The Story Behind The Song: ‘Girl From The North Country’ – the song that united Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash
Two absolute icons of the folk music game are the inimitable Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash. Cash started his music career in 1954 after serving in the United States Army, while Dylan first came to the fore five years later in 1959. The two legendary musicians finally came together and recorded a song of Dylan’s in union on his 1969 album Nashville Skyline.
During a Reddit ‘Ask Me Anything’ session, Cash’s son, John Carter Cash, told of the pair’s first meeting: “My father told me he met Bob Dylan in a New York City hotel room in the early 1960s,” he wrote. “They had corresponded, writing letters back and forth; dad said that when he met Bob that Dylan rushed into his room, jumped on the bed, and began bouncing up and down chanting I met Johnny Cash, I met Johnny Cash.”
“They had a dear friendship,” Carter Cash added, “And although they didn’t spend a lot of time together in the last part of my dad’s life, they never ceased being friends”. It’s a beautiful tale of how the two folk icons came together. Evidently, Dylan admired Cash so much that he could not contain his excitement and jumped up and down on the bed like a little boy.
In Cash’s autobiography, Cash: The Autobiography, Cash discussed his first taste of Dylan and how it led to the first letters sent between the two men. “I had a portable record player that I’d take along on the road, and I’d put on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan backstage, then go out and do my show, then listen again as soon as I came off,” he wrote.
Cash added: “After a while at that, I wrote Bob a letter telling him how much of a fan I was. He wrote back almost immediately, saying he’d been following my music since ‘I Walk the Line,’ and so we began a correspondence”. That correspondence would prove pivotal in the union of two of the great musicians of all time.
The admiration was evidently mutual. When Cash sadly died in 2003, Dylan paid a touching tribute to the memory of his friend. “In plain terms, Johnny was and is the North Star; you could guide your ship by him — the greatest of the greats then and now,” he said. “Truly, he is what the land and country is all about. The heart and soul of it personified and what it means to be here, and he said it all in plain English. I think we can have recollections of him, but we can’t define him any more than we can define a fountain of truth, light and beauty.”
Dylan added: “If we want to know what it means to be mortal, we need to look no further than the Man in Black. Blessed with a profound imagination, he used the gift to express all the various lost causes of the human soul”. These are truly beautiful words that Cash himself would have most likely been envious of. Thankfully, for both artists, they would finally play together on Dylan’s ‘Girl From The North Country’ from his 1969 album Nashville Skyline.
Bob Johnston had produced Dylan’s previous album, Blonde on Blonde, and also took the reigns on Cash’s At Folsom Prison. When the two came together for Nashville Skyline, Johnston hoped that an entire album between the two would be recorded. In a way, it was, as Cash and Dylan recorded 15 songs together during a busy session. However, it was only ‘Girl From The North Country’ that actually featured on the final record.
The track tells of a mystery woman and both Cash and Dylan sing of their longing for her. The song had first been written by Dylan when he visited England late in 1962 when he had been completing his second album. Many Dylan fans have deliberated on who the mystery woman in the song really is, with some suggesting it could have been any of his former girlfriends, Echo Helstrom, Bonnie Beecher or Suze Rotolo.
When Dylan was in London, he met folk revivalist Martin Carthy who exposed him to several traditional English folk songs, which Dylan used to inform ‘Girl From The North Country’. Carthy also showed Dylan his own song ‘Scarborough Fair’, and he used the lyrics and melody to inform his track, including the line “Remember me to one who lives there, she once was a true love of mine”.
The song arrived on 1963’s The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, which Cash, of course, greatly admired. When the opportunity came for Cash to collaborate on one of his favourite Dylan songs in 1969, he simply couldn’t resist, and by offering his deep vocals to the track, contrasting with Dylan’s crooner-like singing employed on Nashville Skyline, he helped to deliver the song’s theme of long-lost love with all the more fervour. Check out the track below.
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