Dylan cover a day: I’ll be your baby tonight

There is a list of most of the earlier articles from this series at the end of the article.

By Tony Attwood

If this song has to be anything, it has to be fun.  Which means a lilting beat and beautiful harmonies.  Or delicate.  Or beautiful.  Or smooth.  Or lilting… which explains why this is so successful a song.  It can be what you make it.

Just let this track play and enjoy the perfection as well as the smoothness…  It is by the Shaken Bakers, of whom I know next to nothing – if you know please fill in a comment and tell me more.

By way of contrast Dennis Bono turns the song into something utterly different.  Dennis Bono, was noted as “the consummate interpreter of the Great American Songbook,” by the Chicago Tribune as “a thoroughbred singer, born and bred to sing.”

It doesn’t do much for me, but that’s just me.   It’s the other end of the spectrum from the Shaken Bakers.

Many of the hundreds of recordings of this song are just obvious in what they do, relying on us knowing the song and accepting it as background music.

But some, like those above, make the effort, and in that category we must include Clare Teal and Her Mini Big Band.  A really good middle eight, and a suitably understated use of the full band.

Just one more to show what people with musical imagination (as opposed to people who do the obvious) can actually do with a Dylan song.  It’s not revolutionary, but it has its own beauty, and there are moments in life (if you are very lucky) when it applies.  By the end, chances are, you are ready to fall asleep in her arms.

If you have been, thanks for reading.

Here’s a list of most of the articles from this series…

• The song with numbers in the title.
• Ain’t Talkin
• All I really want to do
•  Angelina
•  Apple Suckling and Are you Ready.
• As I went out one morning
•  Ballad for a Friend
• Ballad in Plain D
• Ballad of a thin man
•  Frankie Lee and Judas Priest
• The ballad of Hollis Brown
• Beyond here lies nothing
• Blind Willie McTell
•  Black Crow Blues (more fun than you might recall)
• An unexpected cover of “Black Diamond Bay”
• Blowin in the wind as never before
• Bob Dylan’s Dream
• You will not believe this… 115th Dream revisited
• Boots of Spanish leather
• Born in Time
• Buckets of Rain
• Can you please crawl out your window
• Can’t wait
• Changing of the Guard
• Chimes of Freedom
• Country Pie
•  Crash on the Levee
• Dark Eyes
• Dear Landlord
• Desolation Row as never ever before (twice)
• Dignity.
• Dirge
• Don’t fall apart on me tonight.
• Don’t think twice
•  Down along the cove
• Drifter’s Escape
• Duquesne Whistle
• Farewell Angelina
• Foot of Pride and Forever Young
• Fourth Time Around
• From a Buick 6
• Gates of Eden
• Gotta Serve Somebody
• Hard Rain’s a-gonna Fall.
• 42 Heart of Mine
• 43: High Water
•  44: Highway 61.5
• 45: Hurricane
• 46: I am a lonesome hobo
• 47: I believe in you
• 48: I contain multitudes
• 49: I don’t believe you.
• 50: I love you too much
• 51: I pity the poor immigrent. 
•  52: I shall be released
• 53: I threw it all away
• 54: I want you
• 55: I was young when I left home
• 56: I’ll remember you
• 57: Idiot Wind and  More idiot wind
• 58: If not for you, and a rant against prosody
• 59: A Dylan cover a Day: If you Gotta Go, please go and do something different
• 60: If you see her say hello