Be Good Tanyas: In My Time Of Dying
[purchase]
Friends of the Stars: In My Time of Dyin'
[live; more FotS]
Led Zeppelin: In My Time Of Dyin'
[purchase]
One of Dylan's greatest contributions to the world of music was his ability to reframe and reclaim folkways as a generative part of the process of popular music; doing so often meant both resetting and rewriting found or scaveged folksong. This organic process is respectable, but it confounds the issue of attribution, leaving us with such highly contested measures of whether a song is actually "by" Dylan as the extent to which the song resembles older versions, whether Dylan lists it as one of "his" songs on his website, and whether or not Dylan owns the copyright.
In the world of cover blogs, the folk process can complicate the question of whether or not a song is a cover, and if so, of whom. My preference, however, is to respect the artist wherever possible, and here, we are talking about Dylan's ownership, I think, not merely origin. Here, then, we are able to consider citation and attribution as a key component of whether a song "counts" for our covers. And as many songs not technically "by" Dylan, in whole or in part, are treated as "Dylan Covers" by the covering artist, we would be remiss in not attending to such covers as we go through the week ahead.
Nowhere is this phenomenon more visible as it is in coverage of Dylan's seminal version of In My Time Of Dying, first released on his self-titled debut album. Though the song has origins as a gospel blues tune, recorded by Blind Willie Johnson in the heart of the Great Depression under the title "Jesus Make Up My Dying Bed", in Dylan's hands, it was reset as a stripped-down, almost appalachian folktune in the familiar style of the earliest field recordings from the Alan Lomax era.
There is no question that Dylan's performance embodied the song in a way that made it his own. The raw power of Dylan's emerging style, coupled with the familiar spiritual themes of dying and afterlife, made for a powerful statement about broken instruments and the body itself -- one as well-suited for the political and social context of the mid sixties as Blind Willie's version was for the dusty depression-era world into which his own recordings had emerged. Over the next few decades, dozens of covers would emerge, most notably a mystical, metallic mid-seventies bluesrock jam from Led Zeppelin. Some, like the Zepplin cover, would show direct evidence of Johnson's blues take, but all would cite Dylan's weary death rattle as both origin and inspiration.
Where Zeppelin seems to speak of rage at the dying of the light, and Dylan's sparse original evokes the solitary death of age and impending death, more recent covers from the indiefolk world seem more tied to the daily drudge and hardship deaths of younger folks in the older mountains and fields. Here, the three ladies of relatively young Canadian americana band The Be Good Tanyas take Dylan's setting of the tune and flesh it out delicately, adding banjo and brush, crisper rhythm and harmonies, giving what is now (thanks to Dylan) popularly thought of as "originally" a solo acoustic folk tune from the post-war era a "modernized" indie-americana instrumentation and trope. You hear the same slightly jangly new-timey rhythm, albeit almost buried under a drone-y, psychedelic approach, and tinged with manic desperation and wailing resistance, in the Peel Sessions recording from UK-based country/folk band Friends of the Stars, too. The result is a full folkspectrum of covers: three very different ways to die, but all times of dying nonetheless.
For comparison's sake, here's neo-folkie and indie fiddler Andrew Bird with a very recent live version of "the" song which, both titularly and lyrically, appears to reach directly back to the Blind Willie Johnson version. Honestly, you can hear the difference -- this is definitively NOT a Dylan cover.
Andrew Bird: Jesus Gonna Make Up My Dyin' Bed
[live; more Bird here]