Bob Dylan / 3:00
Musicians
Bob Dylan: vocals, guitar, harmonica
Charlie McCoy: bass
Kenneth Buttrey: drums
Recording Studio
Columbia Recording Studios, Nashville: November 6, 1967
Technical Team
Producer: Bob Johnston Sound Engineer: Charlie Bragg
Bob Dylan named his song and album after a late nineteenth-century Texas outlaw and gunfighter named John Wesley Hardin. He added a g to Hardin, presumably in error. But the outlaw has nothing to do with the character in the song. Hardin killed about forty people before being shot to death by John Selman Sr., an El Paso lawman. He was not the “friend of the poor… / [who] was never known / To hurt an honest man” as described in Dylan’s song. A certain analogy can be made with the protagonist of Woodie Guthrie’s “Pretty Boy Floyd.” Dylan is not trying to idealize Hardin, but rather to have a new look at an outlaw, as filmmaker Arthur Penn did in Bonnie and Clyde, released a few months earlier, and as Sam Peckinpah also did two years later with The Wild Bunch and George Roy Hill with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Of “John Wesley Harding,” Robert Shelton wrote, “The song has an open-range roll, the feel of caked mud on the boots.”7
Dylan told Jann Wenner in a 1969 Rolling Stone magazine interview that there is no meaning behind this song, although some critics suggest that the initials JWH may refer to Yahweh, the Hebrew name for God in the Old Testament. “Well, I called it that because I had that song, ‘John Wesley Harding.’ It didn’t mean anything to me. I called it that, Jann, ’cause I had the song ‘John Wesley Harding,’ which started out to be a long ballad. I was gonna write a ballad on… like maybe one of those old cowboy… you know, a real long ballad. But in the middle of the second verse, I got tired. I had a tune, and I didn’t want to waste the tune; it was a nice little melody, so I just wrote a quick third verse, and I recorded that.” Dylan told Rolling Stone that he chose “John Wesley Harding” because “it fits in tempo. Fits right in tempo. Just what I had at hand.”20 His explanation tends to minimize the value of the text and to desecrate it in the eyes of some critics. But Dylan thinks and writes in a musical way; his lyrics work with the rhythm of the song.
The album opens with “John Wesley Harding,” a light and catchy country song, which contrasts with the intensity of Blonde on Blonde, his previous album, but is close enough to the songs just recorded for The Basement Tapes, except for the arrangements. The song marked Dylan’s return to acoustic music and traditional sound roots. Only multi-instrumentalist Charlie McCoy on bass and the excellent Kenneth Buttrey on drums backed Dylan. Despite all Buttrey’s qualities, he oddly chose to perform a complicated rhythmic progression during the second chorus. This resulted in him entangling the drumsticks at 1:43, something unusual for Buttrey. Dylan sings in a calm tone of voice and plays acoustic guitar by strumming, presumably a Martin 0-18, and harmonica in F. The song “John Wesley Harding” was recorded in two takes on November 6, 1967, at Columbia’s Recording Studios in Nashville. The second take was chosen for the album. Curiously, Dylan has never performed this song onstage.