This is a bootleg recorded in December 1961, when Dylan was still very much a folk singer - he hadn't even really started the 'protest songs' phase that brought him to the attention of the nation at large. There are no songs on here by Dylan himself - he was mostly playing adaptations of old folk standards, whilst working his way through the extensive works of his idol Woody Guthrie. He had dropped out of college just the year before, moving to Greenwich Village to join the burgeoning folk community there and go and visit Guthrie in a New Jersey hospital. In September, he had been the subject of Robert Shelton's famous New York Times article, describing him thus;
"A cross between a choir boy and a beatnik, Mr. Dylan has a cherubic look and a mop of tousled hair he partly covers up with a Huck Finn black corduroy cap. His clothes may need a bit of tailoring, but when he works his guitar, harmonica or piano and composes new songs faster than he can remember them, there is no doubt that he is bursting at the seams with talent... Mr. Dylan is vague about his antecedents and birthplace, but it matters less where he has been than where he is going, and that would seem to be straight up."
He had recorded his debut album by this stage, although it wasn't released until 1962. It was mainly comprised of folk standards as well, although it had a couple of original compositions on it. There isn't much crossover between the album and this bootleg, but those songs that appear on both are definitely stronger here - this was a period in which Dylan was developing with astonishing speed, even during the one month between that recording and this. Recorded in a single evening in the hotel room of the 'Bonnie' of the title, the collection of songs was a lot more diverse than that on his debut, drawing mainly on the blues but also on country and gospel. It showed him capable of much more than the fairly monotone, flat-sounding official release. It is frankly scary that at the time of this recording, Dylan was 2 years younger than I am now.
The sound quality is amazingly clear and precise throughout, bar a few momentary glitches, with Dylan in fine form. The second track, a version of Big Joe Williams' 'Baby Please Don't Go', is an immediate standout, showcasing Dylan's experiments with slide guitar. 'Baby Let Me Follow You Down' appears here too, years before it became one of the songs Dylan electrified with the Hawks when he 'abandoned' folk with a bang. This version has less of the punchiness of the later version, but has all of the heart and rawness. 'I Was Young When I Left Home' illustrates his more delicate fingerpicking guitar style, and the way his voice could mould itself to sound absolutely perfect for this type of folk song - there is no way he sounds a day under 60 in this recording, despite being only 20. Which I suppose is why, at the age of 70, he now sounds like he's at least 210.
The songs have been doing the rounds among Dylan fans for a very long time. Some of them were originally released on the very first bootleg LP, 'Great White Wonder', in 1969. The sound quality of that record wasn't great, and the tracklisting was incredibly haphazard, rearranging and interspersing this performace with other completely unrelated recordings. It was, however, a massively important release, not just to Dylan fans after more than the mere 10 or so albums and handful of 7" tracks they had to listen to by that point, but to recorded music as a whole.
Bob Dylan - Songs For Bonnie
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