Barking Dog: July 24, 2025

This Week’s Theme: Barking Dog Goes Electric

Tomorrow marks 60 years since Bob Dylan “went electric” at Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island. The day before, he had played three acoustic songs at a workshop, and apparently decided that night that he would amplify his performance the next day in response to snide comments made by folklorist Alan Lomax while he was introducing the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, who played an electric set. During Dylan’s set on July 25th, he not only played an electric guitar, but played aggressively, quickly and very loudly—something that had never been heard at the folk festival. This resulted in a complicated response from an audience that had likely never heard such a loud performance in their lives; some audience members remembered other audience members booing the performance, while others recalled members of the press or even other performers booing. The target of the boos is also debated; while many people believe that Dylan was booed simply for going electric, others maintain that the emcee, Peter Yarrow, was being booed for his disorganized response, or that the audience was booing because the sound quality was so bad. A lot of confusion still surrounds the event, and many myths have been spread over the years. Perhaps the most widespread of these claims is that Pete Seeger threatened to cut the cables with an axe, though in reality, he merely told the audio technicians that he would cut the mic cable with an axe if he had one because the distortion was so bad that Dylan’s voice was incoherent. Seeger maintained that he never had a problem with Dylan going electric, but misrepresentations of the incident still abound today. Whatever really happened is lost to time, but after 1965, Dylan did not return to the Newport Folk Festival until 37 years later, in 2002, when he performed wearing a fake beard and a wig. Today on the show, Barking Dog is “going electric” to honour the 60th anniversary of Dylan’s performance at Newport. You’ll hear folk rock of all kinds on the show, including songs from Dylan’s set.

• Bob Dylan - Maggie’s Farm

  • This song is from his 1965 album Bringing It All Back Home

  • It was the first song he played at Newport that year

• Taj Mahal - The Cuckoo

  • Taj Mahal is a Grammy-winning blues musician from New York City whose career has spanned over 50 years

  • ​​This is a traditional English folk song also popular in the US, Canada, Scotland, and Ireland

  • Taj Mahal’s version is from his 1968 album The Natch’l Blues

• Lonnie Pitchford - My Babe

  • American blues artist and instrument maker from Mississippi

  • He played acoustic and electric guitar, one string guitar, diddley bow, double bass, piano, and harmonica

  • This is from a series called Living Country Blues USA, which consists of field recordings made of American blues artists in 1980 by two German blues enthusiasts named Axel Kustner and Siegfried Christmann

  • This is a blues standard written by Willie Dixon and first recorded by Little Walter in 1955

  • The song is based on the traditional gospel song “This Train”

• The Beach Boys - Shortenin’ Bread

  • This is from 1979’s LA (Light Album)

  • It’s an African American folk song dating back to at least the 1890s that likely originated on plantations in the southern states

• Blue Rodeo - Four Strong Winds

  • They’re a band from Toronto that have been active since the 1980s

  • This is off the 2007 compilation album The Gift: A Tribute to Ian Tyson

  • The song is by Tyson, who wrote it in about 20 minutes in his manager’s apartment in New York City in 1962

• Led Zeppelin - Gallows Pole

  • This song is also known as “The Maid Freed from the Gallows” and “The Hangman Song”

  • It was first collected by Francis James Child in the 19th century

  • It’s one of many ballads with the theme of a woman pleading for someone to buy her freedom from the hangman

  • It may have originated in continental Europe, as there are versions from Finland, Sweden, and even Lithuania

  • This is their arrangement of the American folk musician Fred Gerlach's version of the song

  • They included it on their 1970 album Led Zeppelin III

• Neil Young, Crazy Horse - Blowin’ in the Wind

  • This is from their 1991 live album Weld, recorded during their Ragged Glory album tour, which took place during the Gulf War and influenced how the band played this and other songs

  • Bob Dylan included the song on his 1963 album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan

• Lucinda Williams - It’s Nobody’s Fault But Mine

  • She’s a musician from Louisiana who’s been performing for over 40 years

  • This is from the 2016 compilation album God Don’t Never Change: The Songs of Blind Willie Johnson

  • This song is by Johnson, who recorded it in 1927

  • It’s been performed by many artists, including Eric Bibb, the Grateful Dead, and Led Zeppelin

• Muddy Waters - I Can’t Be Satisfied

  • Well-known American blues musician who grew up on a plantation in Mississippi, and later moved to Chicago in the 1940s to pursue a career in music, where he began performing electric blues

  • This is from his 1977 album Hard Again

  • It’s his own song, which he recorded several times throughout his career, the first in 1941

• The Chieftones - I Shouldn’t Have Did What I Done

  • They were an Indigenous band that formed in Edmonton in 1964 and had several songs that charted on Billboard lists

  • This is a B-side from 1966 that was included on the Grammy-nominated 2014 compilation album Native North America

• Dave Van Ronk, The Hudson Dusters - Mr. Middle

  • A member of the Greenwich Village folk scene in New York City, known as the “Mayor of MacDougal Street”, MacDougal Street being where practically every coffeehouse was located in the 60s

  • This is from his brief foray into electric rock music, recorded for the 1967 album Dave Van Ronk and the Hudson Dusters

• The Weakerthans - Ringing of Revolution

  • This is from the 1999 compilation album Return of the Read Menace, released by Winnipeg-based independent record label G7 Welcoming Committee Records

  • This song is by Phil Ochs, who later changed the title to “Rhythms of Revolution,” deciding that it sounded better

  • The song contains one of the earliest lyrical references to Ronald Reagan

• Thin Lizzy - Whiskey in the Jar

  • They’re an Irish rock band that formed in 1969

  • This recording from their 1972 album Shades of a Blue Orphanage was a major international hit

  • It’s a traditional Irish song possibly from the 18th century

• Jimi Hendrix - Like a Rolling Stone

  • This was recorded live at the Monterey Pop Festival in June of 1967

  • It’s a version of Bob Dylan’s 1965 song, and he debuted it as the second song in his infamous Newport Folk Festival set that year

• Jim Nollman - Heavy Metal

  • Off the 1982 Folkways album Playing Music with Animals: Interspecies Communication of Jim Nollman with 300 Turkeys, 12 Wolves and 20 Orcas

  • The notes for the album states that the tracks differ from other touted interspecies pieces because they were mostly recorded in real time, not dubbed in the studio

  • This is a duet he made with orcas and guitar

  • Nollman notes that the orca is the “most logical choice for any experiment in advanced interspecies communication”

• Feist - When I Was a Young Girl

  • She’s a Canadian singer-songwriter who’s been playing since the 1990s

  • This is from her 2004 album Let It Die

  • This song is a member of the “Unfortunate Rake” song family, which includes “St. James Hospital,” “The Cowboy’s Lament,” “One Morning in May,” and “The Young Sailor Cut Down in His Prime,” though this is the story of a young girl “gone wrong”, rather than a ballad about a misguided boy, or “rake”

• Deerhoof - Freedom Highway

  • They’re a band from San Francisco that formed in 1994

  • This is from their 2017 album Mountain Moves

  • The song is by the Staple Singers, who wrote it for the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery Civil Rights march

• Narwaltz - Two Ravens

  • They’re a folk rock band from Winnipeg, and this one is from their 2024 album On the Edge

  • It’s an adaptation of a traditional ballad that originated more than 400 years ago as an English ballad called “The Three Ravens,” and was later adapted into the Scots language as “The Twa’ Corbies”

• John Lee Hooker - Two White Horses

  • He was a Mississippi blues musician known for adapting the Delta blues for electric guitar

  • This is a loose version of what is often known as “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean”, written by Blind Lemon Jefferson and first recorded in 1927

  • Hooker’s version is from his 1969 album That’s Where It’s At!

• Lisa LeBlanc - Ace of Spades

  • A New Brunswick musician

  • This is from 2016, and it’s a song by Motörhead

• Tom Waits - Ain’t Goin’ Down to the Well

  • He’s a very well known American musician, composer, and actor who’s been playing professionally for 50 years

  • This is from his 2006 album Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards

  • It’s a traditional gospel song originally recorded by Lead Belly in 1948

• Rush - Crossroads

  • This is from their 2004 EP Feedback, which consists of covers of songs that were influential to the members of the band in the 1960s

  • It’s a song by Robert Johnson, which he recorded in 1936

• Iron & Wine, Ben Bridwell - Coyote

  • Iron & Wine is the stage name of Sam Beam, a singer-songwriter from South Carolina

  • Bridwell is an American musician best known as the lead singer of Band of Horses

  • This is from their 2015 covers album Sing into My Mouth

  • It’s a version of a song by American folksinger Peter La Farge

• Grateful Dead - Cold Rain and Snow

  • This comes from their 1967 self-titled debut album

  • “Rain and Snow” is a folk song and murder ballad from North Carolina

  • It possibly relates the story of a murder that occurred in Madison County, NC in the late 19th century

  • The Grateful Dead learned their version from an influential 1961 recording by North Carolina banjo player Obray Ramsey

• BTO - House of the Rising Sun

  • This is from their 1999 compilation album Trial By Fire

  • It’s an American folk song that could have origins in either England or France

  • The oldest published version of the lyrics were printed by Robert Winslow Gordon in 1925, but it was known to miners around 1905

• Big Mama Thornton - I Shall Be Released

  • She was a blues singer from Alabama known as a key figure in the creation of rock n’ roll through her 1952 recording of the song “Hound Dog”

  • This one is from her 1969 album Stronger Than Dirt

  • It’s a song by Bob Dylan and the Band, who released it on their 1968 album Music from Big Pink

• Bob Dylan - Phantom Engineer

  • This was the last song he performed in his set at Newport in 1965

  • It’s an early version of “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry” from his album Highway 61 Revisited, which was released in August of that year