REVIEWS

Following his 1966 motorcycle accident, Bob Dylan became fascinated with Nashville and artists like Johnny Cash. This period sits between Blonde on Blonde and his work with The Band, and was largely out of step with the spacey, surreal and psychedelic music of the moment. In February 1969, Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash tucked themselves away in a Nashville studio for two days of sessions where they sang each other’s songs. Dylan would return to Columbia Studio A in February 1969 to work on Nashville Skyline and invite Cash to be a guest on the record. Their time together was short but prolific. It was also the first time that Dylan would collaborate in the studio with some of the artists he admired most.

When The Johnny Cash Show was scheduled to debut in June 1969 on ABC, Cash offered Bob Dylan a guest slot on the first show. This appearance accelerated renown for records like John Wesley Harding, Nashville Skyline, and Self Portrait by presenting to America a “Bob Dylan” many had never quite seen before. These albums allowed Dylan to experiment with his sound and his voice, often stripping things down to the basics. The work was completed quickly, starting a rumor that all of the writing for these records was completed in a single drive to Nashville. The scarcity of outtakes from the sessions only fueled broader mystical speculation about the music it looked to explain.

Now, material from these studio sessions and national television appearances are available through a collection called . There alongside these lost gems are a series of tracks performed with bluegrass banjo great Earl Scruggs. The first disc features outtakes from and and introduces a new song “Western Road.” JWH outtakes were never available before because most songs rarely required more than three takes. In the end there simply weren’t many that sounded different than the final cuts. As a result the music on Disc