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Singers and Little Peggy March had topped the American charts). The communist witch-hunt theme of ‘Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues’ was telescoped into a one-line aside, which is just about what it deserved.

CORRINA, CORRINA
    First registered as ‘Corrine Corrina’ by Bo Chatman, Mitchell Parish and J.M.Williams in 1932, this lilting blues had been recorded several times by such artists as Blind Lemon Jefferson and most notably on several occasions by Big Joe Turner, before its revival in the early Sixties.
    Dylan’s version is of a completely different stripe from Turner’s good-natured R&B swing, not least through the addition of a verse about having “a bird that whistles… a bird that sings,” adapted from Robert Johnson’s ‘Stones In My Passway’. Dylan was at the time clearly fascinated by the mercurial Johnson—an earlier, unreleased solo take of the same song also featured fragments from the legendary bluesman’s ‘Me And The Devil Blues’ and ‘Hellhound On My Trail’, too. Subsequently, he attributed the song’s style to another, more mellifluous blues legend, Lonnie Johnson (no relation to Robert), who shares with T-Bone Walker the pioneer status of “inventor of the electric blues.”
    â€œI was lucky to meet Lonnie Johnson at the same club I was working and I must say he greatly influenced me,” Bob admitted later. “You can hear it in ‘Corrina, Corrina’—that’s pretty much Lonnie Johnson. I used to watch him and sometimes he’d let me play with him.”
    The song features one of Dylan’s more beguiling vocal performances, a wistful lamentation in which the depths of his heartbreak are signaled by the gentle falsetto catch in the throat that recurs in the last line of each verse. The inspiration is obviously Suze’s absence. The album version is all that resulted from three otherwise largely unproductive sessions with a full backing band, although another take, marked by a wheeze of harmonica on the intro and a more strident harmonica solo in the break, was released prior to the album, as the B-side of ‘Mixed Up Confusion’.

HONEY, JUST ALLOW ME ONE MORE CHANCE
    Coming toward the end of a largely downbeat album of protest songs and lovelorn blues, this jaunty adaptation of a song originally written by the Texan country bluesman Henry Thomas offers a more light-hearted, breezy expression of Dylan’s pain over his absent woman. It’s a swaggering performance, which best exemplifies Dylan’s understanding of the blues as a means of cathartic healing, as explained in the sleevenote to Freewheelin ’: “What made the real blues singers so great is that they were able to state all the problems they had; but at the same time, they were standing outside of them and could look at them. And in that way, they had them beat.”

I SHALL BE FREE
    First recorded for the November 1962 issue of Broadside magazine, this comic talking blues trifle closes the album almost as an afterthought, as if the stage performer in Dylan realizes how intense the album is as a whole, and wants to “leave ’em laughing.” He wouldn’t be so concerned to do this on later records, but here he goofs around with a cast that includes Yul Brynner, Charles De Gaulle, President Kennedy and several of the world’s most beautiful women, to no particular end. Politically incorrect by today’s standards, this light-hearted account of Dylan’s womanizing does, however, prefigure some of his later work in its tone of blithe nonsense: for one who was being increasingly painted as the serious young spokesman of a generation, Dylan seems determined in this song to keep open his options on different modes of meaning. Or in this case, meaninglessness.

THE TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGIN’
    In the few short months between the release of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan in