Song of the Day: The Mighty "Mississippi"

With Dylan's first and then completed attempt, the Sheryl Crow hit plus Dixie Chicks and--the return of "Soy Bomb"!

Greg Mitchell is the author of a dozen books and now writer/director of award-winning films. He was also a longtime editor of the legendary Crawdaddy.

There’s a new Dylan “Bootleg Series” set coming out later this week, titled Fragments, 5 CDs or so, boasting all or most of the alt-takes and outtakes from his epic 1997 “comeback” album Time Out of Mind, plus a de-cluttered master and some live performances. The original was produced by Daniel Lanois, who fought some infamous battles with Bob over song selection and execution. It won the top Grammy as album of the year anyway and disproved his assertion in “Mississippi” that you can come back but you can’t come back all the way.

For much of his post-1970s career Bob seemed to insist on leaving some of his best material off his albums (shall we mention, again, “Blind Willie McTell,” “Series of Dreams,” and so on). It will be interesting to see what fans make of some of the tunes moved off Time Out of Mind. But we already have some idea, as there is another Bootleg Series release still out there (and in full on YouTube, hint) from 2008, Tell Tale Signs, which first collected a range of outtakes from that time period.

One song that Dylan left off was IDed early on, “Mississippi,” because Sheryl Crow covered it in a popular version. Somehow he decided to boot that track—now showing up regularly on lists of his greatest songs—in favor of the one drag on the album, the endless 16-minute “Highlands” (it’s no “Sad-Eyed Lady,” to say the least). There’s at least one other strong one I will post in coming days.

The upcoming Bootleg release includes half a dozen versions of “Mississippi,” but the simple Dylan alt-take below—to my mind the definitive version—and two others were already on Tales. Also below the Sheryl Crow track and the final Dylan cut that he completed and released in 2001 for his Love and Theft album. Speaking of why it did not make the earlier album, Bob told an interviewer, "The song was pretty much laid out intact melodically, lyrically and structurally, but Lanois didn’t see it. Thought it was pedestrian. Took it down the Afro-polyrhythm route—multirhythm drumming, that sort of thing. Polyrhythm has its place, but it doesn’t work for knifelike lyrics trying to convey majesty and heroism.”

No time to get into this, but controversy remains over claims that that the key repeated line “the only thing I did wrong, stayed in Mississippi a day too long” was “borrowed” by Bob from the trad folk/prison song “Rosie.” Well, he does mention a Rosie in the song….and Love and Theft prompted other charges of Dylan’s “thefts.”

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Let’s start with the first version anyone heard, from Sheryl Crow, via her hit Globe Sessions lp, but here live.

Now here’s how Bob and Lanois (on guitar) first trying out the song in a stark track for Time Out of Mind.

Here’s the finished track from Love and Theft. And a live 2001 version.

Dixie Chicks later covered it.

Bonus: The notorious moment during “Lovesick” at the Grammys when “Soy Bomb” joined a miraculously composed Bob, goofing on stage…

Cartoon of the Day