Dylan — who spent the late 1960s recording “Nashville Skyline,” “John Wesley Harding” and “Blonde on Blonde” in Music City — said that he regularly listens to Bill Monroe and bluegrass elements can be heard in his music, but “I don’t have the high tenor voice and we don’t have three-part harmony or consistent banjo. … I more or less stick to what I can do best.”
LODER:
Do you still listen to the artists you started out with?
DYLAN:
The stuff that I grew up on never grows old. I was just fortunate
enough to get it and understand it at that early age, and it still
rings true for me.. I’d still rather listen to Bill and Charlie
Monroe than any current record. That’s what America’s all about to
me. I mean, they don’t have to make any more new records — there’s
enough old ones, you know? I went in a record store a couple of
weeks ago — I wouldn’t know what to buy. There’s so many kinds of
records out.
Another Bill Monroe mention is to be found in a March 1985 interview
(published in Flanagan’s “Written In My Soul”) :
BILL FLANAGAN:
Are there thoughts that go by that you resist writing about?
BOB DYLAN:
Everything I’ve written about I can relate to. There’s a lot of
stuff I hear that I wouldn’t write about, because it don’t mean
anything to me. You hear people talk every day, and most of it goes
in one ear and doesn’t even come out. Or it goes in then out the
other. Bill Monroe once said he got his best thinking done when
people were talking to him. I always liked that.
“To me there’s no difference between Muddy Waters and Bill Monroe.”
~Bob Dylan (to John Pareles, Sept 1997)
Accompanied by brief biographical and topical notes.
A complete transcription of this recording has been
published in the Journal of Country Music 7 (Dec. 1978):
54-66. Deposited at the Archives of Traditional Music by
Rosenberg in 1966 under option 1. Neil Rosenberg
interviewing Pete Rowan and Richard Greene. Recorded July
18, 1966 by Rosenberg at Indiana University, Bloomington.
Rowan and Greene, members of Bill Monroe’s band, discuss
and critique a Bob Dylan recording session held in
Nashville, Tennessee in April of 1966. Following this is a
general discussion of the “Nashville sound” and recording
sessions in general.
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