This is the spookiest important record since ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, and is built upon the perfect interweaving of guitar, piano, voice and silence—an interweaving that has space for the lovely clarity of single notes: a guitar string stroking the air here, a piano note pushing back the distance there. And if anything, the still-unreleased performance is even better, for its more original melody (less dependent upon the conventional ‘St. James’ Infirmary’ structure) and its incandescent vocal, which soars to possess the heights of reverie and inspiration. No-one can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell, but no-one can write or sing a blues like ‘Blind Willie McTell’ like Bob Dylan.
~Michael Gray (The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia)

An unmistakable masterpiece, one of the true high points of Dylan’s astonishing career as composer and performer..
~Paul Williams (Bob Dylan: Performing Artist, Vol 2: The Middle Years 1974-1986)

“Blind Willie McTeII” is a stunningly brilliant composition that we could analyze needlessly and ecstatically for hours, the heart of this masterpiece is its performance. All the effort of composition is mere preparation for this moment. This is the antithesis of silence. This is that human act so linked with and perhaps even more courageous than seeing;
this is the holiness that Dylan perceives in the old blues singer, and by extension perhaps in all of humanity, though we most of us or all of us fall short; this is speaking.
~Paul Williams (Bob Dylan: Performing Artist, Vol 2: The Middle Years 1974-1986)

For many people, ‘Blind Willie McTell’ is Dylan’s one indisputable masterpiece of the early eighties. It has become one of those songs which has taken on a life of its own. Yet for eight years it was another of those bootleg-only must-haves he’d been producing since day one. When it was finally released on The Bootleg Series, already a legend in its own lunchtime, it was still not in the form that the artist himself preferred. The acoustic versus electric argument still rages…
~Clinton Heylin (Still on the Road: The Songs of Bob Dylan Vol. 2, . 1974-2008)

The English ballad ‘The Unfortunate Rake’; its many variants, including the cowboy ballad ‘The Streets of Laredo’;
the black standard ‘St. James Infirmary’; and Blind Willie McTell’s ‘The Dyin’ Crapshooter’s Blues’: all these related songs end up wondrously transmuted into Dylan’s 1980s masterpiece ‘Blind Willie McTell’.
What all these songs do is allow some articulation of a fundamental human problem: how to face death.
~Michael Gray (The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia)

Reflecting the song’s self-conscious setting – the Saint James Infirmary – he can ‘hear that undertaker’s bell’.
To reinforce that sense of impending doom, and to give this song about the blues the requisite setting, Dylan has gone back to a familiar practice, taking a tune from some traditional ‘fare thee well’. He twice alludes to his debt to ‘St james Infirmary’ in the song’s lyric: first, in the opening couplet, where he suggests the coming darkness will spread ‘all the way from New Orleans to Jerusalem’ (the original St james Infirmary was in New Orleans). He also sings, in the final couplet, of ‘gazing out the window of that old St james Hotel’, which shows a knowledge of the
song’s history- the infirmary often being called a hotel (‘hotel’ meaning ‘hospital’ in French). He thus emphasizes that the narrator is singing his own version of ‘St james Infirmary’..
~Clinton Heylin (Still on the Road: The Songs of Bob Dylan Vol. 2, . 1974-2008)

I started playing it live because I heard the Band doing it. Most likely it was a demo, probably showing the musicians how it should go. It was never developed fully, I never got around to completing it. There wouldn’t have been any other reason for leaving it off the record. It’s like taking a painting by Manet or Picasso – goin’ to his house and lookin’ at a half-finished painting and grabbing it and selling it to people who are ‘Picasso fans.’
~Bob Dylan (Rollingstone interview Sept 2006)