Blind Willie McTell (song)

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"Blind Willie McTell" is a song by Bob Dylan, titled after the blues singer Blind Willie McTell. It was recorded in 1983 but left off Dylan's album Infidels and officially released in 1991 on the The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961-1991. The melody is loosely based on "St. James Infirmary Blues". For the song, Dylan, seated at the piano and accompanied by Mark Knopfler on the acoustic guitar, sings a series of plaintive, heartbreaking verses depicting allegorical scenes which reflect on the history of American music and slavery. Each verse ends with the same negative refrain: "Nobody can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell."

Following three albums with overt Christian themes, Infidels struck most major rock critics (perhaps erroneously) as dealing largely with secular concerns, and they therefore hailed it as a comeback. Yet contrasted with Dylan's contemporary live performances, the studio album seemed flat and stagnant to many fans. "Blind Willie McTell" confounds the story further. When bootleggers released the outtakes from Infidels, the song was recognized as a composition approaching the quality of such classics as "Tangled Up In Blue", "Like a Rolling Stone" and "All Along the Watchtower".

It is unclear why Dylan shelved "Blind Willie McTell" and several other famous outtakes from Infidels in favor of songs released on the LP, which many fans consider to be inferior. Unfortunately, it seemed to set the precedent for much of the remainder of his recording career in the 1980s.

According to the Rolling Stone, September 7, 2006 interview "Dylan can't possibly be sorry that the world has had the benefit of hearing, for instance, "Blind Willie McTell", - an outtake from 1983's Infidels that has subsequently risen as high in most people's Dylan pantheon as a song can rise, and that he himself has played live since. Can he? Bob Dylan - "I started playing it live because I heard the Band doing it. Most likely it was a demo, probably showing the musicians how it should go. It was never developed fully, I never got around to completing it. There wouldn't have been any other reason for leaving it off the record. It's like taking a painting by Monet or Picasso - goin' to his house and lookin' at a half-finished painting and grabbing it and selling it to people who are 'Picasso fans.'""

This song has been covered by a large number of artists, some of which are: