Bob Dylan / 3:20
Musician
Bob Dylan: vocals, guitar, harmonica
Recording Studio
Columbia Recording Studios / Studio A, New York: November 20, 1961
Technical Team
Producers: John Hammond
Sound Engineers: George Knuerr and Pete Dauria
“Talkin’ New York” is a bluesy track over which a story is told in a style closer to narrative than to song. Even though the creation of the style is attributed to Christopher Allen Bouchillon, a musician from South Carolina to whom we owe “Talking Blues” (1926) and “Born in Hard Luck” (1927), Woody Guthrie popularized it in the early 1940s.
In this talking blues, Bob Dylan took inspiration from three songs by his mentor: “Talking Subway,” “New York Town,” and “Pretty Boy Floyd.” It traces his discovery of New York with a kind of derision, even cynicism. He speaks of “people [who] going down to the ground” and “buildings [that] going up to the sky,” then he comes back to his own experience: “I landed up on the North side: Greenwich Village / I walked down there and I ended up in one of them coffeehouses on the block / Got on the stage to sing and play / Man there said, Come back some other day, You sound like a hillbilly / We want folksingers here.” Dylan concludes “Talkin’ New York” with a farewell to New York and a welcome to East Orange. East Orange is the New Jersey town where Bob and Sid Gleason lived at the time. During Woody Guthrie’s hospitalization at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in Morris County, the Gleasons hosted the folksinger every weekend, along with Dylan and many other songwriters. Bob Dylan confessed that he wrote “Talkin’ New York” in May 1961, during a trip that took him away from the Big Apple for some time.
“Talkin’ New York” is the first original song recorded by Dylan for his first album. Although the song does not reach the length of some of his future titles, like “Hurricane” or “Desolation Row,” the lyrics are no less substantive. Dylan also says he had no trouble memorizing long texts: “I didn’t find it troubling at all to remember or sing the story lines.”9 In a style reminiscent of Merle Travis and harmonically based on Woody Guthrie’s “Talking Subway,” Dylan provides the rhythm on his Gibson J-50, playing with three chords on fast tempo, and for the solo parts playing harmonica (in G). It is the only song on the album with a fade-out effect at the end. “Talkin’ New York” required two takes to be immortalized, the second take being the one chosen for the album.