Continuing a spate of Dylan memories, as I wait for the movie…
I learned this from Dylan’s first album, which only included two songs he had fully composed, but had a bunch of songs he had transmuted in various ways. The notes said he’d learned this from Roy Acuff’s record, but his version doesn’t sound much like Acuff’s or anyone else’s. The most obvious influence is Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and I should probably check with Jack and see if he ever did it.
Whether he did or not, Dylan’s yodel and the idea of holding the final falsetto note for a ridiculously long time undoubtedly came from Jack, who used it in his version of “Mule Skinner Blues,” and could hold it even longer and morecleanly than Dylan. I don’t know if Dylan would yet have heard Jack live, but he had picked up a bunch of songs from Jack Takes the Floor — which included Jack’s first recording of the song — before leaving Minneapolis. Which said, the best recorded version, to my ears, is from the 1962 Philadelphia Folk Festival, where Jack holds a perfect high falsetto note while playing riff after riff, until the audience starts to applaud, at which point he finishes off with a high flourish and says, “I was jest waitin’ on you.”
Dylan got a lot of his early sound from Jack — the usual story is that he sounded like Woody Guthrie, but actually he sounded like Jack. (Admittedly, Guthrie said, “Jack sounds more like me than I do,” but Dylan didn’t just pick up Jack’s Guthrieisms; that’s also where he got “San Francisco Bay Blues,” “Candyman,” and “Cocaine Blues.”) I hadn’t yet heard Jack when I heard the Dylan album; I knew Guthrie’s music before Dylan’s, but got to Jack’s a bit later. So I thought of the yodel and everything else about Dylan’s first album as original to Dylan, and played it over and over, and in hindsight I’m surprised to realize that this is the only song I learned off it. Actually, I don’t think I even learned this one — I just absorbed it, and at some point realized I knew it.
Looking it up with the aid of the internet, I find this was originally titled “I’ve Got the Freight Train Blues,” composed by someone named John Lair, and first recorded by Red Foley, then Acuff, then a bunch of other people. I particularly recall Joe Val singing it when his band opened for Doc Watson at Sanders Theater sometime back in the 1970s. Everybody else sang it pretty much as written, but Dylan streamlined it, removing a repeated “Lordy, lordy, lordy” and some other fripperies, and I continue to think his changes were an improvement.
That said, the pleasure of Dylan’s version is its anarchic energy and I never thought of performing this onstage, although I’ve sung it for fun over the years , enjoying the feel of the yodel, even if it wasn’t as clean as his or Jack’s… but, as with “Blowin’ In the Wind,” I ended up playing it recently when I was hired to do a full set of Dylan songs, and everyone seemed to enjoy it, so I did it on another gig and decided to put it up here.
In closing, a mea culpa: I know I don’t hold that falsetto note as cleanly as Elliott or Dylan did. I was going to point out that they were significantly younger when they made their recordings, but I just listened to a recording of Jack doing “Mule Skinner” when he must have been roughly my age or even a bit older, and he sings the note more quietly than he used to, but it’s still absolutely solid and he holds it for over thirty seconds… so ok, I’m not in his league… but I already knew that.