Bob Dylan (1962)

1. You're No Good -- Song Review
2. Talkin' New York
3. In My Time of Dyin'
4. Man of Constant Sorrow
5. Fixin' to Die
6. Pretty Peggy-O
7. Highway 51
8. Gospel Plow
9. Baby, Let Me Follow You Down
10. House of the Risin' Sun
11. Freight Train Blues
12. Song to Woody
13. See That My Grave Is Kept Clean

Liner Notes

Notes and Reviews

The musicians:


References:

Trivia:
Reviews: This album is a MUST have if you want to get a sense of the very young Bob Dylan playin' the clubs in Grenwich Villiage in the early 60's. There's only two Dylan originals here (Talkin' New York and Song to Woody). The rest are either traditional or by the likes of Dave Van Ronk or Mississippi Fred McDowell. - Folkrockman

From The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia by Michael Gray:

Bob Dylan [1962] The first album, this features the 20-year-old Dylan, unique among the Greenwich Village folkies in having been signed to the huge Columbia label, which had missed out on rock’n’roll altogether. In staff-producer JOHN HAMMOND they had a man who’d been involved in Bessie Smith’s recordings and those of many more great blues acts besides. He signed Dylan, spent less than $500 in the studio and came out with an album few people liked and that didn’t sell. The record company was all for dropping him. This album is, in retrospect, terrific. It has such a young Dylan on it that he sounds about 85. Only two of the songs are his own: one dedicated to his early idolWOODY GUTHRIE (‘Song to Woody’) and the other owing its format and spirit to Guthrie’s
own work (‘Talkin’ New York’), though using a format, the talking blues, that goes further back than Guthrie. The other songs are mainly his own impressionistic arrangements of traditional songs and old blues songs by men like JESSE FULLER, BUKKA WHITE and BLIND LEMON JEFFERSON, performed
without any gentility and with a voice that, far from suggesting a soul-mate for PETER, PAUL or MARY suggested some black octogenarian singing personal blues at the back of his shack. The blurb that went out on the album could quite plausibly call Dylan the newest voice in country blues. Dylan comes across as obsessed with the romance of dying, but the speed, energy and attack
in his guitar, harmonica and voice show how fresh and excellently ‘unprofessional’ he was. There are tracks that ring a little false. On Dylan’s rendition of ‘Gospel Plow’, for instance, the death-wish of the young man may be genuine but the evocation is not: wrongly, it relies on a pretence at the experience of age to ‘justify’ that death-wish. So that what comes through is a clumsiness of nderstanding as to what the artist requires of himself. Yet what comes through from the album as a whole is a remarkable skill and more than a hint of a highly distinctive vision. In the context of what was happening at the time—American folk culture all but obliterated and a stagnating ‘folk’ cult established as if in its place—Dylan’s first album can hardly be faulted. It is a brilliant de´but, a performer’s tour de force, and it served as a fine corrective for Greenwich Village: it was the opposite of effete. Dylan’s recordings of folk material are very much more extensive than those officially released suggest, but this first official album is a unit, a fine collection that stands up by itself."

Best Song: I really like "Baby, Let Me Follow You Down" because it seems to best capture the young Bob Dylan when he was singin' in small clubs. -- Folkrockman

Favorite Lyric: "People goin' down to the ground, buildings goin' up to the sky!" "People say you can freeze to the bone. I froze right to the bone!" "You sound like a hillbilly, we want folk singers here!" "Loved my sound! A dollar a days worth!" -- Unattributed

Agree. With the last one. That is how it is to be a musican.
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