Hattie Carrol

This is an enjoyable read, from the Guardian a "what happened next" article about The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carrol:

"Listening to The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll today, you can hear Dylan shouting against exactly this blindness. The song he wrote took a one-column, under-the-rug story and played it as big as it deserved to be.

It's often a surprising thing, how beautiful the melody of an early Dylan song can be. As we all know, he felt unfairly labelled as a "protest singer" - because there is so much more to a "protest song" than mere protest. As the article says, nobody would have really known anything about Carroll or Zantzinger without this song, which documents history (albeit not strictly accurately, but that's why it's poetry) with a sublime and memorable melody.

I've probably said it before, but if you ever wanted to learn anything about record production, about how to produce great sound on disk, you should listen to some early Bob Dylan albums, when it was just a voice and an acoustic guitar, a harpmonica. They sound so clear and fresh and beautiful.