Country music, like blues and rock ’n’ roll, reached the frozen mining country of Hibbing, Minn., through powerful, faraway radio stations in the 1950s. Bob Dylan soaked it all in. Although he initially conformed to the folksinger image when he arrived in New York, he got around to pursuing other sources of inspiration as the passing years allowed.
By the fall of 1967, Dylan, in hiding from the unwanted “voice of his generation” expectations, materialized in Nashville with a batch of mysterious songs that became John Wesley Harding. The outtakes from that session are included on disc one of the latest in the Dylan “Bootleg” series. They don’t drastically differ from the familiar versions except with a word here or a tempo shift there. The renditions released in 1967 achieved something like perfection. The second half of disc one is comprised of outtakes from Dylan’s first overtly country album, Nashville Skyline (1969). Working in tandem with a crew of studio aces, we can hear Dylan working out the nuances of presentation on “I Threw It All Away” and “Lay, Lady, Lay.”
The most revelatory tracks are found on discs two and three, much of it from an informal session with Johnny Cash. The two singers shared a love for country, rockabilly and gospel. As the jacket notes put it, neither was “an ideal partner. They worked in different registers, phrased idiosyncratically and rarely sang anything the same way twice.” It was, invoking a cliché dating from that era, “real”—an authentic encounter without pretense or preconceptions on either side
