Bob Dylan – Duncan and Brady Review

A traditional murder ballad in the hands of Bob Dylan is a protest song waiting to erupt. Duncan and Brady may have been a hundred years removed from the events which formed it at the time of this performance, but they still cut a fresh feeling. It is a similar sort of punch delivered by Hurricane, only there it was guided by the fiddle-led desire of Dylan as a force for societal change. A tone he had delivered on in the 1960s and rejected at the turn of the decade, but found himself right back in the fray with Desire. Where Duncan and Brady does not drag him back into the usual fires of protest song or balladeering brilliance, it does serve as ample live material. One of the many covers in an arsenal still as reliant on those classy tracks of the past as the well-written hits of the time.  

Johnny Cash seems to have been inspired by the tone of this song, originally recorded by Wilmer Watts and his Lonely Eagles. That rush of adrenalin features so early in Duncan and Brady. The death of one man at the hands of the other observed not as a public tragedy but as a personal triumph, a cool and cold development for the sake of feeling the rush and burn of a new experience, is found in the early stages of Folsom Prison Blues. But there is something very matter-of fact about the delivery in this Dylan cover, a calculated tone which strikes after just a few seconds. Duncan and Brady serve as a chance to hear Dylan ply his trade as a balladeer, as a man moved by the fundamental gore and gossip of newspapers. Those chilling tales of murder and gruesome crime were and are a mainstay of the news and as such, of song.  

Clippings of the time are where the detail of this murder ballad comes from too, with the facts slightly twisted and subverted as a way of making for minor distance between the brutal reality and the freedom of creative wiggle room. Dylan tried his hand at this in the studio for an unreleased David Bromberg collaboration and while it was never thrown into the burning light of the public, it is preserved, rather safely, on stage. No frills ballad work here. Steady acoustic work and a little bit of persuasive percussion is all that is needed to make Duncan and Brady work. Punching those lyrical highs with a backing vocalist is the cherry on top of a competent and carefully trodden classic.  

Dylan is no stranger to the murder ballad and has evolved the storytelling suggestions of the genre. Murder Most Fowl is, in its own long and winding way, as fundamental a murder ballad as it gets. Duncan and Brady sit so well in the live discography because of how well-pieced together the lyrics are. They still hold up after well over a century. Conviction is the key to this performance, and thankfully the Durham, New Hampshire-ripped recording is crisp. Ragged killers and the inevitable bookends of death as a starting point and place of finality are a tremendous core to this and Dylan, backed by those repetitive swings of “you’ve been on the job too long,” rises to the occasion well.