Bob Dylan brought warmth, darkness, blues and swing to the Saenger Theater in ... - NOLA.com
He talked about how what he listened to framed what he crafted, those songs that have launched 10,000 doctoral dissertations: "It all came out of traditional music," he said then. "Traditional folk music, traditional rock & roll and traditional big-band swing orchestra music. "If you'd had listened to Robert Johnson singing, 'Better come in my kitchen, 'cause it's gonna be raining out doors,' as many time as I listened to it, sometime later you just might write, 'A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall. Had you listened as intently as he did, he said, to broadside ballads like "Come All Ye Fair And Tender Ladies," or to the Dust Bowl musical reportage of Woody Guthrie, you might have written "The Times They Are A-Changin'," too. It was more than 50 years ago that Dylan first began those intent, keen distillations of American music and its arcane roots. The celebrated critic Greil Marcus, writing about Dylan's "Basement Tapes" -- his masterful 1967 recordings with what would become The Band -- called that world "the old, weird America. Source: www.nola.com
