Rory Block – Positively 4th Street: A Tribute to Bob Dylan
9 Tracks – 62 minutes
Rory Block grew up in Greenwich Village in the era when that was a booming hot spot for many famous musicians. Her father was a country fiddle player, and her mother was a folk singer. Therefore, she was constantly surrounded by music from the day she was born. As a teenager, she regularly saw and heard many of the upcoming musicians of the day including folk legends like Joan Baez, Maria Muldaur, David Bromberg, and Phil Ochs. She started playing guitar at age ten and studied classical guitar at the suggestion of John Sebastian. Stefan Grossman introduced her to the music of the Delta blues guitarists.
Her father owned the Alan Block Sandal Shop located on 4th Street, which was a short trip away from the Village on the subway. The shop was a hot bed for the local performers to have jam sessions. Bob Dylan lived only two doors down from the shop and so she saw him regularly on the streets and sometimes in the Village.
At age fifteen, she left home to travel to the south to explore the Delta music sound. She learned her blues licks at the feet of Reverend Gary Davis and hung out with Son House, Bukka White, Mississippi John Hurt, and Skip James. She then moved to Berkeley, California where she started her career playing in the clubs and coffeehouses. She released her self-titled first album in 1975 and in 1981, a contract with Rounder Records catapulted her into many releases continuing into the 2000’s. She is a seven- time Blues Music Award winner, won Acoustic Guitar Player of the Year at the 2023 Blues Blast Music Awards, has been inducted into two Hall of Fames, all amid a host of other nominations.
Her recent albums have focused on looking back to her early exposures. Those releases were kicked off by her 2006 album, The Lady and Mr. Johnson, a tribute to Robert Johnson. Since then, she has recorded tributes to Son House, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Reverend Gary Davis, Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James, and Bessie Smith. The latter recording was her first in volumes of what she called “The Power Women in Blues”. The second issue in that series released in 2020 featured songs from Ma Rainey, Memphis Minnie and Sister Rosetta among others. 2022 found her doing acoustic versions from more recent female artists like Gladys Knight, Carole King, Etta James, and Bonnie Raitt.
Now she returns to her early days in Greenwich Village and provides her renditions of nine songs composed by Bob Dylan. Her song choices were based on songs “that leap up and cry out to me”. She opens the album with a straight-out blues song, “Everything is Broken” from Dylan’s 1989 album, No Mercy. “Ring Them Bells” also from the same album, is given an anthemic gospel approach with Rory filtering in her slide guitar to drive the song. The very well known “Like A Rolling Stone” again features her slide guitar and she layered in drums that she also played and while she follows the song in a very traditional manner, she manages to make it her own rendition.
“Not Dark Yet” comes from Dylan’s 1997 album, Time Out of Mind. Cindy Cashdollar played a baritone guitar with Rory on this song and is the only instrument on the album played by anyone other than Rory. The song is presented as a solemn ballad. Rory obviously feels the depths of the meaning of the song as she sings with noted emotions that “my sense of humanity has gone down the drain” and the base fear “that it is not dark yet, but it is getting there”. Certainly, a song chosen for the issues facing the world today. “Mr. Tambourine Man” is again one that is well known and certainly quickly brings up images of The Byrds. She plays this in a very straight forward fashion. “Positively Fourth Street” was recorded as a single in 1965 and never released on an album until it was included on a Greatest Hits album years later. The title is obviously a reference to Dylan’s early days in New York, but the song’s rebuke of someone whom he challenged with “You gotta lotta nerve to say you are my friend…” has long been questioned of who was at the basis of his wrath.
” Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” is another one of the much-played songs which deliver a strong message challenging government running amok, which again rings with as much truth today as when Dylan recorded it in the 1960’s. The lesser known “Mother of Muses” comes from Dylan’s 2020 album, Rough and Rowdy Ways. She sings this in a higher, somewhat warbly higher range and expresses a cry for those who gave their lives in attempts for the betterment of our lives. The album concludes with an almost 21-minute version of “Murder Most Foul” which is also from the 2020 album. The album is a recital of the death of President John F. Kennedy and looks at other events that occurred in the era including the coming of The Beatles and Woodstock.
Many musicians have tackled the library of Bob Dylan over the years dating back to fellow folk singer Joan Baez, early proponents such as The Byrds, The Turtles, and Manfred Mann, and more recently Bettye Lavette released an album of all Dylan songs that she certainly made her own. Rory is the latest to tackle the complex songs of Dylan and certainly delivers excellent versions of every song shifting them into their acoustic roots. While there are certainly touches of blues in some songs, for the most part they are the folk songs that one most associate with Dylan. Rory’s slide and acoustic guitars shifts the songs from their more instrumented originals.
