Bob Dylan
Documents of Bob Dylan

The Gaslight was the coffeehouse in Greenwich Village, the New York neighborhood where the Beat Generation was born in the 1950s. Poets and writers like Jack Kerouac arrived first, followed gradually by musicians. Among them was a young Bob Dylan who began performing at this café in early 1961, attracting the first attention of record producers, notably John Hammond, the talent scout who brought him to Columbia.

This introduction alone would be enough to understand the importance of these performances, captured—by some unknown good soul—on tape in the vast market of bootlegs, the real ones, the unofficial ones.

Added to this is the high quality of the pieces presented, a mix of original compositions and traditional songs, delivered by a very young artist yet with a confident manner in both his voice and musical execution, along with more than good sound quality of the recordings.

Hezekiah Jones Black Cross (Joe Newman arr. by Lord Buckley) is originally a poem by Joe Newman from 1948, first set to music by Lord Buckley in 1959. Buckley, one of Dylan's earliest inspirers, simply recited the text with music; Bob makes it his own version, maintaining the original text but completely redoing the music in his early style with simple acoustic guitar strokes that anticipate the famous and still far-off Mr. Tambourine Man. The text is a curse against racism towards Black people: Hezekiah Jones was a Black farmer who committed the grave sin of buying a few books with the money from his labor. The white people of his village hanged him with the help of their Reverend, saying that "It's not good for an ignorant negro to read".

No more auction Block is a traditional song of unknown author, born in Canada in the 1800s. The "auction block" was the marketplace where Black slaves were put up for auction: the "goods" were placed onto a block or stage made of stone or wood, the auction block, so they could be better inspected by potential buyers. This piece, musically gentle, certainly inspired the future Blowin' in the Wind. Dylan officially released it in the Bootleg Series Volume 1 in 1991.

Moonshine Blues, appearing as Moonshiner in the official Bootleg Series Volume 1, is a folk song not American, but of Irish origin, brought to prominence by Irish singer Delia Murphy in the 1930s. Dylan makes a personally musical version that anticipates the arpeggio of the subsequent and famous Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right. As Dylan recounted at the Gaslight, this is the moonshiner’s blues... "I’ve been a moonshiner for seventeen long years, I’ve spent all my money on whiskey and beer. I go to some hollow and set up my still. And if the whiskey doesn’t kill me, then I don’t know what will."

Barbara Allen is a traditional ballad from the 1600s, also not of American origin, but Scottish. The cowboys of Texas were the first to fall in love with this song in America, years before Bob Dylan. The protagonist is the beautiful maiden Barbara Allen who laments not having saved her suitor from inevitable death: she couldn’t have done anything about it, but her heart doesn’t forgive her this fault.

Rock & Gravels is an original piece by Dylan, discarded at the last moment from The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. Musically it has a blues feel but with a particular lyricism that almost feels like a baroque madrigal.

I complete this by recalling the beautiful executions of his classics, which at the time were unpublished, Hard Rain's Gonna Fall and Don’t Think Twice.

This record, not hard to find on the market, is recommended to fans of Dylan and folk in general.