Blind Willie McTell (song)
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"Blind Willie McTell" is a song by Bob Dylan about the Blues singer Blind Willie McTell. It was recorded in 1983 but left off of Dylan's album Infidels and officially released in 1991 on the "Bootleg Series Vol. 1-3". The melody is loosely based on "St. James Infirmary Blues".
The song in question has proven one to be simultaneously one of the most problematic and enduring songs in Dylan's massive catalogue. Following his brief three-album flirtation with Christian Rock, Dylan returned to largely secular music with Infidels, and the album was hailed as a comeback by most major rock critics. Dylan also supported the album with a famous appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman, then an iconoclastic "late-late" show on NBC. There, Dylan was backed by a punk trio known as The Plugz and delivered one of the most memorable performances of his career. By contrast, the studio versions of the songs on Infidels seemed flat and stagnant to many reviewers.
"Blind Willie McTell" confounds the story further. When enterprising "bootleggers" released the unused songs from Infidels, the song was hailed as a composition in the realm of "Tangled Up In Blue", "Like a Rolling Stone" and "All Along the Watchtower". Dylan, seated at the piano and accompanied by Mark Knopfler on the acoustic guitar, sings a series of plaintive, heartbreaking verses telling allegorical stories from the history of American music, each ending with the same refrain: "Nobody can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell."
It is unclear why Dylan shelved "Blind Willie McTell" and several other famous outtakes from Infidels in favor of the inferior songs released on the LP. Unfortunately, it seemed to set the precedent for much of the remainder of his recording career in the 1980s.
External links
- Lyrics of the song (http://bobdylan.com/songs/mctell.html)