By Tony Attwood
During the Christmas and New Year period, I spent a bit of time looking back over the songs Bob wrote concerning gambling – and I am going to wrap this up now, starting with a song by the Clancy Brothers, which I not only love for itself, but because of its introduction about their meeting with the young Bob Dylan. I was chatting to a friend over Xmas who, I have always thought, outdoes me for knowledge of Bob every day of the week. But he didn’t know of this commentary or the subsequent recording, so here it is one more time.
And of course that led me on to thinking further of my favourite covers of Bob’s gambling songs – which have been mentioned a couple of times over this Christmas and New Year period.
But thinking along these lines, I then remembered “Gallo del Cielo” which many people have since recorded and which has often been noted as one of Bob Dylan’s all-time favourites.
So just in case you haven’t heard it before, here it is – and if it is the case that you don’t know this song, and it doesn’t appeal to you at once, I would beg you to let it run, it really is something. And of course, if it does make you fancy a bet and you happen to have a connection with Florida, there are details of some sports betting sites in Florida here – just to help out.
I really do love that recording – and sitting here in rural England with snow covering my garden, I do find it hard to believe I have managed to run this site for so many years without actually adding that recording. Which gives me hope for the future too.
But of course I know my place, as we enter the year of 2026, (this being written and published on 2 January of that year), I return to the normal focus on Dylan’s own music. So, staying with the notion of long songs that have relationships with the issue of gambling, I really do have to conclude this little series of Christmas and New Year pieces touching on the subject of gambling, with Tom Russell’s “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts. Not many people have tried to record the whole song, and fewer have succeeded.
I do hope, as we have moved from Christmas through to the new year, you have found something of interest in this little collection of old Dylan songs and the thoughts they bring to mind. It’s now the new year, so we move on once again….
But of course, as ever, if you have any thoughts on a series we ought to run, or indeed if you would like to write one article or a whole series of articles for Untold Dylan, I would be very happy to hear from you. Aside from this song, in recent pieces we have looked back at “Black Diamond Bay” with a version of that I don’t think we’ve covered here before, “Taking a gamble on life” and the background to “Rambling Gambling Willie.” I hope you found some of that an interesting diversion.
And if you have any ideas for an article or a series which either you would like to write, or think that one of the regular team here should write, just email me at Tony@schools.co.uk
If you have been, thank you very much for listening and reading.