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Thinking About Someone


Speaking of Alicia Keys (previous post) when Bob Dylan mentioned her in his Thunder on the Mountain song (above) he generated some churn among the Dylanologists who take his every word as Gospel.  (I’m a little guilty of that too but the Alicia reference didn’t really bother me one way or the other.)  

However, several folks thought it odd that Dylan would mention Alicia (click here) and some even went so far as to say that it made him sound a little like a dirty old man.  Here’s a Google sampling of the coverage about Bob referencing her:

But like so many things with Bob, one never knows just what the hell he was up to.  Turns out that he was simply paraphrasing an old blues song sung by Memphis Minnie:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Times_(Bob_Dylan_album)

Here is the video of that Memphis Minnie tune.  (Another song of hers’ When the Levee Breaks would later be “appropriated” by Led Zeppelin (click here for story.)

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