BACK PAGES:AN ENCYCLOPEDIA OF BOB DYLAN’S

COVER SONGS

By Oliver Trager

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“ABRAHAM, MARTIN & JOHN” (DICK HOLLER)

• Dion, Dion (1968)

• Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Greatest Hits (1968)

• Marvin Gaye, Hits of Marvin Gaye (1972)

• Harry Belafonte, This is Harry Belafonte (1990)

• Mahalia Jackson, Great Mahalia Jackson (1991)

• Leonard Nimoy, Spaced Out: The Best of Leonard Nimoy (1997)

This homage to three assassinated leaders—Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy—was written in 1968, the year that the bell tolled for Dr. King and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. Dylan’s torch song arrangement was sung as a duet with Clydie King in concert in late 1980 and 1981 and served as a kind of renewed commitment to and reminder of Dylan’s interest in progressive politics after the distractions of his religious turn in the late 1970s and early 1980.

“Abraham, Martin and John” was originally and most famously recorded by Dion DiMucci, formerly of Dion and the Belmonts in 1968. Musician and folklorist Tom Glazer, in the liner notes of Songs of Peace, Freedom & Protest, calls the song “a most affecting rock and roll hit…From the look of this song, it seems too simple to be of much interest, but try to listen to Dion sing it on his hit record.”

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Dion & Aaron Neville

Biographical information on Dick Holler, the song’s composer, is virtually non-existent. Hearsay information suggests that he wrote songs with titles such as “Bob Dylan Request No. 1,” as well as “Hey There Tricky Dicky,” “Cole, Cooke And Redding,”

and “Greater Miami Subterranean Rock.”

Indeed, the poignant song of martyrdom was a hit for Dion as 1968 drew to a close. It was a turbulent year in American

history with the escalation of the Vietnam War facing strong opposition and the Robert Kennedy and King assassinations fresh in people’s minds. The emotional Holler song was a perfectly timed stroke of genius—a lilting, folksy ballad that barely left a dry eye as it climbed to No. 4 in the

U.S. charts. Holler devotes a verse to Bobby Kennedy at the song’s conclusion (“Has anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?”) that depicts the spirit of the slain senator joining his brethren over a hill. This verse, on at least a couple of the tapes of Dylan performing the song, appeared to elicit a particularly warm applause from the audience who seem to be acknowledging his return from fundamentalist-Christian doctrine to the old “protest” days.

Hopelessly naive to the harsh truths of real politic, “Abraham, Martin and John” tries to act as a reminder of the best its subjects had to offer. The song also comments on history’s cold and fickle hand as one day “we just turn away and they’re gone.”

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Harry Belafonte

Sammy Davis Jr.

Moms Mabley

Patti LaBelle

Just weeks after Warren Zevon announced that he had terminal cancer, Dylan hit the road

to start his fall 2002 tour in Seattle. Dylan’s memorable show that October evening included three Zevon compositions, an extraordinary, unprecedented tribute to a deserving if generally under acknowledged talent. “Accidentally Like A Martyr,” an early Zevon hit dealing with the pitfalls of

charisma and cults of personality, is a song that undoubtedly would have seemed all too familiar to Dylan.

Dylan shared the vocals with Danny Kalb and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott on this hard-on-the-ear coming of age spoof song every teenager should take to heart.

The doo-wopish satire about the narrator going to his senior prom, was clumsily-handled by Dylan and company as small part of a twelve-hour, multiact Hootenanny at Riverside Church and broadcast in late July 1961 on the long gone and still very dearly missed New York City FM radio station WRVR. Ramblin’ Jack’s “doowahs” in the background, while augmenting the spirit of the song quite nicely, completely drown out Dylan’s vocals at certain points on the lone, surviving performance of “Acne.” Folkster Eric von Schmidt is sometimes given credit as the composer of “Acne” in various Dylan discographies but it is such a scrap of a song that any attribution seems suspect at best. Probably the most amazing thing about “Acne” is that it saw commercial release nearly thirty-nine years to the day of its original recording when it was included on the soundtrack to The Ballad of Ramblin’ Jack, a quirky documentary film about Jack Elliott, a great eccentric American troubadour who befriended Dylan early on. Dylan recorded “Acne” the following winter at the New York City apartment of radio host Cynthia Gooding whose show he appeared on just around that time.

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“ACCIDENTALLY LIKE A MARTYR” (WARREN ZEVON)

• Warren Zevon, Excitable Boy (1978)

Warren Zevon

“ACNE” (UNKNOWN/POSSIBLY ERIC VON SCHMIDT)

AKA “Senior Prom,” “Teenager in Love”

• Ramblin’ Jack Elliott (performed with Bob Dylan and Danny Kalb), The Ballad of Ramblin’ Jack (soundtrack) (2000)

It’s hard to determine where Dylan learned “Across the Borderline,” a melodic if cynical piece of far-flung illegal immigrant romance with Old West and anti-Oz undertones. Written

from the point of view of someone who seems to know first-hand that the streets of the U.S. are not paved with gold and that those who venture to the land of broken promises will encounter far more than they bargain for, the song was jointly penned by three great songwriters but wasn’t officially

released until about a year after Dylan started performing it during his 1986 tour with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Maybe Willie Nelson shared it with him during a late-night woodshedding session, perhaps he saw the movie for which it

was written, or maybe it merely appeared on a demo tape that came in the mail one day.

Whatever the case, “Across the Borderline” remained in Dylan’s set lists as a sporadic inclusion during the Never Ending Tours of 1988 through 1992 before disappearing for a while and then popping up again in the late 1990s. In Dylan’s hands, the song always came off as almost unbearably romantic and heartbreaking: the tragic hero depicted in the song about to walk to his inevitable doom.

“Across the Borderline” had its beginnings in the early 1980s, when British film director Tony Richardson charged Ry Cooder with coming up with a song for the three-and-a-half-minute opening sequence for The Border, which starred Jack Nicholson. In the scene, a young couple attempts to cross the U.S.-Mexican border.

In Richard Williams’ 1995 book, Lives of the Great Songs, Cooder recalled the origins of “Across the Borderline”: “I thought, what can I do? Woody Guthrie already wrote the anthem of those people when he came up with ‘Deportees.’ Then one day I was out jogging and I thought of the words for the first verse—that yellow-brick-road thing.”

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“ACROSS THE BORDERLINE” (RY COODER/JOHN HIATT/ JIM DICKINSON)

• Ry Cooder, Get Rhythm (1987)

• Flaco Jimenez, Partners (1992)

• Willie Nelson, Across the Borderline (1993)

• Jim Dickinson, Thousand Footprints in the Sand (1997)

• Miller Anderson, Celtic Moon (1998)

Ry Cooder

Named in some versions of the song for the river that flows through it, the Brazos is a sugarcane- and cotton-growing region west of Houston, Texas. In antebellum days, its rich plantations were worked by large numbers of slaves. After the Civil War, and even into the early twentieth century, the local field labor was provided by convicts (almost without exception African-

American) leased from the Texas penitentiary system. A work song sung by the prisoners (and no doubt slaves before them) as they cut the heavy cane grown in the area, “Ain’t No More Cane” speaks to the horrible conditions they toiled under. “Go Down Old Hannah,” Leadbelly’s version which he learned while incarcerated at Texas’ notorious Sugarland prison (AKA the

Central State Prison Farm), began as a widely circulated work holler memorializing some tragic prison history when, on a scorching day in 1910 (more than a decade before Leadbelly arrived), some Texas convicts died of sunstroke and others risked being shot while attempting to escape. This desperation is reflected in this harrowing take on the song where the men were so beaten down that pray that every hammer stroke will be their last: “Go down old hammer, don’t you rise no more/If you rise up in the morning make it Judgment Day.” Other interpretations of the lyrics spring from its alternative title “Go Down Old Hannah” in which “Old Hannah” is the name (some say of Africa’s Yoruba tradition) given to the sun. Here, their misery will cease only when the sun takes pity on them and refuses rise on the morrow.

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“AIN’T NO MORE CANE” (TRADITIONAL/HUDDIE “LEAD-BELLY” LEDBETTER)

AKA “Ain’t No More Cane on the Brazos,” “Ain’t No More Cane on This Brazos,” “Go Down Old Hammer,” “Go Down Old Hannah,” “No More Cane,” “No More Cane on the Brazos”

• Bob Dylan/The Band, The Basement Tapes/’67 (1975)

• Leadbelly, Leadbelly/’35 (1976)

• Various Artists (performed by Ernest Williams and James “Iron Head” Baker), Afro-American Spirituals, Work Songs and Ballads/’33 (1961)

• Various Artists, Negro Prison Camp Worksongs/’47 (1951)

• Odetta, Tin Angel (1954)

• Lightnin’ Hopkins, Country Blues (1960)

• Chad Mitchell Trio, Singin’ on Out Minds (1965)

• Pete Seeger, Folk Music of the World (1991)

• Chris Smither, An American Folk Song Anthology (1996) Ry Cooder, Get Rhythm (1987)

Ernest Williams & James (Iron Head) Baker

Leadbelly

Archivists John A. and his son Alan Lomax (Leadbelly’s liberators and greatest champions) recorded several versions of “Ain’t No More Cane” during their Library of Congress field trips in the 1930s. Recorded again in 1947, it was released some years later on a Folkways album called Negro Prison Camp

Worksongs. Dylan may have lifted the song from any of these sources or, most probably, from an Odetta LP.

Dylan was performing “Ain’t No More Cane” as early as his breakthrough Gerde’s Folk City gigs in the Fall of 1961, and he performed it through 1962 until it faded from his repertoire. He never forgot it, though: on February 16, 1983, just over two decades later, Dylan dropped into the Lone Star Café in Greenwich Village, where he joined Levon Helm and Rick Danko onstage during their set for impromptu and raucous send-ups of some real oddities, including “Ain’t No More Cane.” Buyer beware: The Basement Tapes version of “Ain’t No More Cane” does not include Dylan and is one of four songs on that collection performed only by the Band in whose hands it feels like a radical celebration.

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Odetta

Alan LomaxRick Danko, Janis Joplin,

Jerry Garcia, et. al

Mistakenly perceived as an addendum roughly contemporaneous with the recent

departure of Alabama-bound bandmates Keith and Donna Godchaux from the Grateful Dead in 1979, “Alabama Getaway” is replete with imagery from the Twenty-third Psalm. And the song’s foggy narrative doesn’t help its interpretation—as if Jerry Garcia edited a longer Robert Hunter lyric into a breezy shorthand, loosely describing a relationship with a ornery acquaintance.

After his short 1987 tour with the Dead and well before Jerry Garcia’s death in August 1995, Dylan incorporated a few Garcia/Hunter tunes—“Black Muddy River,” “Friend of the

Devil” and “West L.A. Fadeaway” (as well as Hunter’s “Silvio,” which he co-wrote with Hunter)—into the small handful of tunes by others in his live repertoire. “Alabama Getaway” was introduced soon after Garcia’s passing and remained a constant late-concert rocker through 1999. When performing it

as a roadhouse plea complete with ecstatic slide guitar riffs from a sideman du jour, Dylan seemed to gesture back to his old Blonde on Blonde persona and relish in the song’s kiss-off salvo: “The only way to please me/turn around and leave/and walk away.”

A downshift blues pleading to a woman to let her long hair hang down Rapunzel-style, “Alberta #1” doesn’t exactly help Self Portrait pick up momentum. Dylan claims credit as composer on the album release of “Alberta #1” but in the Self Portrait songbook he is listed as an arranger—a more accurate attribution for he really only revised

the melody of a traditional song in this version.

While some have suggested that “Alberta” is an old barrelhouse song which originated on Fannin Street in

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“ALABAMA GETAWAY” (JERRY GARCIA/ROBERT HUNTER)

• Grateful Dead, single (1980); Go to Heaven (1980)

Grateful Dead

“ALBERTA #1” (TRADITIONAL/ARR. BOB DYLAN)

AKA “Alberta, Let Yo’ Hair Hang Low”

• Bob Dylan, Self Portrait (1970)

• Leadbelly, Good Morning Blues/’48 (1996)

• Big Bill Broonzy, Big Bill Broonzy Story (1961)

• Doc Watson, Essential Doc Watson (1986)

• Eric Clapton, Unplugged (1992)

• Jambalaya Cajun Band, Laisse Les Jeunes Jouer (1994)

• Bob Gibson, Joy Joy!: The Young and Wonderful Bob Gibson (1996)

• Champion Jack Dupree, Truckin’ on Down (1998)

• Roger McGuinn, McGuinn’s Folk Den, Vol. 4 (2000)

Shreveport, Louisiana’s infamous red light district where the likes of Blind Lemon Jefferson and Leadbelly once roamed, Dr. Harry Oster’s liner notes from Angola

Prisoner’s Blues also suggests that the song accompanied the convicts’ job of scraping headland, which entails using hoes and rakes to clear and spruce the strip of land running alongside a road. Additionally, a comparison of the lyrics and melody reveal it to be at least a first cousin in song to “(It

Makes) a Long Time Man Feel Bad,” another old blues Dylan visited early on.

Roger McGuinn also connects the song with labor. As he wrote on his “Folk Den” website: “[‘Alberta’] is a song sung by the stevedores who worked on the Ohio River. There were two types of

river songs. The first was the fast ‘Jump Down Turn Around’ type. The other kind was slow and bluesy. That could be because when it came time to load and unload these boats, it was a pretty busy session—hence the faster songs. But there was lots of time in between to sing songs like this one.”

And, of course, it is a well known fact that the slaves would use their songs as a way of gradually lulling their driver’s into a lackadaisical awareness thereby easing the strain of their exhausting physical toils.

A slightly better downshift blues than its Self Portrait counterpart “Alberta #1,” “Alberta #2” (a version nevertheless marred by the infamous chorus that marked the nadir of the album) serves as a bookend to Self Portrait. As with “Alberta #1,” Dylan claims credit as composer on the album release of “Alberta #2,” but in the Self Portrait

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Leadbelly

Big Bill Broonzy

Doc Watson

songbook he is more accurately listed as an arranger, as he simply revised the melody of a traditional song. The two “Albertas” on Self Portrait was the first of several times that Dylan would release different arrangements of a tune on a single release. A couple of versions of “Little Sadie”

may be found on Self Portrait as well, and alternate takes of “Forever Young” appear on 1974’s Planet Waves.

Written by Tin Pan Alley maestro Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen, his last important collaborator, in 1959 and introduced to the world by Frank Sinatra in the

film Hole in the Head that same year, “All My Tomorrows” is a saccharine love

song of absolute devotion that was raggedly performed by Dylan at a single concert during his 1986 tour with Tom Petty.

Cahn (born Samuel Cohen June 18, 1913, New York City; died January 15, 1993, Los Angeles, California) rose from the mean streets of the Lower East Side as the son of Polish Jewish immigrants to become one of the most nimble American lyricists of the 20th century. His career spanned more than a half century from his days playing violin on the bar mitzvah circuit to the sale of his first hit in 1935 through every major phase of the mid-20th century American popular entertainment landscape: burlesque, vaudeville, the Swing Era, the Broadway musical, and Hollywood. As a songwriter, Cahn’s diversity knew no bounds. This, after all, was the guy who could write lovesick ballads like “Only the Lonely” and intoxicatingly infectious schmaltz like “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!”

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Eric Clapton

“ALL MY TOMORROWS” (SAMMY CAHN/JIMMY VAN HEUSEN)

AKA “All My Tomorrows Belong To You”

• Frank Sinatra, All the Way (1961)

• Nancy Wilson, Yesterday’s Love Songs (1963)

• Shirley Horn, You Won’t Forget Me (1990)

• Tony Bennett, Essence of Tony Bennett (1993)

• Mark Murphy, Songbook (1999)

A natural inductee into the Songwriters’ Hall of Fame, Sammy Cahn also mounted a successful one-man show in the 1980s and wrote one of the more popular rhyming dictionaries used by songwriters.

Cahn will be best remembered for collaborations with Jule Styne and Jimmy Van Heusen for many of the songs that

helped build and then revive Frank Sinatra’s career. At its best, a Sammy Cahn/Jimmy Van Heusen song is marked by sophistication and drama: chromatic bass lines and melodies building sequentially through succession of diminished chords that suggest a rhythm section in the background.

Van Heusen (born Edward Chester Babcock January 26, 1913, Syracuse, New York; died February 7, 1990, Los Angeles, California) took his nom de plume from the famous shirt manufacturer. His first big break came through a meeting with pop composer Harold Arlen in the 1930s who helped the younger man sell his first songs to Harlem, New York’s storied

Cotton Club revue. After a stint as an elevator man, Van Heusen was hired as a staff pianist at one of the Tin Pan Alley music publishers. Establishing a partnership with Johnny Burke, another Brill Building denizen, Van Heusen made the move to Hollywood and sold “Swinging on a Star” to Hollywood in 1940. That song, written for the sentimental 1944 Bing Crosby film Going My Way (Bing plays a priest in a tough New York neighborhood) was the first of three Van Heusen songs to win an Oscar. Extraordinarily prolific, Van Heusen also wrote the songs for many of those camp Crosby-Bob Hope “Road” films. Sinatra recorded seventy-six songs written by Van Heusen, a distinction he shares with no one. After establishing a music publishing company with Burke, Van Heusen began his collaboration with Cahn. “Love and Marriage,” one of the better known Sinatra versions of a Cahn/Van Heusen song was written for a 1955 television adaptation of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, “High Hopes,” another famous Sinatra vehicle was written for a 1959 film, A Hole in the Head, and “Call Me Irresponsible” penned for a 1963 stinker, Papa’s Delicate Condition.

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Frank Sinatra

Dylan first performed Van Morrison’s pastoral slice of summertime rock gospel with Morrison himself as they wrapped

up a 1989 concert in Greece. Dylan pulled out “And it Stoned Me” one last time when the Never Ending Tour resumed stateside less than two weeks later in a version that suffered from its stiff, martial arrangement.

Ritchie Yorke wrote in his 1975 biography Van Morrison: Into the Music that “And it Stoned Me” is “about a real experience. It’s just about being stoned off nature. Remembering how it was when you were a kid and just got stoned from nature and you didn’t need anything else.”

Easy-listening Bob at its best, “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground” is an Infidels outtake released in 1983 as the B-side of Dylan’s single “Union Sundown.” Dylan seems to be

having some fun on the cut. Willie Nelson’s original was first heard in the film Honeysuckle Rose (based on the famed flick Intermezzo and later retitled On The Road Again) in which Willie starred. According to legend, the song is dedicated to a late hard-partying, pedigreed Texan known as “Loose Bruce.”

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“AND IT STONED ME” (VAN MORRISON)

AKA “Stoned Me”

Van Morrison, Moondance (1970)

Various Artists (performed by Widespread Panic), Hempilation Volume 1–Freedom Is Norml (1995)

Van Morrison

“ANGEL FLYING TOO CLOSE TO THE GROUND” (WILLIE NELSON)

Bob Dylan, single (1983)

Willie Nelson, Honeysuckle Rose Soundtrack (1980)

Jerry Butler, Time & Faith (1992)

Various Artists (performed by Kelley Deal with Kris Kristofferson), Twisted Willie (1996)

Willie Nelson

In 1992, thirty-eight years after Nat “King” Cole scored a Top 10 hit with “Answer Me,” Dylan was surprising the octogenarians in his audience with lovely and unguarded acoustic renditions of this old tearjerker of a pop ballad about

a guy withering on the vine as tries to coax his gal into telling him what he did or said wrong. He sounds like he knows he’s guilty…he just can’t figure out exactly of what. Dylan also

performed one electric version of the song during the 1991 Never Ending Tour

A 2003 book about the Beatles, The Walrus Was Ringo: 101 Beatles Myths Debunked asserts that Paul McCartney “may have subconsciously borrowed the tune and lyrics to ‘Yesterday’” from “Answer Me, My Love.”

Injecting little of the dynamism into this minor Chuck Berry classic as its composer did, Dylan utilized this barn-burning rocker Lynyrd Sknyrd Southern boogie-style at one 1992

concert to conclude a show-opening trio of songs that seamlessly segued into one another in manner that would have made the Grateful Dead proud.

“Around and Around” had an informal genesis as Berry recalled in Chuck Berry: The Autobiography, his 1987 memoir, saying that it “sprouted from a jam session during a rehearsal before a concert. Sometimes I didn’t jam before a concert but these guys were on-the-ball

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“ANSWER ME, MY LOVE” (CARL SIGMAN/GERHARD WINKLER/FRED RAUCH)

See also “It’s All in the Game”

• Nat “King” Cole, single (1954); Best of Nat King Cole (1997)

• The Impressions, One by One (1965)

• Bing Crosby, Radio Years, Volume 1 (1987)

• Frankie Laine, Greatest Hits (1995)

• Gene Ammons, Gene Ammons Story: Gentle Jug (1996)

Nat King Cole

“AROUND AND AROUND” (CHUCK BERRY)

Chuck Berry, Chuck Berry Is On Top (1958)

The Rolling Stones, 12 X 5 (1964); Love You Live (1977)

The Grateful Dead, Steal Your Face (1976); Dick’s Picks Volume 1/’73 (1993)

Kingfish, Live N’ Kickin’ (1977)

musicians and we almost had a concert before the concert started that evening. For nearly two hours we jammed, playing standard sweet songs to gut-bucket rock and boogie. One of the riffs we struck upon never left my memory and I waxed in the tune with words about a dance hall that stayed open a little overtime. Rocking ‘til the early morning had been used so ‘til the moon went down’ was the same time of day. Let it be known that at the actual experience, the police didn’t knock.”

A bloody tale of resistance, “Arthur McBride” tells the story of two men—“me and my cousin, one Arthur McBride”—who, when walking along the beach on Christmas morning, encounter two soldiers and their drummer boy. The group begins

conversing pleasantly enough, with the sergeant trying to coax them into joining the military campaign by describing the fruits of military service. When Arthur and his cousin balk, things turn ugly. Threatened with forced conscription, the cousins slug the tar out of their oppressors. It’s all pretty grim stuff, though belied by Dylan’s singing of a sweet, catchy melody. Rarely have the themes of resistance and comeuppance been so profoundly explored.

History would quite naturally produce a song like “Arthur McBride”: recruiting sergeants were perhaps the most reviled authorities in 19th century life in the British Isles. Poverty gave many men little choice but to sign on and was a dose of insult added to injury in the case of the Irish who were not even joining their own army. And, as if to demonstrate how little things have changed, contrast the economic plight of those

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Chuck Berry

Rolling Stones

Grateful Dead

“ARTHUR MCBRIDE” (TRADITIONAL)

AKA “Arthur McBride and the Sergeant”

Bob Dylan, Good As I Been To You (1992)

Martin Carthy, Prince Heathen (1969)

Planxty, Planxty (1973)

Paul Brady and Andy Irvine, Andy Irvine/Paul Brady (1976)

Dave Swarbrick, Swarbrick (1976)

who prevail in “Arthur McBride” against those subjected to modern recruiting methods where little education and few opportunities make the military appear an attractive solution. And, to be honest, it often is.

“Arthur McBride” was first collected in Limerick, Ireland

about 1840 and almost undoubtedly dates from the mid-19th century. While it possibly originated in Donegal, Ireland, “Arthur McBride” moved across the Irish Sea to Scotland around the same time and became widely known there and in England. Folklorist A.L. Lloyd said that it was his favorite

song, calling it “that most good-natured, mettlesome and un-pacifistic of anti-militaristic songs” and considered that “in temper and action it is something of a model for songs of disaffection and protest.”

Informed speculation suggests that Dylan learned the song when he heard the 1976 LP Andy Irvine/Paul

Brady, which includes a classic Brady solo recording of “Arthur McBride.”

The Telegraph #54 contained this excerpt of a letter written by Paul Brady to Gavin Selerie in 1996: “As regards ‘Arthur McBride,’ I didn’t ‘hear’ it in America; I found a version of it in a book. A Heritage Of Songs, ed. Carrie B. Grover (Norwood Editions, Norwood, PA, 1973). I adapted that, wrote and/or changed a line or two here and there, joined two stanzas together, melodically with a half resolve in the middle rather than a resolve after each stanza as the book does, which I found too repetitive and not allowing the power of the song to develop.”

“Arthur McBride” is also notable for its insanely archaic language and diction. That Dylan handle words like “shillelagh” (a cudgel) and rowdy-dow-dow (fight) with such aplomb adds greatly to authentic feel.

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Paul Brady 1977

Paul Brady 2007

Planxty

Tiernan McBride's film