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Tombstone Blues
"Tombstone Blues" is a song by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, which was released as the second track on his sixth studio album Highway 61 Revisited (1965). The song was written by Dylan, and produced by Bob Johnston. Critical interpretations of the song have suggested that the song references the Vietnam War and US President Lyndon Baines Johnson.
Twelve takes of "Tombstone Blues" were recorded on July 29, 1965. The last of these takes was released on Highway 61 Revisited the following month. The song received critical acclaim, with praise for the lyrics, music, and delivery. The album version, and out-takes, have been included on several later compilations. Dylan's official website lists 169 concert performances, from 1965 to 2006. Live versions have appeared on the albums Real Live (1984), MTV Unplugged (1995), and Shadow Kingdom (2023).
Bob Dylan recorded "Like a Rolling Stone" in mid-June 1965, with Tom Wilson as producer. Wilson had produced Dylan's albums The Times They Are a-Changin' (1964), Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964), and Bringing It All Back Home (1965); the last of these had been Dylan's first album with electric instruments. Following clashes between Dylan and Wilson in 1965, Bob Johnston replaced Wilson as Dylan's producer. After recording "Like a Rolling Stone", Dylan wrote a number of songs, including "Tombstone Blues", at his newly-purchased house in Byrdcliffe.
Twelve takes were recorded on July 29, 1965, at Columbia Studio A, 799 Seventh Avenue, New York. Dylan sang and played guitar and harmonica, accompanied by Mike Bloomfield on guitar, Paul Griffin on piano, Al Kooper on organ, Joe Macho, Jr. on bass, and Bobby Gregg on drums. The last of these takes, lasting five minutes and 58 seconds, was included as the second track (following the opener "Like a Rolling Stone") on Dylan's sixth studio album, Highway 61 Revisited, which was released on August 30, 1965. It was later included on his compilation albums Biograph (1985), The Original Mono Recordings, and The Best of the Original Mono Recordings (2010). Alternate takes were included on The Bootleg Series Vol. 7: No Direction Home: The Soundtrack (2005) and The Bootleg Series Vol. 12: The Cutting Edge 1965–1966 (2015). Backing vocals by The Chambers Brothers were recorded on August 3, and a version including them was eventually released on the Bloomfield retrospective From His Head to His Heart to His Hands (2014).
In the sleeve notes to Biograph, Dylan commented how he had felt that he had "broken through with this song, that nothing like it had been done before". He added that he had been inspired by overheard bar-room conversations between police officers about the death of criminals.
The critic Andy Gill describes the structure of the song as "paired four-line stanzas to the rhyme-scheme a/a/a/b, c/c/c/b". The album take has six choruses, five of which have identical words while the other differs slightly. In the first take, all of the choruses are unique, with the characters "Mama" and "Daddy" in different combinations of situations. The Dylan biographer Robert Shelton details the basic chords in the verse as "C, C7, F, and back to C", with a middle eight in which "F and C chords alternate".
"Tombstone Blues" has been described as folk rock, a term Dylan detested. Gill characterizes the music as a "fast blues shuffle", while Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic considers it to be garage rock. The Dylan scholar Michael Gray regards Chuck Berry as an important influence on Dylan, and argues that "Dylan could never have written 'Tombstone Blues' without Chuck Berry". Gill also detects the influence of Berry on the song, as well as the Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger song "Taking It Easy", which has a repetitive chorus about a mother in the kitchen that is emulated by Dylan's song.
The authors Philippe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon assert that the title of the song refers to Tombstone, Arizona, but literature scholar Richard Brown is more equivocal, suggesting that the title could represent "a rather doomy or morbid joke, an existential melancholy produced by an awareness of the inescapable condition of human mortality". The song contains several direct and indirect allusions to historical and characters and events. Paul Revere's horse, Belle Starr, Jack the Ripper, Galileo, Cecil B. DeMille, Ma Rainey, and Beethoven are all mentioned in the lyrics.
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Tombstone Blues
"Tombstone Blues" is a song by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, which was released as the second track on his sixth studio album Highway 61 Revisited (1965). The song was written by Dylan, and produced by Bob Johnston. Critical interpretations of the song have suggested that the song references the Vietnam War and US President Lyndon Baines Johnson.
Twelve takes of "Tombstone Blues" were recorded on July 29, 1965. The last of these takes was released on Highway 61 Revisited the following month. The song received critical acclaim, with praise for the lyrics, music, and delivery. The album version, and out-takes, have been included on several later compilations. Dylan's official website lists 169 concert performances, from 1965 to 2006. Live versions have appeared on the albums Real Live (1984), MTV Unplugged (1995), and Shadow Kingdom (2023).
Bob Dylan recorded "Like a Rolling Stone" in mid-June 1965, with Tom Wilson as producer. Wilson had produced Dylan's albums The Times They Are a-Changin' (1964), Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964), and Bringing It All Back Home (1965); the last of these had been Dylan's first album with electric instruments. Following clashes between Dylan and Wilson in 1965, Bob Johnston replaced Wilson as Dylan's producer. After recording "Like a Rolling Stone", Dylan wrote a number of songs, including "Tombstone Blues", at his newly-purchased house in Byrdcliffe.
Twelve takes were recorded on July 29, 1965, at Columbia Studio A, 799 Seventh Avenue, New York. Dylan sang and played guitar and harmonica, accompanied by Mike Bloomfield on guitar, Paul Griffin on piano, Al Kooper on organ, Joe Macho, Jr. on bass, and Bobby Gregg on drums. The last of these takes, lasting five minutes and 58 seconds, was included as the second track (following the opener "Like a Rolling Stone") on Dylan's sixth studio album, Highway 61 Revisited, which was released on August 30, 1965. It was later included on his compilation albums Biograph (1985), The Original Mono Recordings, and The Best of the Original Mono Recordings (2010). Alternate takes were included on The Bootleg Series Vol. 7: No Direction Home: The Soundtrack (2005) and The Bootleg Series Vol. 12: The Cutting Edge 1965–1966 (2015). Backing vocals by The Chambers Brothers were recorded on August 3, and a version including them was eventually released on the Bloomfield retrospective From His Head to His Heart to His Hands (2014).
In the sleeve notes to Biograph, Dylan commented how he had felt that he had "broken through with this song, that nothing like it had been done before". He added that he had been inspired by overheard bar-room conversations between police officers about the death of criminals.
The critic Andy Gill describes the structure of the song as "paired four-line stanzas to the rhyme-scheme a/a/a/b, c/c/c/b". The album take has six choruses, five of which have identical words while the other differs slightly. In the first take, all of the choruses are unique, with the characters "Mama" and "Daddy" in different combinations of situations. The Dylan biographer Robert Shelton details the basic chords in the verse as "C, C7, F, and back to C", with a middle eight in which "F and C chords alternate".
"Tombstone Blues" has been described as folk rock, a term Dylan detested. Gill characterizes the music as a "fast blues shuffle", while Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic considers it to be garage rock. The Dylan scholar Michael Gray regards Chuck Berry as an important influence on Dylan, and argues that "Dylan could never have written 'Tombstone Blues' without Chuck Berry". Gill also detects the influence of Berry on the song, as well as the Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger song "Taking It Easy", which has a repetitive chorus about a mother in the kitchen that is emulated by Dylan's song.
The authors Philippe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon assert that the title of the song refers to Tombstone, Arizona, but literature scholar Richard Brown is more equivocal, suggesting that the title could represent "a rather doomy or morbid joke, an existential melancholy produced by an awareness of the inescapable condition of human mortality". The song contains several direct and indirect allusions to historical and characters and events. Paul Revere's horse, Belle Starr, Jack the Ripper, Galileo, Cecil B. DeMille, Ma Rainey, and Beethoven are all mentioned in the lyrics.