In the 90s, Dylan did 2 albums of traditional music. He did this, in part, just to complete contractual obligations, but they turned out to be much more than that.
Good As I Been To You and World Gone Wrong are just Dylan, voice and guitar, doing a selection of traditional songs. Mostly, they are blues, old songs by Blind Willie McTell, The Mississippi Sheiks, and some so old, like Delia, that they are just marked 'traditional.' His voice is ragged and so is the guitar playing and that is perfect for these tunes. The musicians who first did these were rough and largely untrained, but they had feeling and knew how to play their music. To play these songs with polish would just undermine their meaning. It would be like rewriting Huckleberry Finn with the grammar corrected.
At this point in his career, Dylan had turned out some fairly lackluster albums. O Mercy was good, the rest, just so so. For another artist, they may have been thought exceptional, but much more was expected of Dylan. That is not at all fair, but that was just the way things were.
It was almost like he had to dig back into his roots to find his voice. The three albums he did after these were very good and I will write about them in the next post I urge you to listen to these two fine albums of acoustic songs. My favorites are the traditional ballad, Jack-a-roe and a song my Grandfather sang to us kids when we were little, Froggy Went-a-Coutrin'.
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