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A great series on the music that influenced a living legend

It’s very easy as a casual listener to identify this influence or that influence when we hear a song on the radio by a band that comes out in the wake of an influential group or musician such as The Beatles, Elvis, Led Zeppelin, Nirvana, etc. The same goes for any other style of music, whether it be Country, Jazz, Blues or Reggae. You may not be a fan of that particular influential group, but their musical stamp hs been embedded into the public conscious.

When someone like Bob Dylan, who has such a varied style of recordings over the past 45-plus years, comes into the picture, he and his influences are a little more difficult to define. Eagle Rock Entertainment, the company that releases DVDs and CDs of the Live At Montreux and Classic Albums series, now has Down The Tracks. This series focuses on the music and styles that inspired legendary performers.

This particular 95 minute DVD is Down The Tracks: The Music That Influenced Bob Dylan. The documentary contains no interviews, performances or music by Dylan, although it does contain other musicians performing old folk songs that Dylan has also performed over throughout his illustrious career. It also contains numerous interviews with music critics, historians, authors, record producers, modern musicians and some of Dylan’s contemporaries and a lot of old archive footage.

The footage is a mixture of images of Dylan, New York and the Village back during the ‘60s, performances and old interviews with many Blues, Folk and Country musicians. Some of the performances included are Hank Williams, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Willie Mitchell, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly and more.

Down The Tracks takes a look not only at Dylan, but the culture in which he was immersed, the state of the Union and the world at that time, the Beat poets, religion and the historical importance of recordings such as The Harry Smith Anthology, which introduced a whole new generation of musicians and poets to the music of the Appalachians, American Folk Music and old Blues musicians who were still kicking around on the front porch of their beaten and weathered homes in the deep South.

This documentary is not only an important collection of information for Dylan fans, but would be of interest to musicologists, historians of Americana, and fans of the various musical styles mentioned within this review. The information presented is well done, intriguing and an entertaining way to understand not only the events that influenced Dylan, but how some of these same circumstances played a large part in the ‘60s culture and the many important interactions between music, its fans and the political world.

The DVD is presented in widescreen format and the audio is in Dolby Digital Stereo. Even the old footage has been well-preserved or cleaned up so that the footage and the audio is of decent quality. There are subtitles in both English and French.

There are no extras on the DVD. With the possibility, and costs, of getting permission to use any Dylan performances, I would suggest maybe an anthology of his work and maybe a quick bio which could be read on each of the major musical influences featured in the documentary. None of those elements are necessary to make Down The Tracks work, but they would be of interest to anyone really studying the musical ingredients that helped to form Dylan.

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