Best songs

The Saddest Songs: Marie by Townes Van Zandt

Posted on by Hallgeir Olsen

Marie she didn’t wake up this morning
She didn’t even try
She just rolled over and went to Heaven
My little boy safe inside

Townes Van Zandt’s Marie from his album, No Deeper Blue

Marie is one of the most harrowing but touching songs ever written; if you’re not affected in some way by this tune upon hearing it, then you have no soul!  I’m kind of joking (but not much…)
No other songwriter brings out emotions the way Townes do, and that’s why his songs stand the test of time. It is a late career masterpiece. Townes Van Zandt said the song was inspired by Meryl Streep’s character in the film Ironweed and describes the harrowing plight of a homeless couple who wind up living under a bridge until the woman dies with the protagonist’s unborn child “safe inside her.” Townes Van Zandt performed the song years before he recorded it.

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Bob Dylan: 10 great live versions of “Ain’t Talkin’”

Posted on by Egil Mosbron

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_message message_box_color=”mulled_wine” icon_fontawesome=”fa fa-quote-left”]
As I walked out tonight in the mystic garden
The wounded flowers were dangling from the vines
I was passing by yon cool and crystal fountain
Someone hit me from behind
—

You’re talking to a person that feels like he’s walking around in the ruins of Pompeii … A song is a reflection of what I see all around me all the time.
~Bob Dylan (to Mikal Gilmore, 25 September 2001)[/vc_message][/vc_column][/vc_row]

This great song released on “Modern Times” August 29, 2006, has been played 118 times live by; peaking in 2008 with 42 performances.

First played live 20 November 2006:

New York City Center
New York City, New York
20 November 2006

First live performance
Video starts @ 00:58

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The Best Songs: Come On In My Kitchen by Robert Johnson

Posted on by Hallgeir Olsen
Robert Johnson by Robert Crumb

 

If I hadn’t heard the Robert Johnson record when I did, there probably would have been hundreds of lines of mine that would have been shut down—that I wouldn’t have felt free enough or upraised enough to write.

— Bob Dylan
Chronicles: Volume One

Wikipedia:

“Come On in My Kitchen” is a blues song by Robert Johnson. Johnson recorded the song on November 23, 1936 at the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio, Texas – his first recording session. The melody is based on the song cycle by the string band the Mississippi Sheiks, “Sitting on Top of the World” (1930)/Things About Coming My Way (1931)/I’ll Be Gone, Long Gone (1932)/Hitting The Numbers (1934).

Johnson’s arrangement on slide guitar (in open tuning, commonly thought to be open G) is based on Tampa Red’s recording of the same tune with the title “Things ‘Bout Coming My Way”. Tampa Red had recorded an instrumental version in 1936, and the song had been recorded earlier by him in 1931, and by Kokomo Arnold in 1935 (Tampa Red may in fact have been the first to use the melody with his song “You Got To Reap What You Sow” (1929) based on Leroy Carr & Scrapper Blackwell’s version).

Johnson’s recording was released on the Vocalion label (no. 03563) as a “race record” – cheap records for the black consumer market. The song was among those compiled on the King of the Delta Blues Singers LP in the 1960s. (A slower alternate take was also later found and released on CD collections; this version also has ten extra lines of lyrics.)

Come on in my kitchen by Robert Johnson:

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November 21: Bob Dylan Tangled Up In Blue live in Boston 1975 (video)

Posted on by Hallgeir Olsen

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_message message_box_color=”mulled_wine” icon_fontawesome=”fa fa-quote-left”]He had a job in Santa Fe
Working in an old hotel
But he never did like it all that much
and one day it just went to hell….[/vc_message][/vc_column][/vc_row]

The best video on youtube.

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Jimi Hendrix – All Along The Watchtower – The Best Dylan Covers

Posted on by Hallgeir Olsen

Jimi Hendrix – All Along The Watchtower – The Best Dylan Covers

 

“I liked Jimi Hendrix’s record of this and ever since he died I’ve been doing it that way. Strange how when I sing it, I always feel it’s a tribute to him in some kind of way.”
– Bob Dylan (Biograph liner notes)

“It overwhelmed me, really. He had such talent, he could find things inside a song and vigorously develop them. He found things that other people wouldn’t think of finding in there. He probably improved upon it by the spaces he was using. I took license with the song from his version, actually, and continue to do it to this day.”
– Bob Dylan (Fort Lauderdale Sentinel Sun, 1995)

“All Along the Watchtower” is a song written and recorded by Bob Dylan. The song initially appeared on his 1967 album John Wesley Harding, and it has been included on most of Dylan’s subsequent greatest hits compilations. Since the late 1970s, he has performed it in concert more than any of his other songs. Different versions appear on four of Dylan’s live albums.

Covered by numerous artists in various genres, “All Along the Watchtower” is strongly identified with the interpretation Jimi Hendrix recorded for Electric Ladyland with the Jimi Hendrix Experience. The Hendrix version, released six months after Dylan’s original recording, became a Top 20 single in 1968 and was ranked 47th in Rolling Stone magazine’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

It is almost too obvious, but it has to be included in this series of the best Dylan covers. It is after all, maybe THE best Dylan cover ever done!

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Bob Dylan: 10 Great Live Versions of “Dignity”

Posted on by Egil Mosbron

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_message message_box_color=”mulled_wine” icon_fontawesome=”fa fa-quote-left”]Of the virtues, I suppose I think integrity is the most essential. Not dignity – a thief can have dignity.
~Bob Dylan (to Barbara Kerr, Feb 1978)
–
‘Dignity’, which describes so resourcefully the yearning for a more dignified world, would have been the album’s [Oh Mercy] ideal opening track. It scorches along musically, declaring its allegiance to the timeless appeal of the blues, while sounding, above all things, fresh. Its lyric, meanwhile, though ‘Dylanesque’ in that it sounds like no-one else’s work and sounds like a restrained, mature revisit to a mode of writing you might otherwise call mid-1960s Dylan, is fully alert and freshly itself, admits of no leaning on laurels, and has the great virtue that while not every line can claim the workaday clarity of instructional prose, the song is accessible to anyone who cares to listen, and offers a clear theme, beautifully explored, with which anyone can readily identify.
~Michael Gray (The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia)[/vc_message][/vc_column][/vc_row]

Dignity was originally recorded for “Oh Mercy” in 1989, but Dylan wasn’t satisfied with it… and left it behind.

Officially there are 5 different versions available:

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