Good as I been to you.

"What should the wedding supper be? - a fried mosquito in a black eyed pea."

I am a huge fan of Bob Dylan. If I had one album to take to the mythical desert island, and I was assured of a credible source of alternating current, it would certainly be Blood on the Tracks. In the next few months I plan to do an extensive series of blogposts on that album and to break it down song by song and even line by line if I have to.

Blood and Nashville Skyline are my two stand bye's, but I occasionally will reach for Oh Mercy, Blonde on Blonde, the Bootleg Series (which has one of my favorite Dylan songs, Seven Curses) or Time out of Mind. A couple others, don't have the full discography anymore.



I rarely play Good as I been to you, a compilation of folk tunes that Bob put out in 1992. Just Bob and a guitar and harp in his garage studio. Was supposed to have a bunch of David Bromberg stuff on it but it all got jettisoned somewhere along the way. It was a filler album to fulfill a label's contractual obligations but it is dismissed at your peril. I had some busy work yesterday afternoon and I put the album on. It was like playing it and hearing it for the first time. I had forgotten what an enjoyable experience it was.

1. "Frankie & Albert" (Trad., arranged by Mississippi John Hurt) – 3:50
2. "Jim Jones" (Trad., arranged by Mick Slocum) – 3:52
3. "Blackjack Davey" – 5:47
4. "Canadee-i-o" – 4:20
5. "Sittin' on Top of the World" – 4:27
6. "Little Maggie" – 2:52
7. "Hard Times" (Stephen Foster, arranged by De Dannan)[2] – 4:31
8. "Step It Up and Go" – 2:54
9. "Tomorrow Night" (Sam Coslow & Will Grosz)[3] – 3:42
10. "Arthur McBride" (Trad., arranged by Paul Brady) – 6:20
11. "You're Gonna Quit Me" (Public Domain) – 2:46
12. "Diamond Joe" – 3:14
13. "Froggie Went A-Courtin'" – 6:26


1. ^ the original album notes incorrectly credit all song arrangements to Bob Dylan.
2. ^ the original album notes correctly identify "Hard Times" as public domain, as it was published in 1855, but the author's name has now been listed for complete accuracy.
3. ^ the original album notes incorrectly identify "Tomorrow Night" as public domain. It was written in 1939 by Sam Coslow & Will Grosz.


This album transports me back to the 19th century, an epoch that maybe doesn't get its full due. These songs would have been a perfect backdrop for Tom and Huck in Hannibal, Missouri, rafting down a river and sitting on a lonely porch swing. We sang some of them when I was a school kid. Hope the kids today still get a chance to hear them like we did. They still sing Jimmy crack corn?

I get a kick out of listening to Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour on Sirius. He is such an ardent musicologist and has a great droll sense of humor. Underneath the crusty veneer lies a real human. A few months ago he was talking about a woman singer who had won an award as America's greatest poet laureate and he dryly interjected in jest, " I must have been out of the country that weekend." Bob honors the music of our roots, with the ear of a field scholar. Much like Alan Lomax, he delves deeply into the etymology of our American musical traditions.

When Cream came to America, Eric Clapton attributed their success to the fact that American musicians were too busy listening to dumb folk music while leaving it to the Brits to mine and discover our blues music. And while they were arguably more successful at reinterpreting our native blues, I would make no apologies for our interest in folk. The antecedents strangely enough often came from Great Britain, through the Carolinas, Virginia and Appalachia. So while they were listening to ours, we were listening to theirs, only a few centuries removed.



There has been a fabulous string of players influenced by folk in the last century, first Woody and Leadbelly and then on to Pete Seeger, Burl Ives, Kingston Trio, Dylan, Baez, The Dead, Springsteen and countless others. But in my opinion, no singer has been as faithful to folk music as Bob Dylan has.

Listening to Bob's radio selections, you can see his encyclopedic knowledge of American music, back to Stephen Foster and before. Dylan was pilloried as a forger for plagiarizing the music of an obscure civil war era poet named Henry Timrod. It is a ridiculous charge. Dylan merely breathed new life into the words of a long forgotten artist. He honors them and releases them from history's dust bin. Besides, all great artists steal.

Joni Mitchell, who has also disparaged fellow countryman Neil Young, took her own shot at Dylan recently. "Bob is not authentic at all. He's a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception. We are like night and day, he and I." I love you Joni, but how can you take a shot at the man who wrote brilliant songs like Simple Twist of Fate, Tangled up and Blue and Desolation Row? Plagiarist? Robert Alan Zimmerman can summon more poetry in a short phrase than the rest of us can muster in our entire lives.

Jerry Garcia did a series of albums with David Grisman that glean the same field as Dylan does on Good as I been to you. Jerry's takes on this material seem slower and more plodding than Bob's. Certainly more produced. While Jerry and David prefer to mine the material from the seventeenth century with the British sea shanties and ballads, Bob mostly stays home in America. The beauty of this album is that it's just Bob and it's rough and raw. I actually love the guitar playing.

A session player once remarked about the man, "He ain't no Segovia." He is often derided for his simple chord structures. But you can not be a brilliant songwriter without the deepest understanding of music, which he has in spades.

The four cuts that I post are all great. Froggie has such a fun procession of animal characters, that Bob gets to play his aural sleight of hand with. Arthur McBride is a classic song about a couple of British fellows trying to evade a press gang at the point of a rapier. Frankie the classic tale of a woman scorned. Johnny is Albert in this earlier incarnation. Blackjack Davey, also known as the Gypsy Laddie and by a score of other titles, roots in Scotland from about 1720. It was originally the story of a gypsy who seduces the unmarried daughter of a squire. Obviously, the visual of "boots of spanish leather" influenced Bob as far back as 1964. In this version the fleeing woman leaves a husband and child behind. He revisited the theme with the poor Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts on BOTT.

 Inside these innocuous nursery rhymes and doggerels lies a door to our shared musical history, and dark tales of murder and mayhem. Dylan makes them sound timeless, yet simultaneously current, no small trick.

Give this album a listen. Thanks for everything, Bob.