11/13/2022 0 Comments Bob dylan discography 1963 bjorner![]() It’s here that the life of ‘John Brown’ truly begins. Onstage, meanwhile, the song received just two outings – once at the Gaslight Café on 15th October 1962, and then once again at New York’s Town Hall on 12th April 1963 (plus a performance on a Chicago radio show on 26th April) – before being retired, seemingly for good. It’s possible that Dylan wasn’t quite happy with the song when he wrote it: it was not recorded for The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, and only turned up on an obscure ‘various artists’ album on the Folkways label called Broadside Ballads Vol 1, where Bob was credited as ‘Blind Boy Grunt’. No matter how much it is rearranged, it can never grow beyond what it is. ‘John Brown’, the story of a soldier who goes off to war only to return horribly wounded to the horror of his mother, does not possess this this malleability. A song like ‘Masters of War’ can be confrontational and in-your-face ( Berkley ‘88) or quiet and seething, overflowing with barely-supressed rage ( Woodstock ‘94). The vast majority of Dylan songs contain a lot of room for different interpretations even songs that tell straightforward narratives (like ‘The Ballad of Hollis Brown’ or ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’, dating from the same time period as ‘John Brown’) are somehow able to mean vastly different things depending on how they are performed. But if Bob always performs it well, why do I never look forward to hearing it?Īt first, I thought the lyrics might be the problem. The song is ‘John Brown’, written in 1962 and performed 170 times since then. ![]() ![]() I also have a song that I never look forward to hearing, but – unlike the two previous songs mentioned, both of which Dylan tended to coast through - this is a song that he has almost always performed well. ![]()
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