, The Morris Brothers, The Byrds, Charlie Daniels, Bill Monroe, Joan Baez, various friends and family members, and even records a track accompanying a Moog. You can watch the whole thing online:
Earl Scruggs, His Family and Friends.
posted by Kattullus
on Jan 28, 2011 -
17 comments
I had this concept--after a strange dream, while scoping out the
I Dreamed I Saw st. Augustine tab in my just-in-case-it-disappears downloaded
dylanchords, of ...
St. Augustine as a slow moody slide in Open D ala Blind Texas Marlin. But then I got to wondering whether someone might have a chord dictionary online where a few variations on a first position
B Minor in Open D might be found. Voila! Achtung, Baby! Behold
Brian's huge chordlist collection. Oh, man, he's got your standard and open tunings on guitar plus mandolin, uke, banjos, bouzouki, pipa and lute. A living room guitarist's must have, no doubt, although a few more open tunings for pipa would have been nice...
[more inside]
posted by y2karl
on Dec 9, 2009 -
6 comments
Back in 1963, a TV special called "Folk Songs and More Folk Songs" aired, which featured a cross section of the "folk" artists who were at that time just beginning to receive wider media exposure. Aside from the squeaky-clean, white bread embarrassment of groups like
The Brothers Four, the show redeemed itself with performances by a very young Bob Dylan, who sang
The Ballad of Hollis Brown (with banjo and bass accompaniment) and
Man of Constant Sorrow. And here's two more very early Dylan TV appearances, from Canada, 1964:
A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall and
Girl From the North Country. Here's the same
Girl From the North Country performed years later, once again on broadcast TV, in duet with Johnny Cash, from the Johnny Cash Show.
[more inside]
posted by flapjax at midnite
on Oct 4, 2008 -
23 comments
At the Isle of Wight Festival, Dylan was the only monster on the bill capable of attracting a monster of an audience. In refusing to play the Woodstock Festival and in then letting himself be talked into playing the Isle of Wight, Dylan in effect was telling England's counterculture: ''C'mon. Let's hold our own Woodstock.'' And so, on the Isle of Wight, a dot of land that certainly wasn't the easiest place in the world to get to, Dylan almost single-handedly proved an enticing enough attraction to collect an audience sometimes estimated to be as few as a 125,000 and sometimes as many as 250,000.
My Dylan Papers: Part 2 The Isle of WightAnother scrap from the late Al Aronowitz, the self-styled Blacklisted Journalist, and former Dylan courtier, recalling the only full concert Dylan gave solo or with the Band between 1967 and 1973 and sung in his Nashville Skyline voice, to boot, no less. And now you can have it all to yourself....
[more inside]
posted by y2karl
on Jan 26, 2008 -
10 comments
... After take seventeen, Dylan heeds the producer Johnston’s advice to start with a harmonica swoop. Crescendos off of an extended fifth chord, led by Paul Griffin’s astonishingpiano swells (“half Gershwin, half gospel, all heart” an astute critic later wrote), climax in choruses dominated by piano, organ, and Bobby Gregg’s drum rolls; Robbie Robertson’s guitar hits its full strength at the finale. Intimations of the thin, wild mercury sound underpin rock & roll symphonics. Johnston delivers a pep talk before one last take—“keep that soul feel”—and Gregg snaps a quick click opener, and fewer than five minutes later, the keeper is in the can.
Mystic Nights - The Making of Blonde On Blonde In Nashville An account of how the many strands of that thin, that wild mercury sound were woven. And the
annotation goes on.
Via email via St Urbain's Horseman
posted by y2karl
on Sep 28, 2007 -
36 comments
Aside from the usual crap, YouTube has a great selection of
one the
most
covered
song of all time:
All Along the Watchtower. Classics like Hendrix (
live and
studio), Neil Young (at
DailyMotion
with better sound) and
U2--and some great contemporary versions like Keziah
Jones' blazingly-fast
version,
Bradley Fish's 12-instrument (including Chinese Zither)
version, Michael Hedges’
reason-to-be-excited
cover, and
even a quite good version of DMB's much-maligned
cover. What doesn't really rank: Dylan's original.
posted by FeldBum
on Jul 2, 2007 -
43 comments
...Rembrandt's last self-portrait, for instance, shows an old man having a good laugh at the ways of the world, even as he is about to leave the stage. The Western world may be ageing, then, but, far from this amounting to a 'dying of the light', a case can be made for the very opposite, certainly where Bob Dylan's renaissance as an artist is concerned. Neither should age be confounded with a heavier tread. For while a perception and characterisation of the surreal nature of much of human life was a defining quality of Bob Dylan's first golden creative period in the 1960s, it's also a delightful characteristic of his artistic renaissance in the 'noughties' of the new millennium.
Bob Dylan and the ageing of the West
In other news, May 24th is
International Talk Like Bob Dylan DayOf course, he was 23 in 1965, the year when he recorded Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde, but, gosh darn it, he's still writing songs and touring and he still isn't dead yet..."
posted by y2karl
on May 24, 2007 -
38 comments
"If you had Bruce playing with you," Dylan wrote, in his 2004 autobiography, Chronicles, "that's all you would need to do just about anything."
Bruce Langhorne has quite the
discography. And a
hot sauce, to boot. And he's led quite the life. Here is Richie Unterberger's interview with Langhorne in Parts
One and
Two. And
here he talks with Unterberger about working with
Mimi and Richard Fariña.
On a personal note, I will add that his hot sauce is hot indeed. Will buy it again.
posted by y2karl
on Apr 13, 2007 -
6 comments
On
"Love and Theft" & On
On "Love and Theft" and the Minstrel Boy &
The Annotated Love And Theft... In melody,
Bye and Bye comes by way of Billie Holiday's
Having Myself A Time and
Floater by way of Bing Crosby's
(& Eddie Duchin's & Kate Smith's & Isham Jones's...) Snuggled On Your Shoulder--and lyrically, by way,
in part, of Junichi Saga's
Confessions Of A Yakuza, which was not a crime novel, as
StupidSexyFlanders once surmised, but an outright
As told to memoir, which makes it four or five degrees from Yakuza to Dr. Saga to translator to Dylan to
Plagiarism in Dylan, or a Cultural Collage? Oh, who's going to throw that minstrel boy a coin ?
posted by y2karl
on Apr 14, 2005 -
18 comments
Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash. "As far as I could determine, this 1969 session features tracks from a CBS Studios session in Nashville, TN that did not see an official release."
Nineteen largely unknown MP3s of the two greats singing together.
posted by BackwardsCity
on Mar 9, 2005 -
44 comments
Be careful what you wish for, the cliché goes. Having aspired from early youth to become stars, people who achieve that status suddenly find themselves imprisoned, unable to walk down the street without being importuned by strangers. The higher their name floats, the greater the levy imposed, the less of ordinary life they can enjoy. In his memoir, Bob Dylan never precisely articulates the ambition that brought him to New York City from northern Minnesota in 1961, maybe because it felt improbable even to him at the time. Nominally, he was angling for Leading Young Folksinger, which was a plausible goal then, when every college town had three or four coffeehouses and each one had its Hootenanny night, and when performers who wowed the crowds on that circuit went on to make records that sometimes sold in the thousands. But from the beginning Dylan had his sights set much higher: the world, glory, eternity—ambitions laughably incommensurate with the modest confines of American folk music. He got his wish, in spades... 'I Is Someone Else'
posted by y2karl
on Feb 19, 2005 -
34 comments
"It was surprising how thick the smoke had become. It seems like the world has always needed a scapegoat --someone to lead the charge against the Roman Empire. But America wasn't the Roman Empire and someone else would have to step up and volunteer. I really was never any more than what I was -- a folk musician who gazed into the gray mist with tear-blinded eyes and made up songs that floated in a luminous haze. Now it had blown up in my face and was hanging over me." -- from
Bob Dylan's new autobiography,
Chronicles, with a brief
interview, via
Newsweek
posted by digaman
on Sep 26, 2004 -
14 comments
My Back Pages--Interesting in his own right
Eyolf Østrem still maintains the fan's fan tab, chords and music site, the standard by which all others are judged. I just revisited it the other night, while trying to recall how that little run in Dylan's version of
Delia went, and dang, if it didn't have the
back story of that ballad. I love this kind of stuff. The source of that account, John Garst, is the folklorist king of such research--he puts
John Henry at a railroad tunnel near Leeds, Alabama, just east of Birmingham on September 20, 1887, for example. Murder and heroic death ballad back stories are of extreme interest to me, so I decided to post a few more here:
Frankie and Albert,
Frankie and Johnny,
Casey Jones and
Stagger Lee. Did I say I love this kind of stuff?
posted by y2karl
on Sep 23, 2004 -
10 comments
The closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind was on individual bands in the 'Blonde on Blonde' album. It's that thin, that wild mercury sound. It's metallic and bright gold, with whatever that conjures up.
Bob Dylan 1978
Blonde On Blonde--Seven mixes, four or five covers, four or five women,
some missing photographs and one leather coat...
(story within)
posted by y2karl
on Nov 19, 2003 -
26 comments
The Mysterious Norman Raeben, the son of
Shalom Aleichem, the man behind
Bob Dylan's Blood On The Tracks.
Norman Raeben was one of the most influential people in Bob Dylan’s life. It was Norman Raeben, Dylan said, who, in the mid ‘70s, renewed his ability to compose songs. Dylan also suggested that Norman’s teaching and influence so altered his outlook upon life that Sara, his wife, could no longer understand him, and this was a contributory factor in the breakdown of the Dylans’ marriage. (More inside)
posted by y2karl
on Jan 11, 2003 -
16 comments
Bob Dylan Live at Newport, 1965: Maggie’s Farm. 10 MB Quicktime mp3 A
notorious and historic
moment, that began a legendary year of
touring , stolen moments of which are available in
several sometimes bootlegged formats .Sometimes, perhaps
revised ,
stories differ at
what happened, and, now,
post-
ironically enough, He appears at
Newport again
this Saturday.
posted by y2karl
on Aug 2, 2002 -
35 comments
American Magus Without Harry Smith I wouldn’t have existed!
Bob Dylan
… I put Harry Smith with the three most dear to me GRAND INTELLIGENCE!! Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Harry Smith…These were sharp motherfuckers… and heavy… talk about heavy!!
Gregory Corso
Harry Smith, a central figure in the mid-20th-century avant-garde, was a complex artistic figure who made major contributions to the fields of sound recording, independent filmmaking, the visual arts, and ethnographic collecting. Along with Kenneth Anger, Jordan Belson, and Oskar Fischinger, Smith is considered one of America’s leading experimental filmmakers. He would often hand-paint directly on film creating unique, complex compositions that have been interpreted as investigations of conscious and unconscious mental processes. Smith began as a teenager to record Native American songs and rituals. He is best known for his Anthology of American Folk Music, a music collection widely credited with launching the urban folk revival.
The Anthology is the focus here, but Harry Smith, the artist, avant garde film maker, polymath, musicologist and quintessential hipster must be mentioned, too.
Details Within
posted by y2karl
on Jul 10, 2002 -
32 comments
