I don’t know what it means either: an index to the current series appearing on this website.
For more details on this new series on cover versions of Dylan songs that were not considered in the last series, please see the intro to the first article in this series. An index to this series is at the end of the article. A list of all the cover reviews from the previous series can be found at the end of the final article in that series.
——–
By Jurg Lehmann
Billy 1? Billy 4? Billy 7? Most cover artists don’t care. They just mix the lyrics of the three versions, as did American singer and guitarist Billy Goodman, who was the first to tackle Billy in 1998 – 25 years after its release. Goodman started playing professionally at the age of 13, and along the way he has played with such rock legends as Jorma Kaukonen of Hot Tuna, Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane and Dave Mason from Traffic. Goodman’s Billy is dutiful and correct, it’s his slide playing that makes the song a little bit special – and you may like the siren whistle in the distance, if you have a sense for the strange.
He stood out, said Bob Dylan. His voice and presentation ought to have gotten him in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by now.
Willy DeVille’s fans included not just Dylan: Neil Young and Tom Petty and many others paid tribute to the one of the “very few who got it right; he understood what made a three-minute song great, and why it mattered—because it mattered to him, enthuses Thom Jurek and remarks self-critically: He lived and died with the audience in his shows, and he gave them something to remember when they left the theater, because he meant every single word of every song as he performed it. Europeans like that. In this jingoistic age of American pride, perhaps we can revisit our own true love of rock and roll by discovering Willy DeVille for the first time—or, at the very least, remember him for what he really was: an American original. The mythos and pathos in his songs, his voice, and his performances were born in these streets and cities and then given to the world who appreciated him much more than we did.”
Being inducted into the Hall of Fame was probably the least of deVille’s worries at the time he started performing Billy. At the turn of the century he was living in New Mexico and had just cured his two-decades-long addiction to heroin when his wife Lisa committed suicide by hanging. In his despair Willy caused a car accident, for the next five years, he walked with a cane and performed sitting on a barstool. DeVille’s stay in the Southwest awakened his interest in his Native American heritage. On his next album Crow Jane Alley he explored Spanish-Americana sounds and featured many prominent Los Angeles Latino musicians. It was in those years when he regularly performed Billy. We got several live recordings of concerts all over Europe, from 2000 until 2008, a few months before DeVille’s death. Here are the Stockhom concert from 2002 and the performance with Jan Akkerman in Harderwijk in 2008 – both make clear what a great performer Willy DeVille was.
In the noughties, other artists finally took an interest in Billy: Rab Noakes & Fraser Speirs (2000), Rick Robbins with Rory Block (2001), The Dylan Project (Steve Gibbons) 2005, Fernando Goin Quartet (2006), Los Lobos (2007), Calexico (2007 Main Title, instrumental).
These are all decent recordings, but they are not very exciting. Two stand out a bit: Suzie Ungerleider (2007), who at the beginning of her career had decided to perform under the name Oh Susanna, alluding to the classic American folk song “Oh! Susanna“, rather than her given name as a means of keeping her private and professional lives separate.
It took her 25 years to find out about the complicated racial history of the song “Oh! Susanna”, but then, in 2021, she announced that she was retiring the Oh Susanna stage name. Under whatever name, her Billy is a fine rendition, as is that by Gretchen Peter and Tom Russell (2009), the Man From God Knows Where.
Come up on stage Gillian Welch & David Rawlings (2009) and now things get really exciting. Their live duet of Billy is truly exquisite, with subtle vocal harmonies and Rawling’s masterful fingerpicking. Their sparse musical style, which combines elements of Appalachian music, bluegrass, country and Americana, is described by The New Yorker as at once innovative and reminiscent of past rural forms. Welch and Rawlings have collaborated on several critically acclaimed albums, their All the Good Times received the Grammy Award for Best Folk Album in 2021. Over the years, they have covered numerous Dylan songs, Billy is definitely one of their best.
Can it get any better? Well, not for the next 10 years. Again, there’s no shortage of Billy covers, but none of them do I really need to listen to more than once or twice (perhaps with the exception of Les Shelleys):
Les Shelleys (2010), Doc Bones & The Rattlesnakes (2012), Mark Lee Gardner (2012), Lötsjön (2013), The Stetson Family (2015), Thursday Club (2017), Killing the Day (2019):
Well away from any publicity in the English-speaking world, the album Bienvenido a los 90 was released in Spain in 2019. Bienvenidos a los 90 is a podcast by Spanish radio presenter Roberto Martinez that has been running for more than ten years and has become a sort of a cultural institution in Madrid. In 2019, a Dylan special was released as an album with a few really interesting songs. Among them a cover of To Fall in Love With You, which is probably the only version of this song that has ever been officially released on an album. The performer is Ricardo Lezón.
Dylan recorded To Fall in Love With You for the film Hearts Of Fire in London in August 1986. Dylan dropped the song, considered by many to be a potential masterpiece, for unknown reasons. Hearts of Fire performed poorly in cinemas and was shelved due to the negative reviews for the film. Dylan’s song is clearly unfinished – on the only recording that exists, you can’t even make out the exact lyrics. So it is not surprising that no recognised musician has dared to tackle the song to this day. Ricardo Lezón has probably not been noticed because his song is in Spanish. The only other covers I know of are a live performance at the Bath Festival in 2017 and a YouTube post by two young women from 2022.
Back to Billy. And Tucho and Sofia Buckingham. It is not that easy to find out anything significant about them, although they are not unknown in Spain. Sofia Buckingham was born in Madrid. As a kid she often spent her vacations in the U.S and she lived in England from the age of fourteen until she was sixteen. That’s when she started writing songs. In 2017, she released her first studio album ‘Mistakes at 2am’, which can be found on all the usual streaming platforms.
Singer/songwriter Toño Villar (‘Tucho’) is a musician from Salamanca who lives in Madrid since 2006. For several years he was the singer of the band Lex Makoto, until its dissolution in 2012. It was then that he began to listen to more folk and Americana. In 2017 and 2018 he did two solo tours in the US and then decided to lock himself away in Madrid’s Metropol Studios for his first album “Tucho”.
Tucho & Sofia Buckingham’s duet is a very fine Billy cover. The simplicity with which the two voices deliver and the harmonies between the male and female voice are impeccable, as is the accompaniment. I could do without Sofia’s voice leap at the end of the song, but let’s not quibble.
Previously in the “Covers we missed” series…