Early Mornin' Rain
Featured on Dylan's polarizing Self Portrait album, this is a cover of Gordon Lightfoot's modern folk standard about watching airplanes instead of trains. The blues thread runs through Dylan's vocal performance. He ignores the polished, melodic delivery of Lightfoot's original, instead attacking the song with a ragged, sliding vocal technique heavily indebted to blues phrasing. He treats this Canadian folk tune the same way he would a Blind Lemon Jefferson standard, bending notes and stretching syllables to find the grit inside the melody.
The floating-verse lineage for this recording (who else recorded it, where the melody or lyric traveled, and how it was adapted) is still being mapped. This section will trace the song's DNA across the archive.
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