It's Been 60 Years Since Dylan Released His First Studio Album
And the recent anniversary offers occasion to revisit six decades' worth of contributions to the world of song
Sixty years ago this past Saturday, on March 19, 1962, Columbia Records released Bob Dylan’s first studio album. Boasting the eponymous title, Bob Dylan, the record features two original compositions and several covers of older folk and blues songs with the artist’s unique style, lyrical insertions and rearrangements added for good measure.
Recorded in 1961, when Dylan was only 20, the album reflects how the artist had “been sopping up influences like a sponge,” as Robert Shelton described the young man’s fledgling maturation in a New York Times article published in September of that year.
Heralded in the early 1960s as the next big thing in folk music, Dylan’s musical interests and approaches, while strongly influenced by the tradition of folk music, were nevertheless more varied, even from the release of his first album. “A good deal of Dylan's steel-string guitar work runs strongly in the blues vein,” Stacey Williams wrote in the album’s liner notes, “although he will vary it with country configurations, Merle Travis picking and other methods.”
The blues influence on Dylan is undeniable, even in recent years, as with the June 2020 release of Rough and Rowdy Ways, the prolific bard’s most recent album featuring tracks like “False Prophet,” “Crossing the Rubicon,” and “Goodbye Jimmy Reed,” a belated, uptempo tribute to the late songwriter sprinkled with allusions to the electric bluesman’s life and music. The allusions include the final lines of the track (“Goodbye Jimmy Reed and with everything within ya / Can’t you hear me calling from down in Virginia”), a reference to a song Reed recorded a few years before Dylan laid down his self-titled album, re-released on an album by the same name in 1969. Dylan borrowed the classic blues beat Reed used for that one as well.
Dylan’s harmonica on that 1962 album evinced an amalgam of folk and blues influences. “His pungent, driving, witty harmonica is sometimes used in the manner of Walter Jacobs, who plays with the Muddy Waters’ band in Chicago, or the evocative manner of Sonny Terry,” Williams explained in the liner notes. The Chicago Blues sound of Muddy Waters – along with Willie Dixon, Howlin’ Wolf and Luther Allison, but especially Muddy Waters – resonates with me, as it clearly did with Reed too, who recorded the aforementioned 1969 album in the Windy City. Dylan and Muddy Waters would later cross paths, as music legends often do.
In the documentary, Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese (2019), viewers are treated to old footage of violinist Scarlet Rivera sitting in the back of a moving vehicle. Rivera mentions that she and Dylan met up with Muddy Waters one night.
“We just played music all day and all night. We went to the Bottom Line and played with Muddy Waters,” a young Rivera recounts, “and we went that night to Victoria Spivey’s house – she’s an old blues singer – and, umm, we played music till about six in the morning. It was really great.”
While Scorsese (along with Dylan, I’m assuming) have some fun with the film’s audience, concocting anecdotes that never happened, it’s hard to believe Rivera misled anyone about the all-night jam session.
Coincidentally, the same year BluesWay Records released Reed’s Down in Virginia album, Dylan put out Nashville Skyline, a 10-track testament to the artist’s interest in country music, recorded at a time when rock had embraced a dissimilar psychedelic sound.
For his part, Muddy Waters waded into the psychedelic current the year prior with Electric Mud, a masterful blend of electric rock based in soulful, erotically-charged Chicago blues. The admixture is maybe best exemplified by the version of “I Just Want to Make Love to You” included on the album. Waters hypnotically repeats the last four words of the track title a number of times throughout the song, as his vocals and guitar offer an auditory experience reminiscent of rhythmic intercourse. I heard or read somewhere that Muddy Waters didn’t care for his vocals on the record, but that just underscores how receptive the public can be to works of art underappreciated or criticized by those who create it. Sometimes artists themselves may not even be prepared for the new music they produce.
In Dylan’s case, the self-titled album perhaps bespeaks the novice singer-songwriter’s – or perhaps Columbia’s – short-lived reluctance to release his own originally authored material, but it also speaks to the shared folk, blues and spiritual traditions of performing, sharing, re-recording and modifying songs passed down through the ages – and it shows signs of brilliance to come. That should be illustrated by the closer look at select songs, coupled with a bit of biographical history, hopefully not bordering too much on hagiography, along with brief commentary on germane ideas found below.
Talkin’ New York
The second track, “Talkin’ New York,” is one of the two wholly original compositions on the album. The song is “a musical comment on his reception in New York,” according to Williams in the liner notes. “Wintertime in New York town / The wind blowin’ snow around / Walk around with nowhere to go / Somebody could freeze right to the bone / I froze right to the bone / New York Times said it was the coldest winter in seventeen years / I didn’t feel so cold then,” the young Dylan sang on the track.
He grew up in the upper Midwest, and was no stranger to cold weather in his youth. Only a few minutes into another Dylan documentary directed by Martin Scorsese, No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (2005), the Minnesota-born artist recalls his hometown of Hibbing being “very hot in the summertime” and “in the winter it was just rightly cold.” That kind of cold weather “equalizes everything very quickly,” he added.
In Dylan’s 2004 book, “Chronicles: Volume One,” the author remembered an apropos conversation he had with Billy James, the head of publicity at Columbia, soon after he got to New York. Apparently annoyed with all the questions James asked him, Dylan told him he was from Illinois. He also said he got to New York City via freight train – as it happens, there is a song on the 1962 album titled, “Freight Train Blues” – which wasn’t true.
“What I did was come across the country from the Midwest in a four-door sedan, ‘57 Impala–straight out of Chicago, clearing the hell out of there–racing all the way trough the smoky towns, winding roads, green fields covered with snow, onward, eastbound through the state lines, Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania, a twenty-four-hour ride, dozing most of the way in the backseat, making small talk,” Dylan wrote in the book, adding that upon arrival: “The biting wind hit me in the face. At last I was here, in New York City, a city like a web too intricate to understand and I wasn’t going to try.”
In retrospect, Dylan wrote that the city would shape his destiny.
The somewhat auto-biographical lyrics to “Talkin’ New York” let the listener know he “landed up on the downtown side / Greenwich Village,” where he first burst onto the music scene, but not without issue. “I walked down there and ended up,” the singer discloses, drawing on personal experience, “In one of them coffee-houses on the block / Got on the stage to sing and play / Man there said, ‘Come back some other day / You sound like a hillbilly / We want folk singers here.’”
Even prior to his studio debut, Dylan cultivated an ambivalent relationship with the folk scene. By the mid-1960s that relationship had soured – or, rather, Dylan refused to be boxed in and continued to experiment and evolve. The song, “Farewell Angelina,” recorded in 1965 during the sessions for “Bringing it All Back Home” but not released until years later, in addition to offering vivid imagery with repeated focus on what’s happening in the sky – it’s “changing colors,” “trembling,” “folding,” “flooding over,” then finally “erupting” within the song-world – and functioning as ambiance for the end of a romance with the singer bidding a woman adieu, can also be interpreted as Dylan’s outgoing message to the folk genre he could no longer represent.
Prior to all that, with the ensuing verse in “Talkin’ New York,” he mentions the modicum of success he enjoyed early on but also intimates that approval didn’t equate to truly being valued. “Well, I got a harmonica job, begun to play,” Dylan sings, “Blowin’ my lungs out for a dollar a day / I blowed inside out and upside down / The man there said he loved m’ sound / He was ravin’ about how he loved m’ sound / Dollar a day’s worth.”
The song ends with the narrator leaving the Big Apple, heading west and saying hello to Jersey. “So one mornin’ when the sun was warm / I rambled out of New York town / Pulled my cap down over my eyes / And headed out for the western skies / So long, New York / Howdy, East Orange.”
Song to Woody
In “Chronicles,” Dylan wrote that he journeyed to New York to meet singers he heard on records and “most of all to find Woody Guthrie.”
His ode to the rebellious folk music icon Woody Guthrie, the second of the two original compositions on the 1962 album, begins with Dylan likening his experience to other ramblers in body and spirit, Guthrie included: “I’m out here a thousand miles from my home / Walkin’ a road other men have gone down / I’m seein’ your world of people and things / Your paupers and peasants and princes and kings.”
The lyrics turn directly to Guthrie, who suffered from progressively debilitating Huntington’s Disease and was visited by Dylan while in the hospital in the early sixties. “Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song / ’Bout a funny ol’ world that’s a-comin’ along / Seems sick an’ it’s hungry, it’s tired an’ it’s torn / It looks like it’s a-dyin’ an’ it’s hardly been born.”
But, as he proceeds to say, he knows Woody knows. Guthrie walked that road and put the world’s joy and pain and struggle into song.
Dylan ends the track with a hint of humility and recognition of the hard times Guthrie endured. “The very last thing that I’d want to do / Is to say I’ve been hittin’ some hard travelin’ too,” he sings at the end. Rhetorically passing on presumptuousness and acknowledging their then-incommensurate experiences, Dylan might also be forecasting his own future, to a degree. That is, in addition to refraining from claiming what he then could not, the last two lines could also carry the message that the singer hopes not to be able to say he had encountered his share of troubles on par with those faced by the man who famously slapped a sticker on his guitar stating, “This Machine Kills Fascists.”
But like Guthrie, Dylan and his music metamorphosed, time and again.
Tom Morello, another musician (like Dylan) from the Midwest, who grew up in Libertyville, Illinois, a few hours from where I was raised, interviewed Woody Guthrie’s daughter, Nora, for his Maximum Firepower podcast in October 2021. The podcast episode came out shortly before a book that the guest curated, “Woody Guthrie: Songs and Art * Words and Wisdom,” became available. During the podcast, Morello reads a quote from Guthrie, included in the book, in which the rebel folk singer refers to himself as a “changer,” that is, “a constant changer”:
Were Dylan to have written those lines, they would seem equally apropos, I think.
“He became educated along the way,” Nora Guthrie told Morello about her father, his travels and his life’s journey, “and that’s what I really love about his story. He wasn’t a boy genius like Mozart. He wasn’t born to do anything great. He was a guy who kept his eyes and ears open, and gave back through his songs and his stories.”
Guthrie became a “journalist through his music,” she said. He bore witness, documented what he saw as any dissident artist might and developed as a person and songwriter in the process.
“He allows all of these things to affect him,” his daughter told Morello about what her father experienced, “and he allows himself to grow.”
Dylan did likewise, in many ways, learning from his early role model.
“There’s this great Bob Dylan quote that said, ‘You could listen to Woody Guthrie’s songs and learn how to live,’” Nora Guthrie noted during her interview with Morello, adding that she too learned to live through her father’s life and work, which is what the new book about her dad offers readers. Coincidentally, the book came out on November 16, 2021, the day before I turned 36.
As for Guthrie’s enduring influence on Dylan, it was apparent when the latter recorded a rendition of the folk legend’s song, “Do Re Mi,” for The People Speak (2009), a documentary narrated by the late historian and author of the widely read “A People’s History of the United States,” Howard Zinn. The old Guthrie song addresses migration out West to California, as during the Dust Bowl – and Guthrie himself made his way from Oklahoma to Southern California where he encountered the labor movement, as his daughter explained to Morello in the podcast referenced above – and extols the beauty of the region while simultaneously satirizing how poverty and social class ensure only some are afforded the luxury of enjoying the Golden State. People without the dough have little choice but to scrap and struggle to get by.
“Oh, if you ain't got the do re mi, folks, you ain't got the do re mi,” the lyrics proclaim, “Why, you better go back to beautiful Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Georgia, Tennessee / California is a garden of Eden, a paradise to live in or see / But believe it or not, you won't find it so hot / If you ain't got the do re mi.”
In that regard, too little has changed since Guthrie’s time, with Californians today keenly aware of the growing gap between rich and poor that exacerbates a crisis of housing and homelessness, making Dylan’s 21st century rendition of the song all the more relevant.
Dylan’s Bootleg Series Vol. 7, which doubles as the soundtrack to Scorsese’s No Direction Home (2005), also features a recording of Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land,” performed by a then relatively inexperienced at a slower, depressed pace with subdued, seemingly more conversational, confessional and sorrowful delivery. Dylan adjusts his lyrical elocution slightly and oh-so subtly when he approaches some of the most powerful verse from the song. “Nobody living can ever stop me,” he sings assuredly and with equanimity, in matter-of-fact fashion, “As I go walking my freedom highway / Nobody living can make me turn back / This land was made for you and me.”
Incipient Desire in Song
One of my favorite songs from the album, “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down,” which as Dylan comments on the track, he learned from the blues guitar player Eric Von Schmidt, earnestly entreats the listener to let the singer accompany her as she descends or otherwise makes her exit. “Baby let me follow you down, baby let me follow you down / Well I'll do anything in this godalmighty world / If you just let me follow you down,” goes the impassioned plea.
The song prefigured similar sounding and similarly themed original work to come, such as “Honey, Just Allow Me One More Chance,” from his next album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, “All I Really Want to Do,” from the 1964 album, Another Side of Bob Dylan, or even “I Want You” from Blonde on Blonde and “Buckets of Rain” from Blood on the Tracks.
But in the song he borrowed from Von Schmidt for that first studio album, the singer expresses longing, burning desire and desperation in a direct manner reminiscent of the sensuous blues. His pleading inquiry within the next verse, accompanied by a promise to please if only the woman in question grants his wish, illustrates the tone. “Can I come home with you, baby can I come home with you? / Yes I'll do anything in this godalmighty world / If you just let me come home with you,” Dylan implores and propounds as he croons.
Songs of Death, Dying and Spirituality
“Bob Dylan has, for one so young, a curious preoccupation with songs about death,” Williams wrote in the album’s liner notes. “Although he is rarely inarticulate, Dylan can't explain the attraction of these songs, beyond the power and emotional wallop they give him, and which he passes on to his listeners. It may be that three years ago, when a serious illness struck him, that he got an indelible insight into what those death-haunted blues men were singing about.”
In hindsight, the preoccupation perhaps also foreshadows the continuous death and rebirth characteristic of Dylan’s career.
In the song, “Fixin’ to Die,” written by the Delta blues guitarist Bukka White, Dylan comes off as emotive, attacking the track vociferously with hints of intensity and anguish in his voice as he sings the following:
Feeling funny in my eyes, Lord / I believe I'm fixing to die, fixing to die / Feeling funny in my eyes, Lord / I believe I'm fixing to die / Well, I don't mind dying but / I hate to leave my children crying / There's a black smoke rising, Lord / It's rising up above my head, up above my head / It's rising up above my head, up above my head / And tell Jesus make up my dying bed
It’s not the only song on the album concerning death that references Jesus. So does “In My Time of Dyin’”:
Lord, in my time of dying don't want nobody to cry / All I want you to do is take me when I die / Well, well, well, so I can die easy /Well, well, well/ Well, well, well, so I can die easy / Jesus gonna make up, Jesus gonna make up / Jesus gonna make up my dying bed
Additionally, in “Gospel Plow,” Dylan mentions the name of Jesus within the first 10 words he utters.
The interpenetrating facets of gospel, blues and folk he immersed himself in no doubt exposed Dylan to and acquainted him with Christian motifs that would reappear in his music years later.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Dylan famously found Jesus and embarked on what’s often referred to as his gospel period, which lasted a few years and spanned a few albums.
“There can be no doubt that Dylan experienced a new presence in his life, a direct communication with Jesus,” David and Lucy Boucher wrote in their 2021 book, “Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen: Deaths and Entrances,” “He felt that he had been called to follow and that he had found the meaning to his life that had so long escaped him. Before the total destruction of the human race, Dylan believed, Christ would return to save us. Dylan had become convinced, after a close study of the book of Revelations, that ever since the time Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden things had gone downhill and that the human race is destined for Armageddon. His belief in Christ the Saviour was not, in his view, incompatible with his Jewish heritage and was consistent with sects within Judaism who described themselves as Messianic Jews.”
Per the Bouchers’ account, when Dylan’s contemporary, the late Leonard Cohen, whose music was steeped in the Jewish tradition, got word of Dylan’s conversion, he remarked, “I just don’t get the Jesus part.” While I’m not a fan of most of his music during the gospel era, which has always struck me as a little too preachy, Cohen in contrast defended Dylan’s musical output during the period, despite being baffled by Dylan’s seeming change of faith.
But it was not to last. Dylan, it appears, came to find aspects of evangelical Christianity hypocritical and alienating. A song he recorded during the sessions for the 1981 album Shot of Love – “Angelina” – which harkens back, inadvertently or otherwise, to the song with the same woman’s name in the title he recorded as he distanced himself from the folk music scene in the mid-60s, has been interpreted as comparable commentary regarding his decision to part ways with Christian evangelism. Like the earlier song, it too was not released on the album for which it was initially recorded.
In their recently released book, the Bouchers offer reason to believe Dylan elected to or simply could not deviate too far from the Jewish tradition. They note that he turned down an offer to present the “Gospel Song of the Year” at the National Music Publishers Association Awards in March 1981 so that he could instead attend his son’s bar mitzvah. After attending another son’s bar mitzvah in 1983, the authors wrote that he started studying under Rabbi Manis Friedman at the Chabad-Lubavitch centre in Brooklyn, and they informed readers his publicist once said rabbis were often part of his entourage and that Dylan himself could frequently be found studying the Torah.
Now, not to be confused with “Highway 61 Revisited,” a song from Dylan’s 1965 album of the same name which, coincidentally, starts off with lyrical allusion to the Old Testament straight out of Genesis (“Oh God said to Abraham, ‘Kill me a son’ / Abe says, ‘Man, you must be puttin’ me on’ / God say, ‘No.’ Abe say, ‘What?’ / God say, ‘You can do what you want Abe, but / The next time you see me comin’ you better run’ / Well Abe says, ‘Where do you want this killin’ done?’ / God says, ‘Out on Highway 61’”), the seventh track off of the 1962 album, “Highway 51 Blues,” also grapples with mortality and the macabre.
The song does so in an almost contradictory way, starting with with a love-riddled ultimatum delivered in verse: “Highway 51 runs right by my baby's door / Highway 51 runs right by my baby's door / If I don't get the girl I'm loving / Won't go down to Highway 51 no more.” After avowing that, the singer qualifies, sort of, with the following: “Well, if I should die before my time should come / And if I should die before my time should come / Won't you bury my body out on the Highway 51,” suggesting that, ironically, in premature death, the promissory note would become null and void, and he would want his body buried near his would-be lover’s door.
The tenth track on the album, “House of the Rising Sun,” depicts suicidal ideations as part of a larger narrative that Eric Burdon and The Animals would help popularize a few years later. According to fellow artist Dave Von Ronk in an interview included in the 2004 Scorsese doc, Dylan adopted the chord changes to the song from him. Dylan asked him if he could record a version of the song, but he did so after already putting it down during the recording session for that first album. Von Ronk said he had to stop performing the song because people started accusing him of taking it from Dylan, but the karma of music composition came back around later, and Dylan let Von Ronk know he had to stop playing it as well because people accused him of ganking it from The Animals after they recorded a radio-friendly rendition most people today probably associate with the song.
Dylan’s version is sung from the perspective of a downtrodden woman (“There is a house down in New Orleans they call the rising sun / And it's been the ruin of many a poor girl and me, oh God, I'm one”), destroyed in large part by this place located, perhaps, within the old Red Light District. Eric Burdon and his band opted to approach the song from the vantage point of a ruined man (“There is a house in New Orleans / They call the Rising Sun / And it's been the ruin of many a poor boy / And God, I know I'm one”).
Whereas Dylan sings, “Oh tell my baby sister not to do what I have done / But shun that house in New Orleans they call the rising sun,” Burdon switches it up with the admonition, “Oh mother, tell your children / Not to do what I have done / Spend your lives in sin and misery / In the House of the Rising Sun.” In both versions, the protagonist-singer has “one foot on the platform,” the other “on the train,” headed back to the so-called Big Easy “to wear that ball and chain.”
The version The Animals released in 1964 omits the thought of taking one’s own life, unlike the the iteration of that traditional folk song’s cautionary tale found on Dylan’s first album. “I'm going back to New Orleans, my race is almost run,” the weary woman voiced by the up-and-coming 20-year-old musician from the Midwest reveals, “I'm going back to end my life down in the rising sun.”
While Dylan assumed the vantage point of one “of many a poor girl,” in “The House of the Rising Sun,” in the final track on that first album – titled, “See That My Grave is Kept Clean” – Dylan sings “another poor boy is underground,” when you hear the coffin sound, and that “another poor boy is dead and gone,” when you hear those church bells toll.
Conjuring the spirit of the the man who wrote it, Blind Lemon Jefferson, a blues and gospel musician who entertained audiences with songs about prisons and spirituals at brothels and saloons in the South before making his way to Chicago in the 1920s, Dylan ends the song and his debut album by directly addressing the listener with a humble request regarding the maintenance of his concretized memory after he transitions.
There's just one last favor I'll ask for you / And there's one last favor I'll ask for you / There's just one last favor I'll ask for you / See that my grave is kept clean.
The Poetry of Becoming
Yet, as Dylan was wont to remind listeners years later, “Death is Not the End,” at least not as regards artistic death, rebirth and soulful renewal. The 1962 release of the self-titled Bob Dylan punctuated the artist’s inaugural cycle of transmigration, as his study of music and his time spent soaking up songs in Greenwich Village (and wherever else he could) transformed him as a person and set him on a trajectory. The arc of his ongoing career – still active after he turned 80 last May – started to take form some sixty years ago, when a career of recording that would come to be characterized by a number of reinventions and poetic revolutions in the realms of music making officially kicked off.
In the wake of the sixtieth anniversary of his studio initiation, we have occasion to revisit Dylan’s recording roots. Anyone new to his music and keen on hearing more can start with that seminal release and make their way through the plethora of subsequent records comprising the artist’s extensive oeuvre. I attempted, and for the most part succeeded, in listening to Dylan’s discography while trying to finish a thesis and complete a master’s degree at the University of Illinois at Springfield around and maybe beginning just prior to 2010.
Sam Meister, a professor of communication at Millikin University in Decatur, Illinois, who attended graduate school at UIS when I did, has emphasized how Dylan’s 1962 record reflects a precocious creator on the cusp of becoming, and my friend’s thoughts on the songwriter’s emergence are worth ending with here.
“Numerous accounts hold that Dylan was immediately disappointed with his first LP, instantly second-guessing his song selection and performance choices almost as soon as he left the studio,” Meister, with whom I attended two Dylan concerts, including one on Indiana University campus this past November, told me when I asked about that debut record. “While it can be said, after several listens and six more decades of Dylan releases, that he was not yet quite the poet laureate of his generation on his debut, what is definitively present within the grooves of this record are the seeds of his still untapped genius. Perhaps more than anything, what we should take from the album are the theme of potential and the longing to become. Dylan, more than any other artist–both musically and mythically--was, and is, always on the verge of becoming something. This is the beginning of that becoming, and it is a rather enjoyable opening note to his canon.”
Many thanks to Prof. Mesiter for providing the photo of the vinyl album cover that accompanies this post.