Word: rockingly
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Dylan's music has, essentially, always been rock and roll. In his early years he was forced to sing in the prevailing folk idiom of the times because there was no other way to break into big-time entertainment. Even then, however, most of his songs had a rock feel to them, a fact which was quickly appreciated by Manfred Mann in England and the Byrds in this country. Both groups had only to supply the standard rock accompaniment of drums, guitars, etc. to make enormously successful covers of early Dylan songs...
...Dylan's subsequent entry into rock, which so scandalized the folk fans at Newport, was the logical, and inevitable, outcome of a deep-seated movement in that direction. Nevertheless, it is clear that Dylan emerged considerably enriched from his experience in folk-music. In the first place, the free and bohemian atmosphere of the folk-world allowed, if it didn't encourage, Dylan to develop his own unorthodox singing style, in all the expressive glory of its distorted, flat phrasing...
...CASE, when Dylan burst into full-fledged rock with Highway 61 Revisited (and in the sublime follow-up Blonde on Blonde) he fused rock-music with his legacy from folk-music: the eccentric tension-filled voice, and the sharp-edged songs whose writing he had come to master. This particular combination proved to be unrelentingly right, with the three elements of voice, words, and music interacting upon one another like rigorously synchronized interlocking wheels...
...this context and with these categories in mind that one could try to weight Nashville Skyline. Three years after Blonde on Blonde,Bob Dylan remains solidly in rock and roll. The new album, despite all the talk about country music, is definitely a rock album--though to be sure it is calm rock, gentle climaxes, active relaxed drumming, generally vibrant rhythm section, crisp guitar work, strumming organ and all. And clearly, this music is equal to Bob Dylan's best...
...rock on Nashville Skyline is not as tense and irascible as the music on Blonde on Blonde was. This is no accident. Bob Dylan's sense of fitting the music to the words and the general mood of an album has not deserted him. Since the lyrics are low-key and gentle the music is appropriately smooth rock and roll. In turn this configuration of words and music, I thing, determined Dylan's use of his voice on the album (which as everyone knows by now, is radically different from the grating, flaring voice we used to recognize as Dylan...