Blind Willie McTell by Bob Dylan video

Rare version of Blind Willie McTell from Amazon.com company event 2006

Bob Dylan performing Blind Willie McTell at Amazon.com event

The video is dated October 25th, 2006. Dylan appeared in Seattle on October 13th, 2006 at the Key Arena. Glen Boyd wrote a review Concert Review: Bob Dylan And His Band – October 13, 2006 at Key Arena, Seattle WA of that date.

Another entry says the performance was July 16th, 2005. Amazon 10th Anniversary Concert With Bob Dylan and Norah Jones.  Update – Bill Pagel’s Bob Tour Guide confirms the July 16, 2005 date.  

Blind Willie McTell

Dylan’s tribute to old blues men and Willie McTell in particular was recorded for Infidels in 1983 but left off the CD. It was recorded on May 5th which was Willie McTell’s birthday.

The song was heard in bootlegs throughout the 1980s and got official release with The Bootleg Series, Vols. 1-3 : Rare And Unreleased, 1961-1991. Dylan started to perform the song in concert in 1997.

Blind Willie McTell is loosely based on the melody and chord structure of St. James Infirmary. Dylan includes a direct reference in the last verse:

I’m gazing out the window
Of the St. James Hotel
And I know no one can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell

Blind Willie McTell contains an evocative and depressing view of American mistreatment of blacks in the South, a remembrance of McTell and the narrator’s own appointment with death.

See them big plantations burning
Hear the cracking of the whips
Smell that sweet magnolia blooming
See the ghosts of slavery ships
I can hear them tribes a-moaning
Hear that undertaker’s bell
Nobody can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell

The song is operating on several levels as Dylan takes the listener from East Texas to New Jerusalem which could mean the literal city or the heavenly reward. This is typical Dylan song craft but he elevates it this time to a new level. Some critics consider Blind Willie McTell one of his finest creations.

Michael Gray in The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia: Revised and Updated Edition calls the song a “masterpiece.”

“The English ballad ‘The Unfortunate Rake’; its many variants, including the cowboy ballad ‘The Streets of Laredo’; the black standard ‘St. James Infirmary’; and BLIND WILLIE McTELL’s ‘The Dyin’ Crapshooter’s Blues’: all these related songs end up wondrously transmuted into Dylan’s 1980s masterpiece ‘Blind Willie McTell’. What all these songs do is allow some articulation of a fundamental human problem: how to face death.”

In Song & Dance Man 3: The Art of Bob Dylan, Gray covers Blind Willie McTell in a chapter of it’s own.

Performance, word and music copyright Bob Dylan.