Various: The Early Blues Roots of Bob Dylan

It turns out I bought this just a week before I got Dylan's World Gone Wrong. I'm horrified to say that I think I may not have realised at the time how many songs the two albums have in common. I was just buying too much music to absorb it carefully.

I know it's suspect to draw a too-straight line between influencer and influenced, but I do like these 'roots of' albums. Tracing back up the stream to its source is, after all, the reason I bought Robert Johnson and Charley Patton as well. In the days before the radio show, this was the closest you could get to a Bob playlist.

And you might argue that you should meet this old music on its own terms, not through the lens of putative celebrity endorsement or tie-in. As I've said before, I find it really quite difficult to listen to the old recordings — as today's kids would with black and white TV — so I'll defend anything that gives me a way in to that world. When I've come to feel at home there, which I haven't quite yet, I may explore some more.

I think I was quite surprised when I first learned that Blind Willie McTell was a real person. Somehow I imagined that he was a myth that Bob had conjured up.

MusicBrainz entry for this album