Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Dylan Covers: Rock Me Mama becomes Wagon Wheel


Old Crow Medicine Show - Wagon Wheel

[purchase]

Bob Dylan - Rock Me Mama

[from Genuine Bootleg Series Vol. 1...out of print?]

Today I am gonna mix it up a little. I originally posted the below back in May of 2007 on ninebullets.net. I got so many emails about it that I reposted it in October of last year. It has easily been the most popular post on the site so I decided to post it over here. I hope y'all enjoy it even though it's on the fringes of this weeks theme.

Here you go:

This morning I was sitting here listening to the new cd, Two Bottles Of Wine by Jason Webley and Reverend Peyton. At the end of the cd is a cover song that I instantly recognized as Old Crow Medicine Show’s, Wagon Wheel. Only, it’s labeled as Rock Me Mama (Bob Dylan Cover).

huh?

I am no Dylan expert but I thought if Wagon Wheel was actually a Dylan cover I would have known by now. This seemed like a job for Google. After a little looking I found this explination from OCMS’s Keith Secor:

“It’d be my pleasure to dispel the myth and rumor about the song Wagon Wheel, or “Rock Me Mama” as Bob Dylan himself called the song when he recorded it down in Mexico in 1972 for the soundtrack of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. This song was not released, and it was not finished either, this is a demo of a practice session of him, Rob Stoner, and a couple of gals doing the chorus over and over again while the bass player learns the bass line. That’s what I heard on a German bootleg about nine years ago in high school. And I wrote the lyrics to the song because I loved the chorus so much and I sung it in my head for maybe a year straight, and then just penned what I penned, which is something of an autobiographical story about just wanting to get outta town, gettin outta school, and just wanting to go play music. It’s sort of autobiographical like that. But yeah, it’s sort of a Bob Dylan co-write with about 25 years inbetween.”

Well there you go. As the late great Chris Thomas used to say, “That’s why you get up in the mornings. You never know what you might learn.”

Jason Webley and The Reverend Peyton - Rock Me Mama

[Out of Print]

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