Dylan Goes Twang Part Three

The Dylan Goes Twang series has been running for a while now. Parts one and two established the scope: Bob Dylan's relationship to country and folk music is not incidental to his career or limited to a single period. It runs through the catalog in ways that only become fully legible when you assemble the evidence in one place.

Part three focuses on the Nashville Skyline period with more depth than the earlier installments allowed, while also picking up threads that connect Nashville Skyline to what came immediately after.

Part two is at Dylan Goes Twang Part Two. Part four extends the story further: Dylan Goes Twang Part Four.

Nashville Skyline in context

Nashville Skyline (1969) arrived as a surprise. Dylan had spent the years since his motorcycle accident in relative isolation, making John Wesley Harding (1967) and Nashville Skyline from a position of withdrawal from the cultural noise that had surrounded his earlier career. The acoustic simplicity of John Wesley Harding had been one surprise. The full country album that followed was another.

The Nashville recordings were made with session musicians who were also playing on the country records coming out of the city at the same time. Bob Johnston produced both albums. The sound was not simulated country — it was country, made by people who played country for a living.

Dylan's voice on Nashville Skyline is changed from the voice on earlier records: softer, warmer, in a lower register. He attributed this to quitting smoking. Whatever the cause, the effect is of a singer who has settled into something rather than a singer perpetually straining against the available forms.

The mixtape sequence

The songs for part three build on the foundation laid in the first two installments:

• "Lay Lady Lay" — the hit single, which many people heard without knowing it was a country record
• "Country Pie" — throwaway-seeming, but precise in its evocation of the form
• "Tonight I'll Be Staying Here with You" — the closing ballad that summarizes the album's warmth
• "If Not for You" — written for New Morning but belonging here aesthetically
• "Sign on the Window" — one of Dylan's most direct statements about the pastoral ideal
• "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" — the Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid recording, which is country by another name
• "Forever Young" — the Planet Waves version, the most country-inflected of the two takes

The threads forward

The Nashville Skyline period connects forward to the Self Portrait period (which has been reconsidered in recent years) and backward to the country influences audible in Basement Tapes recordings. Part four of the series picks up with the Basement Tapes and the recordings that sit alongside them.

See the full Mixtapes archive.