Album review: Bob Dylan, Folk Singer – Humdinger (Smith & Co)

This double-CD draws together some of the songs which comprised such early Dylan bootlegs as Great White Wonder and Stealin'.

The mostly live performances, all from 1961/62, depict a tyro talent steeped in the blues. Dylan's lyrical ambitions, meanwhile, were swiftly bearing fruit, as his repertoire of traditional ballads and blues was expanded through talking blues in the Woody Guthrie manner, topical broadsides like "Ballad of Hollis Brown", and early versions of "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" and "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right".

Download: A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall; Talkin' Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues; Song To Woody