Bob Dylan – Man of Constant Sorrow: Vol. 2 Review 

The official YouTube account has some nerve releasing a second volume of Man of Constant Sorrow. The first release was a wasteland of early years Bob Dylan songs. Nothing more. The second volume is the same. But it’s in adding these extra songs to a playlist which rocks the very foundation of search engines across the internet that hurts the most. Not physical pain, though the mental gymnastics now needed to search for those real and interesting bootlegs are made harder. That search for meaning in a song or the origins of a recording muddied that little bit more as these Dylan tracks are stretched out once more. The archives are seemingly off limits to the YouTube team, perhaps because their propeller hats will be stuck in the cabinet or they’ll wipe their mouth with original lyric sheets. Whatever the case, it means the same rotation of early years recordings for Man of Constant Sorrow: Vol. 2.  

Pretty Peggy-O, a song different to the one Hank Hill sings with Willie Nelson on King of the Hill, opens this compilation. It’s a confusing mess of a release, and it’s only nine songs long. That is perhaps the greatest achievement of all. Never has so little been done with such quality work. Lend an ear to Blowin’ in the Wind, a live version of some type, presumably from the radio tapes which frequently appear on these early years compilations. That, and a nearly eight-minute-long rendition of Rocks and Gravel, are featured alongside some of the debut album songs. Bob Dylan is often fragmented on these compilations, and there does not seem to be much, if any, reason behind the song selections. Just a collection of tracks ripped from here or there and scrubbed of their identity beyond being a Dylan recording. The vastness of those recordings, the thousands of tapes, bootlegs and official releases, means not having any detail on the song is absurd.

Hunt it down if you can, then preserve a copy for personal use. It is hard to think of an artist whose backlog is in need of careful release and structure than Dylan’s. Despite that, here is a compilation, one of the many thrown together for the sake of peddling old tapes to new audiences. If the viewing figures and release date is anything to go by, this version of Blowin’ in the Wind has reached fifty-one people per year for the last five years. What an achievement. It’s a dirty time. The desecration of origin and credit is making the internet, let alone Dylan’s backlog, difficult to traverse and experience. There is the opportunity, with care intact, to make something of these early recordings. These playlists are not the place.

But it is worth reminding a listener of that, warning them off the potential for miserable experiences and confusion. Every last one of them needs a counter, a search engine link noting these are not worth listening to. What little good it does will, perhaps, counter the lack of description, the removed credits. Auto-generated compilations on YouTube are doing more damage to Dylan’s career and discography than the bootlegs released, the unlicensed recording at least serving the purpose of historical documentation. If you scrubbed the channel of unnecessary reuploads it’d be a rather sparse sight. They can only do what they can with the work they are provided but if there is no more to get out of these songs, then adding them to new and shuffled compilations is hardly worthwhile.