The one singer Bob Dylan felt was as good as Elvis Presley: “The only one”
Bob Dylan was always going to do whatever the hell he wanted to do every single time he made a record.
He never wanted to dance to anyone else’s tunes but his own, and even if that infuriated a fair share of people when he was making his records, he was content knowing that he was making some of the best music that he could whenever he sat down with a guitar in his hands. But even if Dylan was transparent every time he played one of his tunes, he felt that some artists were much better at articulating what they were trying to say every single time they performed.
But a lot of Dylan’s greatest songs often are when he’s talking out of both sides of his mouth. He didn’t like the idea of giving his audience the whole truth whenever he sang, so while there were more than a few times when he had songs that dealt with some difficult subjects, you would hear him say lines that were slightly sarcastic every single time he sang them. You never knew where he was going, but it took a special songwriter to lay everything out completely bare.
And when it comes to honesty, the greatest genre for it is country music. While a lot of the greatest country songs are meant to be the most complicated things in the world, Dylan would always marvel at the kind of passion behind everything that came out of Nashville. He was in awe of how someone like Johnny Cash could really inhabit every single song he sang, but there was always a little bit more depth to the way that Willie Nelson approached every single one of his tunes.
Nelson was already a professional songwriter, but he was never afraid to take a chance and perform some of the songs from his youth, either. Some of the greatest tunes that he ever made were watching him remake old standards, and even when he was plucking away on Trigger when singing a song like ‘Stardust’, you’d be forgiven for thinking that it was a tune that he wrote on his own while strumming away at home.
It was that homemade nature that appealed to Dylan, and even when everyone fawned over Elvis Presley, he felt that Nelson could match ‘the King’ with his own material, saying, “He takes whatever he’s singing and makes it his, and there’s not many people who can do that. With something like an Elvis tune. When Elvis does a tune, it’s pretty much done, but Willie’s the only one in my recollection that has taken something of Elvis’s and made it his. Put his own trip on it.”
But that also comes from the tone of voice that Nelson always had as well. He was never trying to make the kind of grand spectacle that Presley was known for every single time he sang, and whether he was singing one of the old country classics or reinterpreting some rock and roll tunes, Nelson was always going to have that same slice-of-life-style vocal that sounds like an old grandpa imparting some wisdom on their grandchildren.
And that trickled down into what Dylan did half the time as well. Even though he didn’t always knock it out of the park when covering someone else’s tunes, you were never going to forget when Dylan did his own version of a standard, whether that was him reinterpreting some of the traditional tunes that he had heard as a kid or later in his career when he pulled from the Great American Songbook.
Because while songwriting was both Dylan’s and Nelson’s expertise, that was only one facet iof what they did as entertainers. The whole point of getting up onstage was delivering their own take on a song, and whether it was one of their old tunes or something that they had heard on the radio decades before, they were always going to approach it from a different perspective depending on where they were at that particular moment.
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