photo: Courtesy of Heaven's Door Spirits
It’s been a half-century since one of our most enigmatic musicians and certainly our most shape-shifting Nobel literature prizewinner, Bob Dylan, turned to the South to re-invent himself artistically in Nashville. The result of those February 1969 recordings with Johnny Cash and Cash’s trusted backup band—Bob Wootton and Marshall Grant, alongside Charlie Daniels, Norman Blake, Kenny Buttrey, Charlie McCoy and Pete Drake—was the deceptively mellifluous, genre-smashing album
Nashville Skyline. The recording has since stood tall as a plinth upon which Dylan, now seventy-nine, was able to build his subsequent, and several, artistic lives. Like a sepia-toned Matthew Brady platinum print of the Civil War, the album serves today as an intensely detailed picture of its time, in its case revealing an intimate portrait of the artistic prowess of Cash, Dylan, and the deep bench of musical talent in Nashville of that day.