Sometimes I wonder whether winning a Nobel Prize for literature is a sign that you're finished as an artist. It'd be good to go back and see if any Nobel laureate has ever published a major work after receiving the prestigious award. Bob Dylan became the first singer/songwriter to win a Nobel for literature in 2016 and, while he's been releasing records as often as ever, these are mostly archival recordings. Of the 4 new albums released in the last decade, 3 are collections of covers (from 2009's Christmas in the Heart to 2017's Triplicate) - a curious choice for someone who is (much more) celebrated for his songwriting rather than his singing abilities.
That said, there is a precedent: Dylan followed one of the lowpoints of his career (Under the Red Sky, 1990) with a couple of back-to-back cover albums: Good as I Been to You (1992) and World Gone Wrong (1993). Both, especially the latter, were well received - much better than his latest attempts at covering the classics. But then, they weren't Christmas songs or Sinatra covers like his latest work, they were the kind of traditional material that young Dylan had originally made his name with playing at The Village cafes. Both the material choice here and the instrumentation (just voice, acoustic guitar and harmonica) are a throwback to his eponymous first album, recorded at the age of 20. It starts with a gentle acoustic blues "World Gone Wrong", followed by "Love Henry" (an Appalachian variant of Child ballad no.68) which sounded immediately familiar to me - but that''s probably because it provided the inspiration for "Henry Lee", a Nick Cave/P.J. Harvey duet from Murder Ballads (1996). The rest of (the vinyl's) side 1 are acoustic 30's blues: Blind Willie McTell's "Broke Down Engine" is somewhat upbeat, followed by slower ballads "Ragged & Dirty" and "Blood in My Eyes". The latter is one of two songs (next to "World Gone Wrong") originally done by guitar/fiddle duo The Mississippi Sheiks - both are among the record's highlights. Side 2 opens with a couple of traditional murder ballads inspired by true stories. "Delia", also often attributed to Blind Willie McTell, is the story of a 14-year old girl shot dead by her teenage boyfriend in 1901. She was buried in an unmarked grave, so the song is all that's left to remind of her. "Stack a Lee", sometimes also known as "Stagger Lee", takes us even further in time to 1895, when infamous St. Louis pimp "Stag" Lee Shelton shot one Billy Lyons in a bar brawl for taking his Stetson hat. Depending on who you listen to, the fight was originally about a woman, or gambling, or political in nature. Coincidentally (or not) this is the second song from this album that later found its way to Nick Cave's Murder Ballads, even if Cave's version is very loosely based on the traditional song. Exactly why these specific crimes were immortalized in song out of thousands of similar stories is something that escapes me, but there are a lot of similarities between them: both happened on Christmas day, and in both cases victim and murderer were black but the song makes no mention of their race, which is quite rare for its time. "Two Soldiers" is a Civil War ballad while "Jack-A-Roe" (a.k.a. "Jack Monroe") is an English or Scottish 19th Century mid-tempo song about a young girl and her sailor lover who goes to war. The closing "Lone Pilgrim" is a hymn about dying and joining God in Heaven - lest we had forgotten that Dylan is now a Christian. Which makes 5 out of 10 songs where one of the heroes dies, while in another 4 out of 10 a lover is spurned and mistreated. Miraculously, the girl who sails to her embattled lover finds him on death's doorstep but manages to save him and marry him. But even with a happy ending like that, a song that features flying cannonballs and piles of corpses isn't exactly cheerful. The choice of lesser-known and darker songs, combined with Dylan's affinity for traditional material and his, often underrated, mastery of the acoustic guitar has made this one a cult favorite. Recommended if you like traditional folk and blues, not necessarily recommended for fans of Dylan the Nobel-laureate wordsmith.
**** for World Gone Wrong, Love Henry, Blood in My Eyes, Delia, Jack-A-Roe
*** for Ragged & Dirty, Broke Down Engine, Stack a Lee, Two Soldiers, Lone Pilgrim
