Read enough biographies on the early years of Bob Dylan, and you get the feeling he was ahead of his own works. Dylan tired of the folk music he became a figurehead of long before he made it to the top. You can hear his drift away from the fundamentals in the albums to follow his self-titled debut. Even he was aware of this desire to create and push on; he admitted as much in interviews reflecting on the creative process. By the time an album was released, he had moved on to the next thing. Bob Dylan’s Blues captures this. It may feel strange to hear the well brought up boy covering songs of impassioned poverty, but his vocal tone fits well enough to cover those pieces, and they are assembled well on this unofficial compilation.
Turn to the bootlegs once more for pieces of work which feel like laying the bricks of a bridge to better times, to stronger material. Follow “the calling,” as Dylan once put it, and hear how he continued. Not long after his debut album, he was back in the studio preparing for what would become The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. Not one song from this excellent compilation would show up on the proposed album, scrapped as Dylan moved on to new ideas just as quickly as he finished the old ones. More originals than the first album, but still a reliance on those out-of-copyright classics. Understandably so, as Dylan has a knack for making the likes of Baby, Please Don’t Go and Going to New Orleans his own. That unique vocal range, the charm of his deeper voice at the time, it all makes a difference as he goes head-to-head with the contemporary folk ramblers. Bob Dylan’s Blues is an incredible missing step in confident growth.
Hearing his sound develop is easy enough in the released materials, though this compilation adds an incredible new depth. Take originals like Let Me Die in My Footsteps or Rambling Gambling Willie, songs where the instrumental effort is something Dylan would develop that little bit further before his second album. Acoustic joys and the influences paid their dues once more on the latter song. It feels relatively predictable in hindsight, but at the time, it was a matter of developing the few loose ends which were heard on his debut album. Talkin’ Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues would feature on The Bootleg Series though with the context of The Death of Emmet Till after it, the fleshed-out suggestion of this being another album-quality release is present.
It certainly affects the feeling of the compilation, which documents a transitional period for Dylan. Is every period in his career not a transition? He was always searching for the next step towards some artistic enlightenment, and the suggestion of Dylan being one step ahead is true. Bob Dylan’s Blues is a neat collection of songs which were a vast improvement over Bob Dylan, but would have stuck out as part of the “old style” had they featured on future releases. These are too closely tethering Dylan to a fundamental folk noise, which worked well for his earliest years but restrained his voice as an independent powerhouse who could read the world better than the traditional songbook could. A fine blur of old tricks and new suggestions which, by the time they were complete, already found themselves outdated by their creator.
