Bob Dylan - I Threw It All Away; Living the Blues; Girl from the North Country

Note that the first few seconds of this 9-minute clip - Johnny Cash's introduction of Dylan - has no audio. Mislabeled on Google Video as simply the duet of Girl from the North Country with Johnny Cash, this is actually Dylan's full May 1969 performance at the legendary Ryman Auditorium in Nashville for The Johnny Cash Show.

As with the One Too Many Mornings clip below, this shows Dylan in full "new" country-western voice that he'd use for Nashville Skyline and for many of the songs on 1970's Self Portrait where the very Hank Snow-like Living the Blues would appear.

Dylan seems very nervous throughout, licking his lips between songs, looking everywhere except at the the audience. Probably not all that surprising as it was only Dylan's second public performance after his 1966 motorcycle crash (in 1968 Dylan had performed at a tribute for Woody Guthrie in New York City, and later in 1969 he would take the stage again for the Isle of Wight Festival). Added to that was the pressure of his performing in front of a Nashville audience that might react poorly and the risk Dylan was taking of alienating his core audience with this radically changed approach to his music.

After the show, a visibly relieved Dylan returned to Johnny Cash's house with a group that included Earl Scruggs, Graham Nash, Nash's then-girlfriend Joni Mitchell, and Kris Kristofferson. Nash recalls Sara Dylan sitting there crying at the drama of the moment.

Bob Dylan & Johnny Cash - One Too Many Mornings

From the Nashville Skyline recording sessions, February 17, 1969 in Nashville, Tennessee. The video is probably from either the documentary Johnny Cash: The Man And His Music, released in 1979 or The Other Side Of Nashville, released in July 1984.

The Cash/Dylan sessions over February 17-18 generated only one commercial release on Nashville Skyline, a duet of Dylan's Girl From The North Country, which had originally appeared on The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, but most - if not all - the material from the sessions have appeared on various bootlegs over the years. This excerpt from a comment on the Between Thought and Expression blog details an interesting history of the origin of the bootleg material:

"... A little history about the source: These were bootlegged in the late 70s or early 80s in poor quality. In 1985 or 86, my friend, Chris D., worked in a video store in Nashville (I lived near there). I had helped him get some space shot videos from NBC, so to return the favor, he called one day and asked if I wanted a cassette of the Cash session. He got it from a guy who found it in his attic, in a box marked "BDJC". That guy's father worked for CBS Nashville in 1969 and made a 1 inch mono reel-to-reel copy of the original session tape. He made Chris a cassette from the 1 inch tape. Chris copied the cassette, and gave me the original. In the fall of 1986, I went to a Dylan collectors meet in Chicago, and we daisy-chained 15 cassette decks together. I was second in the chain, and everyone past me copied my tape. By then, I had added the second "One Too Many Mornings" and the three songs from a betamax tape of the JC TV show, so this CD is one generation down from my original cassette. The original bootleg CD came out about two months later. "Mornings" has a tone shift in the middle, from the video when they change from the studio footage to the control room footage..."