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Bob Dylan - Man Of Constant Sorrow

Posted by Thomas Nephew on July 22nd, 2007

One of my favorite tracks on one of my favorite albums — the 2005 compilation “No Direction Home,” accompanying the excellent Scorsese documentary of the same name.

I’m no long-time folkie, nor even a Dylan afficionado from way back. For some reason I was kind of standoffish about all of that back when I was a kid and later in college — all the civil rights stuff, “how many years,” Baez, Pete Seeger, and whatnot was kind of sanctified history and I quite unfairly filed it all under “boring.” So it was really this documentary and this album that made me a fan. It’s a fascinating and exhilarating story: a young Dylan starts with next to nothing but this drive to perform, ignites folk music into transcendence — and then ignores the catcalls of many of those fans as he forges forward into new electric territory.

As I recall it, this recording was made in the period immediately after Dylan had been to New York City’s folk scene of the early 60s, where he obviously became an accomplished performer. Someone* who’d known him from his Minneapolis days was astonished how much Dylan had grown musically in a relatively short time:

He was playing at some party or something and it was like a whole different guy. You hear those stories about the blues men who go out to the crossroads and sell their soul to the devil and come back all of a sudden able to do stuff …Robert Johnson, Tommy Johnson, that whole mythology… it was one of those kinds of deals almost.

When he left Minneapolis he was just average — there were five, six other guys doing the same thing. When he came back he was doing Woody and he was doing Van Ronk, he was fingerpicking, he was playing crossharp — and this is a matter of a couple of months. I mean, this is not like he was gone a year or anything.

I’m not a musician myself, just a listener. But I love this song, and this performance — you listen to it by itself, without the cheesy TV show staging, and suddenly it’s not Dylan, it’s the Colorado guy himself, an utterly believable voice from the past. Get the album, rent the DVD — they’re both superb.

=====
* The fellow wasn’t identified during the course of this quote; I’ll add it when I learn who he is.

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