Henry Thomas

Um, but he had a song on his...

I think it's on his second album, um, an old folk song by a guy named Henry Thomas called Honey Just Allow Me One More Chance.

Aha.

[laughs]

Yeah.

But then like, maybe like Henry Thomas or some of the o- other folks had a mo- like, a more expansive kind of, uh, uh, uh, landscape they would, they would paint with their, with their music.

How did you kinda come to the form? 'Cause that form kind of grows and swells, and there's, there's parts to it that, that-

Yeah

In the interview with Nat Hentoff, which appeared on the sleeve notes of The Freewheeling album, 1963, he declared that his ambition was to be able to carry myself like Big Joe Williams.

He thus wished to eventually acquire the kind of gravitas that the old blues singers exuded, born largely of a grindingly hard life, blighted by the poverty and prejudice that were the lot of the vast majority of black people in the USA during the early decades of the 20th century.

Despite the fact that, as in his early performances he demonstrated, he was deeply steeped in the conventions, law and musical disciplines of this distinctly American genre of music, the young Dylan was clearly aware that his own personal background, coming from a reasonably comfortable lower middle class home, could never match the depths of lived experience that the great blues singers he so admired had acquired.

quiet yet his devotion to the blues was so intense he was able to imbue many of the musical and lyric conventions of the form he'd also never really experienced the hard traveling life personified by his hero woody guthrie itself in many ways an imitation of guthrie's blues heroes but as guthrie did he made it his business to become steeped in the various different forms of the music Many of the other white singers he saw and met in Greenwich Village in the early 60s, such as Dave Van Ronk and Rambling Jack Elliot, were performing blues material.

But they were mainly engaged with their own cover versions of blues classics, often in a manner that was palatable to white audiences.

The precocious Dylan, however, who was barely out of his teens, had listened to blues records so obsessively that he had picked up many of the vocal and musical nuances of the great blues singers.

When performing this material, he was never afraid to change and adapt classic blues songs or to deliver the material using an uncompromisingly harsh delivery, if necessary.

He had an understanding of the poetic nature and emotional character of blues lyrics that was to inform the writing of virtually all of his own songs.