Songs Bob Dylan ALMOST Covered In Concert

Surprises on '90s cue sheets: Son House, Ray Price, and more

One of my weird areas of fascination in Dylan touring (I mean, even weirder than having a fascination with Dylan touring to begin with) are cue sheets. These are the pieces of paper that are placed on stage for Bob and the band members to remember the setlists.

They still use these today, even though the setlist basically doesn’t change. Why risk someone having an onstage brain fart trying to remember what comes after “When I Paint My Masterpiece,” no matter how many times you’ve done it before (the answer, by the way, is “Black Rider”). 

That said, the most interesting cue sheets come from back when the setlists were changing every night. As I’ve explored before, they can tell an alternate history of a show, displaying in black and white the songs Bob was considering playing, but didn’t. He would often list two or three different song options in a single slot, and pick one in the moment. Hell, sometimes he didn’t pick any of them, and decided he’d rather play some other song instead.

Today, I wanted to look for the cue sheet Holy Grail. Not looking for listed songs he didn’t play that night. Not even listed songs he didn’t play that tour. I wanted to look for listed songs he didn’t play ever. But, apparently, came close to playing—close enough that he had them written down on the paper in front of him onstage. The band was ready to launch into them, presumably they’d rehearsed them, but, when he got to that slot on the sheet of paper, Bob went in a different direction. And he never played the song anywhere else either.

These are all covers. They mostly come from the ‘90s, since that’s the period where we have cue sheets for every show—shoutout Bill Pagel at BobLinks, where I found most of these. At some point, cue sheets became rare for fans to acquire. If Bob had “Lily Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts” written on the paper last month, I have no idea. But, for most the ‘90s, we would have known.

Let’s look in chronological order at eight songs Bob almost covered in the ‘90s. He was planning it. Probably even rehearsed them with the band. But he never did them onstage. Not at that show. Not ever.

Freight Train Blues

The first few setlists are handwritten—by Bob himself, if an auction site for one of them, is to be believed. And I do believe it, because surely an employee would make more of an effort to make it legible by the boss (that’s even more of an issue on the next one).

This first one comes from a show in Charleston, West Virginia in 1990. Scan through and see if anything jumps out. If it doesn’t, go back to the sixth song on the list.

What is “Freight Train”?

Could be “It Takes a Lot to Laugh”—he does just write a portion of lyric sometimes (see: “Mr. Jones”)—but that opening lyric is mail train, not freight. And on other setlists from around that he writes “Takes a Train.”

My guess is it’s “Freight Train Blues,” the Red Foley song Bob covered for his first album but never performed since. The early ‘90s was the period where he was covering a ton of old folk songs, including some he dug back up from that same debut album. “Man of Constant Sorrow” (right there after “Freight Train” on this cue sheet), “Pretty Peggy-O,” and “Baby Let Me Follow You Down” all got revived during the first years of the Never Ending Tour. Why not “Freight Train Blues” too? I could have sounded great in an acoustic guitar duo with G.E. Smith, as he likely would have done it. Alas.

Friend of the newsletter and copyeditor Tim Edgeworth shared another possibility: Elizabeth Cotten’s “Freight Train.” Dylan covered two other Cotten songs repeatedly during the ‘90s, the first of them once this same year: “Oh Babe It Ain’t No Lie” (debuted at Toad’s Place 1990) and “Shake Sugaree” (not debuted ‘til ‘96). Jerry Garcia and David Grisman released a version of “Freight Train” too, although not until a few years after this show. But Garcia had covered it once live in the ‘80s, so it’s entirely possible Dylan learned it from him.

Blue Monday(?)

Next up we get this undated setlist. Given that it says guitarist César Diaz’s name at the top, it surely also comes from the early ‘90s. Given the songs listed, best guess is is London on February 8 1991 (though some February 1992 setlists are pretty similar too). And given that César’s name is misspelled, I’m guessing Bob personally wrote this one too.

Bob was apparently indecisive that evening. Next to the main setlist, he scrawls a bunch of alternate options on the right-hand side. Most seems straightforward, but the second-to-last is intriguing. It’s “Blue…Midge?” Surely not. “Blue River,” the great Eric Anderson song? Eh. My best guess of what that says (though I’m open to other ideas) is “Blue Monday.” I’d love to believe he was considering covering the New Order song, but a more likely guess is he was considering covering the Fats Domino song. Which he eventually did, but not for another 15 years, one time in London 2005. So maybe it’s that, or maybe it’s something else entirely.

Update: Several people have suggested it in fact says “Blue Ridge,” which seems very plausible, and opens up a number of songs about the Blue Ridge Mountains (including “I’ve Been All Around This World,” a traditional tune he covered around this time). Though Dag Braathen pointed to another instance a year earlier of “Blue Monday” reported on the setlist, so the mystery continues.

City of New Orleans

What song appears on those two setlists, both from Dylan’s 1991 South American tour, three separate times? This one’s easier to identify: “City of New Orleans!” The Steve Goodman train song most famously performed by Arlo Guthrie.

Bob undoubtedly knew the song, and during those wild and woolly days of the early ‘90s when he was trying out all sorts of covers, it’s not surprising he was considering this one. A 1991 “City of New Orleans” would have really been something. Something good though? We’ll never know.

John Hardy

Now we can easily read the writing, since at some point between that last one (1991) and this (1997) the cue sheets became typed. This comes from Larry Campbell’s very first show. It’s the alternate for “Oh Babe It Ain’t No Lie”: “John Hardy.” This would I think be “John Hardy Was a Desperate Little Man,” a traditional folk song covered by many people Bob would have known, including The Carter Family, Dock Boggs, and Cisco Houston.

Added evidence is the fact that Dylan covered it a decade prior! Not on stage, but in his tour rehearsals with the Grateful Dead. That tape has leaked, and you can hear that version below. It sounds great, unlike the actual tour that resulted.

This would have sounded killer with the Larry Campbell/Bucky Baxter band of 1997. This ‘97 cue sheet addition probably came out of the tour rehearsals they did to break in the new band member. Too bad they never actually played it.

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