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"Nettie Moore" is a folk love song written and performed by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released in 2006 as the eighth track on his album Modern Times. As with much of Dylan's 21st-century output, he produced the song himself under the pseudonym Jack Frost.

Composition and recording

The song is characterized by unusually spare (for late-period Dylan) musical backing and a memorable vocal melody that sees Dylan's voice rise and fall with the delivery of each line in the verse. Speaking to USA Today's Edna Gunderson, Dylan said that "Nettie Moore", more than any other song on Modern Times, “troubled me the most, because I wasn’t sure I was getting it right. Finally, I could see what the song is about. This is coherent, not just a bunch of random verses. I knew I wanted to record this. I was pretty hyped up on the melodic line”. The song is performed in the sounding key of B major.

Critical reception

Jon Dolan, writing in Rolling Stone, where the song placed eighth on a list of "The 25 Best Bob Dylan Songs of the 21st Century", noted that, although it has lyrical roots in the 1857 James Lord Pierpont and Marshall S. Pike composition "Gentle Nettie Moore" and other pre-20th century folk songs, Dylan's "Nettie Moore" nonetheless "feels so personal" to the songwriter because of the way he sings of wandering the earth and being "in a cowboy band".

Spectrum Culture included the song on a list of Dylan's "20 Best Songs of the '00s". In an article accompanying the list, critic Tyler Dunston also sees the song as a "personal account", noting that "Dylan conflates the myth of a version of himself with American music, the story of which is deeply entangled with mythology and history—from the Faustian fiction of Robert Johnson’s legendary guitar skill to the very real histories of oppression that blues and folk music arise out of and document. It is one of the great ironies of the history of the blues that the racial discrimination which they so often documented is itself responsible for the fact that the early history of the blues is so poorly documented. Dylan knows it is impossible to fill these gaps, but he weaves an incomplete tapestry anyway. (We may see his supposed 'plagiarism' as a kind of scattered history.)"

In their book Bob Dylan All the Songs: The Story Behind Every Track, authors Philippe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon praise the song's "very creative arrangement, including a highly streamlined rhythm section...and cello playing pizzicato as well as with the bow" and call it "one of the best songs on Modern Times".

Singer/songwriter Patti Smith included it on a playlist of her "16 favorite Bob Dylan love songs." On the opposite end of the spectrum, historian Sean Wilentz, seeing darker implications in the line "No knife could ever cut our love apart", interprets the song as being an oblique murder ballad in his book Bob Dylan's America.

A USA Today article ranking "all of Bob Dylan's songs" placed "Nettie Moore" 24th (out of 359).

Jokermen Podcast placed the song 9th on their ranking of Dylan's top 100 post-1966 songs.

Cultural references

The line "Blues this mornin' fallin' down like a hail" paraphrases a line from Robert Johnson's "Hellhound on My Trail".

The line "They say whisky'll kill you, but I don't think it will" is a reference to the traditional folk song "Moonshiner".

The line "Albert's in the graveyard, Frankie's raising hell" is a reference to the traditional folk song "Frankie and Albert".

The line "I'm going where the Southern crosses the Yellow Dog" is a reference to the earliest known blues lyric. At a train station in Tutwiler, Mississippi in 1903, W. C. Handy heard a Black man playing a blues song on a steel guitar using a knife as a slide. The man repeatedly sang the phrase, "Goin’ where the Southern cross’ the Dog”, which Handy later popularized in his own 1914 song “Yellow Dog Blues”.

Live Performances

Between 2006 and 2012 Dylan performed the song 142 times in concert on the Never Ending Tour. The live debut occurred at ARCO Arena in Sacramento, California on October 18, 2006 and the last performance (to date) took place at Rexall Place in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada on October 9, 2012.

Cover versions

The song was covered by Born 53 on their 2012 album Thieving in the Alley and Muscle & Bone on their 2013 album Masterpieces of Bob Dylan.

Notes

1. "August 29: Bob Dylan released Modern Times in 2006 | Born To Listen". 29 August 2020. Retrieved 2021-02-09.
2. "Nettie Moore | dylanchords". dylanchords.com. Retrieved 2021-05-28.
3. Dolan, Jon; Doyle, Patrick; Greene, Andy; Hiatt, Brian; Martoccio, Angie; Sheffield, Rob; Shteamer, Hank; Vozick-Levinson, Simon (2020-06-18). "The 25 Best Bob Dylan Songs of the 21st Century". Rolling Stone. Retrieved 2020-12-18.
4. "Gentle Nettie Moore", 1857 sheet music, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Libraries, Digital Collections. Retrieved 16 December 2022.
5. "Bob Dylan's 20 Best Songs of the '00s". Spectrum Culture. 2020-12-04. Retrieved 2021-03-03.
6. Margotin, Philippe (27 October 2015). Bob Dylan : all the songs : the story behind every track. Guesdon, Jean-Michel (First ed.). New York. ISBN 978-1-57912-985-9. OCLC 869908038.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
7. "Patti Smith names her 16 favourite Bob Dylan love songs". Far Out Magazine. July 1, 2020. Retrieved 2020-12-18.
8. Wilentz, Sean (2011). Bob Dylan in America (First Anchor Books ed.). New York. ISBN 978-0-7679-3179-3. OCLC 697261610.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
9. "Ranking all of Bob Dylan's songs, from No. 1 to No. 359". For The Win. 2015-11-06. Retrieved 2021-01-02.
10. Jokermen (2023-06-21). "The Jokermen 100, Volume 3". Jokermen. Retrieved 2023-07-28.
11. "Nettie Moore | The Official Bob Dylan Site". www.bobdylan.com. Retrieved 2021-01-02.
12. "Hellhound on My Trail Lyrics". www.lyrics.com. Retrieved 2021-01-02.
13. "Folk Song Lyrics Archive". songbat.com. Retrieved 2021-01-02.
14. "Frankie & Albert | The Official Bob Dylan Site". www.bobdylan.com. Retrieved 2021-01-02.
15. r2WPadmin. "Southern Cross the Dog". Mississippi Encyclopedia. Retrieved 2022-12-16.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
16. "Bob Dylan Tour Statistics | setlist.fm". www.setlist.fm. Retrieved 2021-01-02.
17. "Setlists | The Official Bob Dylan Site". www.bobdylan.com. Retrieved 2021-05-28.
18. "Tune Doctor: Dylan Covers # 165 Born 53/Muscle and Bone - Nettie Moore". Tune Doctor. Retrieved 2020-12-18.

External links

• Lyrics at Bob Dylan's official site
• Chords at Dylanchords

• Bob Dylan songs
• 2006 songs
• Songs written by Bob Dylan
• Song recordings produced by Bob Dylan