The overture is a short take on the title song that combines nostalgia for both mid-century song and the mythical sunny Southern California that the Beach Boys helped to invent. A record of the cycle was released in 2007, and remains Wilson's strongest record in the past decade. Brian Wilson built a whole song cycle (and then a whole album) around the song, complete with spoken-word recitations of Van Dyke Parks’s poems. Cash’s version, from the third volume of the American series, is especially simple-just voice, guitar, and piano-and the way Cash’s voice fails to rise when he sings “lift me up to Paradise” is heartbreaking.Ĭash’s Rubin-produced version is only one of the song’s recent revivals. “Lucky Old Sun” worked as a country song, or at least a song performed by country artists, whether Willie Nelson or Johnny Cash. People have compared it with “Ol’ Man River,” but “Lucky Old Sun” is a superior song, both more melodic and more malleable.

By sheer force of will, he recreates “Lucky Old Sun” in his image, just as he later would with “Over the Rainbow.”Īs the song aged, its nostalgia shifted into something more generically and powerfully spiritual. The version wasn’t released until later, but it’s an amazing illustration of Lewis’s stylistic consistency.

Louis Armstrong released a version that competed directly with Sinatra’s, in October of 1949.Ī half decade later, Jerry Lee Lewis put his distinctive stamp on the song when he recorded it, at Sun Studios. That’s why it’s both surprising-and, given the surprising nature of this entire project, maybe predictable-that Dylan closes the album with “That Lucky Old Sun.” Written in the late forties, by Beasley Smith and Haven Gillespie, the song was a huge hit for Frankie Laine and was featured in the repertoires of several singers: Sinatra, of course, as well as Vaughn Monroe, among others. Dylan improves “Stay with Me,” Sinatra’s theme song from Otto Preminger’s “The Cardinal” turns in a lovely, melancholy version of “The Night We Called It a Day” and lets Donny Herron’s pedal steel do the talking in “Where Are You?” All the songs have long histories and long memories.įor the most part, Dylan avoids the biggest and brassiest numbers in Sinatra’s catalogue, and only a few of these songs (“Autumn Leaves” and “Some Enchanted Evening”) are so popular that they verge on cliché. There are other versions, of course, including a devastating take by Billie Holiday, on “Lady in Satin.” Dylan goes for something quieter, a touch more defiant than Holiday, a bit more resigned-as broken as Holiday sounds, she was only in her early forties when she recorded her version. “I’m a Fool to Want You,” the opener, is one of the few songs that belong indisputably to Frank Sinatra he co-wrote it and released it as a single in the early fifties.

The songs are part of our communal memory they are also emotional Rorschach blots.

Bob dylan discography numberd