Rory Block: Positively 4th Street - A Tribute To Bob Dylan

Artists sufficiently motivated to offer homage to Bob Dylan can still end up sounding more foolish than brave. With Positively 4th Street—A Tribute To Bob Dylan, veteran contemporary folksinger Rory Block places herself in the latter category and with no little panache too.

Apart from guitarist Cindy Cashdollar's baritone guitar solo etching "Not Dark Yet," Block handles all the vocals, guitars and percussion on these nine recordings. And in keeping with that aforementioned courageous choice of song featuring her guest, she selects plenty of other thought-provoking material from a genuinely legendary canon, not the least among which is The Bard's epic and acerbic rumination on culture, "Murder Most Foul."

Rory Block actually ups the ante on the author with her interpretation of this cull from from Dylan's Rough And Rowdy Ways (Columbia Records, 2020 (also the source for "Mother of Muses" within the nine cuts). A 20:42 rendition longer than the Nobel Laureate's, it is a suspenseful and climactic final flourish to an album that fully lives up to its subtitle (right down to the superimposed cover photos taken in the Greenwich Village environs in which both the artist and her subject cut their respective teeth in folk music circles of the Sixties).

The most skeletal arrangement on the record, this concluding track becomes more haunting as it progresses. But elsewhere too, Block is equally effective in her bare bones approach. For instance, she uses dobro guitar to place "Everything Is Broken" in a decidedly rootsy mode, an artful performance that in its own way resonates as deeply as this emotive reading of "Like A Rolling Stone."

In both cases, Block's voice is the flashpoint. Sounding as aged as a long-in-the-tooth blueswoman, the fluidity of her phrasing is deceptive as she hits notes to make them resound so fittingly on "Ring Them Bells." In much the same purposeful fashion, the precision of her singing illuminates the world-weary tone of "Not Dark Yet."

Sensitive co-production by the artist with recording and mixing engineer Rob Davis juxtaposes that fatalistic, cloistered ode to mortality with the freewheeling air of "Mr Tambourine Man." And besides highlighting the expert sequencing of the album, this side-by-side points up one of the few instances of any overt nods to Dylan's idiosyncratic singing style.

Alongside some impromptu vocal fillips, prominent bottleneck guitar decorates the comparatively unsung composition of The Bard's that serves as this album's title song, Accordingly, it echoes as an expression of personal truth for Rory Block, just like the rest of Positively 4th Street.

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