It's Dylan week

Covers and rethinks

I didn’t love Girl From The North Country, the “Bob Dylan Broadway musical”. Dylan’s songs did a very good job of cussedly refusing to settle into Conor McPherson’s play set during the Depression. But there was a heart-stopping moment, an arrangement of a song that I don’t think I’d ever heard before, or certainly never noticed: ‘Tight Connection To My Heart”, from Empire Burlesque - an album that only Bob’s mother (and his thousands of rabid fans) could love. The original was a plodder, buried in a horrible 1980s production that sounds as though it was remixed by someone who’d just finished a Huey Lewis album. Press play at your own peril.

In Girl From The North Country, it’s an exquisite ballad. Whoever heard what the song’s bones were made of - presumably Simon Hale, who arranged the music for the show - is a genius. It’s included in the list below.

I have been listening to Dylan (and rereading

Greil Marcus

) since seeing A Complete Unknown last weekend, and given every song in the movie is a cover - because Timothee Chalamet isn’t really Bob Dylan -, I eventually started playing my favourite interpretations. I have gathered a few together that you might not know, and which I think add something to the originals.

Dylan has been covered for pretty much the whole of his professional life, as the movie makes clear: Joan Baez was in there before the ink had dried on the first lyrics. (She has recorded thirty Dylan songs to date.) Wikipedia estimates that over six hundred different artists have had a stab at three hundred of his songs. It is somewhat startling to realise that both Pink and Sam fucking Cooke , who died in 1964, are two of them. There isn’t much else those two have in common, and a lot that separates them, notably decades. Centuries, even. Some other interpreters: Acker Bilk, the clarinettist who belonged to a pre-Beatles time in British popular culture; Duane Eddy; Cher, nine times; Stan Getz; Ben E King; Elvis Presley; William Shatner; Nina Simone; Kitty Wells. Last year I saw my friend Margaret Glaspy cover another one I didn’t know, ‘In The Summertime’, from Shot Of Love. He continues to mean a lot, to a lot of musicians.

I love all of these in the playlist below. I know one of them features Dylan himself, but he’s revisiting a song, so it counts as a cover, and the little chat between Dylan and Mavis Staples after the false start is both cheesy and cute - they apparently dated for a little while, in the old March On Washington days. (Dylan is supposed to have proposed to her, perhaps not seriously.) One of my favourite Substackers,

Allison Moorer

, and her sister Shelby Lynne provide the blood harmonies on a beautiful take of one of Dylan’s greatest late songs, ‘Not Dark Yet’; Rod Stewart harmonises with himself on a track from his greatest album. Jason and the Scorchers kick the shit out of ‘Absolutely Sweet Marie’. Tell me what I’m missing (and yes, I know the Byrds, thanks.)