The last song on Bob Dylan’s new album, World Gone Wrong, is a spare, four-verse ballad, the story of a pilgrim who after a long, mysterious quest–“The cause of my master compelled me from home / No kindred or relatives now”–finds himself alone and at rest. The fact that Dylan himself is nearing the end of a journey makes this song an especially touching statement of isolation. “The Lone Pilgrim” is one of ten traditional folk-blues tunes here, ranging from the rather obscure to the very obscure, adorned on this record with nothing but a roughly recorded voice and guitar. In many ways Dylan is boring and irrelevant now; his indifference on his last dozen or so albums and the fact that this is actually his second offering in a row of old acoustic folk-blues numbers would suggest it’s of little interest. But it’s a lot different from the last sonically and thematically, and it’s worth hearing.
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The 30-plus-year journey that “The Lone Pilgrim” refers to can be looked at in two ways. The first is musically. In the liner notes to an album called The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, a very long time ago, Nat Hentoff quoted Dylan as saying, “I ain’t that good yet. I don’t carry myself yet the way that Big Joe Williams, Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly and Lightnin’ Hopkins have carried themselves. I hope to be able to someday, but they’re older people. I sometimes am able to do it, but it happens, when it happens, unconsciously.” Dylan’s versions of old blues songs on his first album are callow and a bit awkward: but his powerful sense of taste soon led him away from them to find his own voice; on Freewheelin’, his second album and the home of songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind” and the apocalyptic “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” he snapped his aesthetic and progenitive moorings and swept himself out into new territory.
I came to the place where the lone pilgrim lay
Woke up this morning feelin’ blue
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Ken Regan.
