Acoustic Guitar recently featured a video of Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash singing Girl From the North Country in 1969.
Next week (April 8) marks the 50th anniversary of the release of Bob Dylan‘s Nashville Skyline album. At the time, the album was viewed as yet another new direction for Dylan, whose previous album had been the spare, rustic, lyrically opaque, acoustic guitar-based John Wesley Harding (1967); itself a departure from the mostly electric sound of Highway 61 Revisited (1965) and Blonde on Blonde (1966). Both Blonde on Blonde and John Wesley Harding were recorded in Nashville, the latter using three local musicians exclusively, but when he returned to Nashville in February 1969 to record Nashville Skyline (released in April ’69), he embraced country music more than he ever had before—penning simpler, more straightforward lyrics, doing a deeper dive into country instrumentation as accompaniment, and also singing with a much warmer, sweeter tone than he had shown before. “Lay Lady Lay,” the Top Ten hit from Nashville Skyline, was emblematic of the “new” Dylan: Could this honey-voiced crooner be the same singer whose distinctive nasal delivery had become famous all over the world? And what was up with all that pedal steel guitar (courtesy of Nashville steel master Pete Drake, who had also been on John Wesley Harding)?
