Category Archives: The Best Songs

Bob Dylan, Bob Dylans's best songs, The Best Songs

Bob Dylan’s best songs: Dignity

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bob dylan dignity

Of the virtues, I suppose I think integrity is the most essential. Not dignity – a thief can have dignity.
~Bob Dylan (to Barbara Kerr, Feb 1978)
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‘Dignity’, which describes so resourcefully the yearning for a more dignified world, would have been the album’s [Oh Mercy] ideal opening track. It scorches along musically, declaring its allegiance to the timeless appeal of the blues, while sounding, above all things, fresh. Its lyric, meanwhile, though ‘Dylanesque’ in that it sounds like no-one else’s work and sounds like a restrained, mature revisit to a mode of writing you might otherwise call mid-1960s Dylan, is fully alert and freshly itself, admits of no leaning on laurels, and has the great virtue that while not every line can claim the workaday clarity of instructional prose, the song is accessible to anyone who cares to listen, and offers a clear theme, beautifully explored, with which anyone can readily identify.
~Michael Gray (The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia)

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@ #43 on my list of Dylan’s 200 best songs. It was originally recorded for “Oh Mercy” in 1989, but Dylan wasn’t satisfied with it… and left it. Michael Gray points out that it would have been a perfect opening track to the album… way better than “Political World”… only thing missing was an instrumental solo in the middle.

I will not mess with too many details around the songs recording history.. even Clinton Heylin calls Dignity’s recording history a bit… messy….

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Officially we now have 5 different versions available:

# released Album
1 1994 Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits Volume 3
Brendan O’Brien remixed version
2 1995 MTV Unplugged
Live version
3 2000 The Best of Bob Dylan, Vol. 2
Touched By An Angel version*
4 2008 The Bootleg Series Vol. 8
Piano demo version
 5 2008 The Bootleg Series Vol. 8
Tell Tale Signs version2

* First released on the album “Touched By An Angel: The Album” – TV Series soundtrack compilation (1998)

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The Best Songs, Willy DeVille

The Best Songs: Storybook Love by Willy DeVille

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wdv

The Best Songs: Storybook Love by Willy DeVille

“It was Mark (Knopfler’s) wife Lourdes who came up with the idea (to record Miracle). She said to him that you don’t sing like Willy and he doesn’t play guitar like you, but you really like his stuff so why don’t you do an album together? So I went over to London to do this album. It wasn’t easy because we didn’t want it to sound like a Dire Straits album, and his guitar playing is so unique that it was hard to do. But nothing good is going to be easy. I know that I spent the whole time really trying to impress Mark, I wanted it to be good.”
– Willy DeVille (2006)

The album includes what is probably the best known Willy DeVille song — Storybook Love, it is also one of his best songs among many many great ones.

willy-deville-1987-miracle1

Willy DeVille (with Mark Knopfler on guitar) – Storybook Love (music video, studio version, Princess Bride soundtrack):

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Beatles, Music Calendar, The Best Songs

Feb 15: The Beatles recorded “Ticket To Ride” in 1965

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ticket to ride beatles picture sleeve

The Beatles were such a prolific album act that it’s sometimes hard to abstract their later singles; here, they ride their roots as a bar band in Liverpool and Hamburg to a new kind of glory.
~Dave Marsh (The Heart of Rock & Soul)

The opening circular riff, played on 12-string guitar by George Harrison, was a signpost for the folk-rock wave that would ride through rock music itself in 1965.
~Richie Unterberger (allmusic.com)

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Blues, The Best Songs

Skip James: Devil Got My Woman

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OLD post … You’re being redirected to a newer version……

skip james

I’d rather be the devil, to be that woman man
I’d rather be the devil, to be that woman man
Aw, nothin’ but the devil, changed my baby’s mind
Was nothin’ but the devil, changed my baby’s mind
~Skip James (Devil Got My Woman)

Coupling an oddball guitar tuning set against eerie, falsetto vocals, James’ early recordings could make the hair stand up on the back of your neck.
~Cub Koda (allmusic.com)

Skip James (June 9, 1902 – October 3, 1969) was an American Delta blues singer. He is regarded by most blues writers as a very important artist.

He is one of 3 blues artists to featured in Wim Wenders great documentary film The Soul of a Man (2003). 

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Blues, folk, Gospel, Jazz, Soul, The Best Songs, Van Morrison, Video

The Best Songs: Sometimes I feel like a motherless child


The Negro spiritual, Motherless Child Blues is a Negro Spiritual that turned into “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” (or simply “Motherless Child”) .

The song dates back to the era of slavery in the United States when it was common practice to sell children of slaves away from their parents. An early performance of the song dates back as far as the 1870s by the Fisk Jubilee Singers. Like many traditional songs, it has many variations and has been recorded many times.

The song is clearly an expression of pain and despair as it conveys the hopelessness of a child who has been torn from his or her parents. Under one interpretation, the repetitive singing of the word “sometimes” offers a measure of hope, as it suggests that at least “sometimes” I do not feel like a motherless child.

Although the plaintive words can be interpreted literally, they were much more likely metaphoric. The “motherless child” could be a slave separated from and yearning for his African homeland, a slave suffering “a long ways from home”—home being heaven—or most likely both. (- wikipedia)

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