A friend recently told me he thought Bob Dylan should be inducted, post haste, into the Country Music Hall of Fame. I’m sympathetic to most anything that’ll muddy the lines between genres, but this proposal struck me as a real stretch on the merits. Give or take some significant exceptions — including but not limited to his “Tonight, I’ll Be Staying Here with You” from John Wesley Harding, the entirety of Nashville Skyline, and his version of the Roy Acuff-associated “Freight Train Blues” back in 1963 — Dylan has engaged the country scene in sporadic, tangential conversations far more often than he has influenced the music directly.
To tackle the most obvious example first, it’s a good bet Johnny Cash influenced Dylan a hell of lot more than Dylan influenced Cash. “I used to sing this song before I ever wrote a song” is how Dylan introduced a 2002 recording of Cash’s “Train Of Love,” for example. And never mind that a campaign to induct Dylan would be, practically speaking, a total non-starter, aimed as it would have to be at the same hidebound voters who still haven’t honored Kris Kristofferson, Dylan’s primary country disciple, or Woody Guthrie, his main “country” influence.
Dylan Country includes sixteen Dylan songs as recorded by legends, mostly, of country music. The exercise makes for a wonderful set, even as it confirms that Dylan’s country connections are infrequent. You probably could’ve named a few of the cuts here without so much as a glance at the back of the jewel box: Cash tromping through “It Ain’t Me Babe” in 1965, for example, or the Byrds’ “You Ain’t Going Nowhere” from Sweethearts Of The Rodeo, which is at least as much country-rock as country.
What makes Dylan Country such fun, even valuable, is that it mostly focuses on less well-known music. Hank Williams Jr. channels Jerry Lee Lewis on “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight”; Waylon Jennings adds some unexpected jangle to his expected thump on “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright”; Buck Owens fashions “Love Minus Zero/No Limit” into a stunning example of folk-rock countrypolitan; Glen Campbell out-country-pops Olivia Newton-John on “If Not For You”; and Jennifer Warnes delivers a gorgeous Cali-rock reading of “Sign On The Window”. Best of all, the set concludes with Kitty Wells’ soaring and swelling country-rock version of “Forever Young.”
Except for the Warnes selection, each of the above was cut between 1969 and 1974, the years when Dylan’s impact upon mainstream country music was at its most direct. Dylan Country also includes more contemporary cuts: Tim O’Brien’s hillbilly rap rendition of “Subterranean Homesick Blues”, Nanci Griffith’s sweet “Boots Of Spanish Leather”, and Willie Nelson joined by Dylan on a 1993 version of “Heartland”. Ironically, instead of proving the persistence of Dylan’s part within the country story, these nowhere-near-the-country-mainstream tracks suggest his greatest impact has been elsewhere. He was, you might say, Americana before Americana was cool. Or even around.
