[Harp-L] Re: pathetic, again

["Jonathan Metts" <jonathan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

"Let's see.  Dylan as an example of folk harmonica?  He hasn't played folk 
music since 1965."

Sorry, that's not true.  His basement tape recordings with the Band in the 
late 60s (officially but incompletely released in the 70s) were pure folk 
songwriting.  Some of his mid-70s work like Blood on the Tracks features 
folk songs or folk influences on other types of music.  And in the early 
90s, Dylan released two solo acoustic albums of only folk songs, including 
some music dating back to the Civil War.  Not to mention that he still 
regularly plays songs from his early folk albums in live concerts.  And all 
that evidence notwithstanding, the fact remains that Bob Dylan brought folk 
music -- and harmonica in that context -- to a larger American and European 
audience than it had ever known before then.  You can bash his playing if 
you like, but Bob Dylan introduced the harmonica to more people than John 
Popper or even Stevie Wonder and certainly more than Little Walter.  I agree 
that the Wikipedia article looks incomplete, as many are, but Dylan's name 
belongs somewhere on that page.

Jonathan Metts