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Added in VOCALS recently was a new CD from The Netherlands by J.W. Scholte & Band.  Just Like A Woman (Scholte sings Dylan)  includes a few rarely covered songs among it's 11 tracks, including  Going, Going, Gone  and Dirge.  IMHO, the standout track on the CD is  Idiot Wind.  All tracks are performed in English.  The CD is nicely presented in a tri-fold digipack with photos of the performers in the studio and others,  and full credits. More info and contact information can be found on the Dutch-language COPYRIGHT JOKE website.  US buyers can order the CD by mailing $20 in cash.  Contact Copyright Joke for instructions.   (I have been told ordering instructions will also be added to their website.) Thanks to Joke Scholte (and to Anton Bohnen for telling me of the CD)

Michel Montecrossa has released a 3rd annual boxset recorded at his 2003 “Michel & Bob Dylan Fest.”  The box includes 5 CDs and a DVD of Michel Montecrossa's 21st century overground musical “Living The Experience.” The Bob Dylan (& Dylan related) songs performed by Michel & band: Kingsport Town, Where Teardrops Fall, What Good Am I?, Disease Of Conceit, What Was It You Wanted?, Shooting Star, Seeing The Real You At Last, Clean-Cut Kid, Something's Burning Baby, You Wanna Ramble, They Killed Him, Driftin' Too Far From Shore, Precious Memories, Maybe Someday, Got My Mind Made Up, Under Your Spell, Sally Sue Brown, Death Is Not The End, Had A Dream About You, Baby, Ugliest Girl In The World, Ninety Miles An Hour (Down A Dead End Street), 'Cross The Green Mountain, Slow Train, Minstrel Boy, It Hurts Me Too, Corrina, Corrina, Fur Slippers, Let's Keep It Between Us, Cold Irons Bound, Wigwam, Alberta #1&2, All The Tired Horses, Early Mornin' Rain, Little Sadie, Belle Isle, Living The Blues, Woogie Boogie, Someone's Got A Hold On My Heart, When I Paint My Masterpiece, You Ain't Goin' Nowhere, Down In The Flood (Crash On The Levee), Carribean Wind, Up To Me, I Wanna Be Your Lover, Tears Of Rage, One More Cup Of Coffee (Valley Below), Positively 4th Street, George Jackson, Rita May, Watching The River Flow.   Also included is a cover of Robbie Robertsons' Broken Arrow, 48 original Montecrossa songs and 3 Montecrossa videos.

April  5, 2003 MAY YOUR SONG ALWAYS BE SUNG VOL. 3

Due to be released May 26 is Volume 3 of BMG's “May Your Song Always Be Sung” series of Dylan tribute albums.  Volume 3 follows the ORIGINAL 1997 CD and 2001's VOLUME 2.  An excerpt from the liner notes: Volume 3 is different from the previous two: first, it’s a double, then it’s a digipack, and then you’ll see some names in the track listing that you might not know. The concept of this album was to gather some of the musically most interesting Dylan covers of recent years on one compilation. So you’ll see some well known artist names in the track listing, even some songs that were exclusively done for this project, and a lot of names that you might not be familiar with, but will make you want to hear more.  --  Hanns Peter Bushoff It's a good one!  More info and a full tracklisting.........Thanks to HP

I have added the 2002 CD  THINKING ABOUT BOB DYLAN  in VARIOUS ARTISTS.  The CD presents 6 Dylan covers + 6 originals (some are about Bob) by six singer/songwriters: Rex Foster, Jack Tannehill, Danny Schmidt, Kate & Paul (Sobolewski), Will Hoppey and Norman Lamont. Mr. Tambourine Man by Jack Tannehill was edited after this original release.  The new version of the song is included on a bonus disc (along with 5 more originals by album artists) that is available for free to purchasers of the remaining stock of the original pressing.  Subsequent pressings will include the updated track.  This CD has been available since last year, but at the time I was told of the upgrade and decided to wait for the new edition.  Since it now appears that isn't imminent, I've added it as-is.....For more info visit:  thinkingaboutbobdylan.com

Due for release 4/1 is the soundtrack to the US TV drama “Crossing Jordan,” featuring a collection of classic songs remade by contemporary artists.  Included are Buckets Of Rain  by Vic Chesnutt  and  It's All Over Now, Baby Blue  by series star Jill Hennessy, making her singing debut.  Hennessy stars in the NBC drama about a Boston medical examiner with a checkered career -- and a penchant for going beyond the call of duty to investigate crimes. Full tracklist & order from:..amazon.com...or...amazon.ca...or...amazon.co.uk

"I like the fact that Bob Dylan couldn't care less about what people say or think about his music, because you write what's in your heart." - Shirley Caesar, the queen of gospel
"I think it's interesting, twenty years now from that time, from that gospel period, there's now a record with people singing those songs. So, twenty years had to go by for people to become aware of the fact that Bob Dylan is one of our great gospel writers?" -- drummer Jim Keltner
Nearly a quarter-century after Bob Dylan's "Gotta Serve Somebody" cracked the Top 30 and garnered him his first Grammy Award, a new album by that name, GOTTA SERVE SOMEBODY: THE GOSPEL SONGS OF BOB DYLAN, presents eleven newly-recorded renditions of songs from Slow Train Coming and Saved performed by today's leading gospel artists, including Aaron Neville ("Saving Grace"), Mighty Clouds of Joy ("Saved"), Lee Williams and the Spiritual QCs ("When You Gonna Wake Up"), the Fairfield Four ("Are You Ready"), and Shirley Caesar, the queen of gospel herself, performing the title track.  The compilation allows these songs to be heard finally in a wholly new and fresh context, perhaps the very context in which they were always destined to be heard - as pure, unadulterated gospel music.  The title arrives in stores March 25th on Columbia Records, a division of Sony Music.
GOTTA SERVE SOMEBODY also includes a new duet by Bob Dylan and Mavis Staples of the Staples Singers on his smoking-hot, rewritten version of "Gonna Change My Way of Thinking," recorded with his 2002 touring band.
"The music is great -- it's uplifting too," says Joe Ligon of the Grammy Award-winning ensemble Mighty Clouds of Joy, contemporary gospel's
preeminent group, known for its trademark quartet style.  Says Ligon, the group's co-founder and leader since 1955, "The music sounds like back home in one of those sanctified churches where I come from, where everybody would get up, and they would be beating a tambourine, and playing the drums, and all of that's going on, and the old ladies, and the young people clapping, and people falling out and feeling God's spirit."
That spirit is heard in the joyous sound of a revival meeting in the Mighty Clouds of Joy's version of "Saved" and in the inspirational, soulful testifying by Detroit singer Rance Allen on "When He Returns."
"The writer of 'When He Returns' has to have had a real experience with the Lord, because those kind of lyrics do not come up out of just singing and writing," said Allen, a featured lead vocalist along with Men of Standard on Something About the Name Jesus" from Kirk Franklin's 1998 blockbuster album The Nu Nation Project.  "It's powerful stuff, powerful stuff."
It wasn't hard to convince these artists to take part in this project. Many of them were already familiar with Bob Dylan's material.  Shirley Caesar, whose crowded trophy closet includes 10 Grammys and 17 Dove awards, sang "Gotta Serve Somebody" at the request of Bob Dylan when President Clinton presented him with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Kennedy Center in 1997.
Mavis Staples, of course, has been a friend of Bob Dylan's for over 40 years (as can be heard near the beginning of "Change My Way of Thinking,"
when Dylan stops the band in order to give Staples a hearty greeting when she wanders into the recording session mid-song). Bob Dylan songs were staples of the Staple Singers' repertoire of "message music" since the early 1960s, and the group ? the first African-American performers to record a Bob Dylan song -- helped make anthems out of Dylan songs like "Blowin' in the Wind," "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" and "Masters of War."
Nor was Aaron Neville a stranger to the work of Bob Dylan; his version of "I Shall Be Released" graced his 2000 gospel album, "Devotion."  He has also recorded a version of "Don't Fall Apart on Me Tonight," and with the Neville Brothers he recorded "The Ballad of Hollis Brown and "With God on Our Side."
Formed in 1921, The Fairfield Four - who were recently featured in both the film and soundtrack to "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" and in the "Down from the Mountain" documentary and concert tour -- stamp "Are You Ready" with their four-part harmony vocals in the vintage, "jubilee" style the quartet helped to create.
The genesis of GOTTA SERVE SOMEBODY: THE GOSPEL SONGS OF BOB DYLAN goes back to 1980, when as a college freshman, executive producer Jeffrey Gaskill attended his first Bob Dylan show.  During this period, Dylan had put aside his political anthems and searing personal ballads in favor of set lists drawn almost entirely of songs from Slow Train Coming and Saved."
"I recognized he was taking a stand and doing something highly unusual for someone in his position, and I was amazed by that," remembers Gaskill.  "I felt the obligation to entrust these songs to the finest gospel singers to be found."
The album -- produced by Joel Moss, best known for his Grammy Award-winning work with gospel singer Cissy Houston -- also reunites Bob Dylan's touring band from his "born-again" period, including bassist Tim Drummond, guitarist Fred Tackett, pianist Terry Young, and drummer Jim Keltner, on a jubilant version of "Solid Rock" performed with Grammy-winning group, Sounds of Blackness, the choir from Dylan's home state of Minnesota.  Also featured is a lead vocal by Regina McCrary, one of the backup singers from Dylan's gospel albums and concert tours, performing "Pressing On" with the Grammy-nominated Chicago Mass Choir.
The album features contributions by organist Spooner Oldham (Percy Sledge, Neil Young) -- also a member of the original gospel touring band - who lends his Hammond B-3 organ to Aaron Neville's version of "Saving Grace," and keyboardist Billy Preston (the Beatles, the Rolling Stones), who plays on two tracks, including a rendition of "What Can I Do For You?" by Grammy nominee and Dove Award-winner Helen Baylor.  The album also includes a version of "I Believe in You" by Atlanta-based, Dove and Stellar award-winning vocalist Dottie Peoples.
"On this recording, we can separate what Dylan is saying in his gospel songs from the drama of his saying it," writes author Tom Piazza in the album's liner notes.  In addition, says Piazza, "we see, again, how rooted Dylan is in the grain of American music, the Saturday night/Sunday morning tug-of-war that has lent tension and fire to the fact of the Gospel in the singing of Ralph Stanley, Little Richard, Charley Patton, Muddy Waters, and Hank Williams, among so many others."
For Regina McCrary, who sang with Bob Dylan throughout the original gospel period in 1979-1981, GOTTA SERVE SOMEBODY  brings things full circle.  A lead vocalist with the Bobby Jones Gospel Choir and the daughter of the late Reverend Sam McCrary  -- "the Singing Preacher" of the Fairfield Four -- McCrary says, "I don't think that a song that is written about God -- about his 'Saving Grace' or about 'Serve Somebody' or 'Pressing On' or 'Saved' or 'I Believe in You' or 'Are You Ready' -- will ever die, no matter who wrote them.  But because Bob Dylan wrote them and we're going in and we're doing them over now, I think that all it does is just remind people that this man is God-gifted."

GOTTA SERVE SOMEBODY: THE GOSPEL SONGS OF BOB DYLAN          (CK/CT 89015)
Selections:
1. Shirley Caesar, "Gotta Serve Somebody"
2. Lee Williams and the Spiritual QCs, "When You Gonna Wake Up"
3. Dottie Peoples, "I Believe in You"
4. Fairfield Four, "Are You Ready"
5. Sounds of Blackness, "Solid Rock"
6. Aaron Neville, "Saving Grace"
7. Helen Baylor, "What Can I Do For You?"
8. Chicago Mass Choir, "Pressing On"
9. Mighty Clouds of Joy, "Saved"
10. Rance Allen, "When He Returns"
11. Bob Dylan and Mavis Staples, "Gonna Change My Way of Thinking.

DYLAN COVER ALBUMS  has again received a  Golden Web Award  for 2003-2004. The Golden Web Awards are awarded by The International Association of Web Masters and Designers and is presented to those sites whose web design, originality and content have achieved levels of excellence deserving of recognition.