"Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" is a song by the American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan. First released as the final track on Dylan's seventh studio album, Blonde on Blonde (1966), the song lasts 11 minutes and 23 seconds, and occupies the entire fourth side of the double album. The song was written by Dylan and produced by Bob Johnston. The recording session began at 6 pm on February 15, 1966, at Columbia Studio A, Nashville, Tennessee, but Dylan worked on the lyrics for several hours while the experienced Nashville session musicians hired to accompany him stood by. Four takes were recorded in the early hours of February 16; the final recording was released on Blonde on Blonde. The music is a waltz in time.

Some writers have concluded that the song refers to Joan Baez, although most agree that it was composed for Dylan's wife Sara Lownds. Dylan refers to writing the song for his wife in his track "Sara" (1975). Commentators have pointed to literary allusions in "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" which include William Blake's 1794 poem "The Tyger", Algernon Swinburne's 1866 poem "Dolores", and verses of the Bible.

Dylan's lyrics polarized critics. On its release, several reviewers found them impenetrable, but rated the song favorably. Later writers often agree with this, praising the sound, dismissing the lyrics, and rating the song as amongst Dylan's best work.

Dylan has never performed the song in concert. It has been covered by a variety of artists, including Baez, on Any Day Now (1968), and Richie Havens, on Mixed Bag II (1974). Dylan's version has been cited as an influence by the former Pink Floyd bassist and songwriter Roger Waters, and George Harrison wrote that the track influenced aspects of the Beatles song "Long, Long, Long".

Background and recording

thumb|alt=Bob Dylan, wearing sunglasses and a dark shirt with light polka dots on a dark background, with Robbie Robertson smoking a cigar and Victor Maymudes behind them.|Bob Dylan (left) with his tour manager [[Victor Maymudes (center) and Robbie Robertson in Sweden in April 1966, between the recording and release of "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands"]]

Bob Dylan began to record his seventh studio album, Blonde on Blonde, in New York in October 1965. Frustrated by slow progress in the studio, Dylan agreed to the suggestion of his producer Bob Johnston and moved to Columbia Studio A on Music Row, Nashville, Tennessee, in February 1966. Bringing with him Robbie Robertson on guitar and Al Kooper on keyboard, Dylan commenced recording with experienced Nashville session players. Finally, at 4 am, Dylan called the musicians in and outlined the structure of the song. Dylan counted off and the musicians attempted his composition, "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands". Drummer Kenny Buttrey recalled that after the second chorus, "everybody's just peaking it up 'cause we thought, Man, this is it... This is gonna be the last chorus and we've gotta put everything into it we can. And he played another harmonica solo and went back down to another verse", meaning that the group had to revert to a less intense style.

Four takes of the song were recorded, three of which were complete. The first-take version lasted 10 minutes and seven seconds. After an incomplete take two, used to familiarise the musicians with the intended tempo, the third take was just over 12 minutes long. The fourth take clocked in at 11 minutes, 23 seconds, and would occupy the entire fourth side of the double album. He regards the other lyrical changes between different takes as minor. Daryl Sanders, author of a 2020 book about the making of Blonde on Blonde, remarks that several people present at the studio "have remembered recording 'Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands' in one take, and that has become part of the mythology surrounding the song". The recording session was released in its entirety on the 18-disc Collector's Edition of The Bootleg Series Vol. 12: The Cutting Edge 1965–1966 in 2015, with the first take of the song also appearing on the six-disc version of that album.

When Dylan played the song to his biographer Robert Shelton, shortly after recording it, he claimed it was the best song that he had ever composed. Around the same time, Dylan played the as-yet-unreleased album track with journalist Jules Siegel present, describing it as "old-time religious carnival music". Siegel described Dylan as excited by his own track. In 1969, Dylan related to Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner, "I just sat down at a table and started writing... And I just got carried away with the whole thing... I just started writing and I couldn't stop. After a period of time, I forgot what it was all about, and I started trying to get back to the beginning."

The music is a waltz in time. The music critic Alex Ross wrote that the refrain [is] a rising and descending arc, made up of successive notes in D-major. Both the song and the album contain musical and thematic influences from country music. The music scholar Keith Negus wrote that the "timbre of the vocals, the texture of the instruments, [and] the ballad style" on the album are reminiscent of country music, particularly on "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands", "Visions of Johanna" and "One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)". Negus describes the song's structure as five cycles each of two verses followed by a chorus, with "musical components that... can be represented as [a a b a a b c c d e e]".

Each verse consists of a list of the sad-eyed lady's attributes, complemented by a sequence of rhetorical questions about the Lady which are never answered within the song.

Critical comments

Subject

Critics generally agreed that Dylan wrote "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" about his wife, Sara, and some have remarked on the similarity of "Lowlands" to "Lownds", Sara's previous surname. Shelton wrote that "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" was a "wedding song" for Sara Lownds, whom Dylan had married on November 22, 1965, only three months prior to recording the song. Heard by some listeners as a hymn to an other-worldly woman, for Shelton "her travails seem beyond endurance, yet she radiates an inner strength, an ability to be re-born. This is Dylan at his most romantic."

In "Sara", a song Dylan wrote and recorded in 1975, he gave another account of the origin of "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands", singing:

The couple had lived in the Chelsea Hotel in 1965. In his 2009 book Bob Dylan in America, historian Sean Wilentz comments that "Sara" appears to be an insincere attempt at reconciliation after the couple had split, with the lines from the later song giving the impression that Dylan "thought he was handing her some kind of trophy, by telling the whole world that she alone was the muse behind his masterpiece". Lester Bangs provided a hostile critique of the recording in his review of Dylan's 1976 album Desire. Noting Dylan's claims in "Sara" to have written "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" in the Chelsea Hotel, Bangs remarked that he had been reliably informed that Dylan had composed the song "wired out of his skull in the studio, just before the songs were recorded... Those lyrics were a speed trip, and if he really did spend days on end sitting in the Chelsea Hotel sweating over lines like 'your streetcar visions which you place on the grass', then he is stupider than we ever gave him credit for."

Joan Baez has sometimes been suggested as the song's subject; Baez herself thought that the song was about her; since 1959 she had included a song called "Lowlands" in her repertoire, and her version was included on the album Folksingers 'Round Harvard Square (1959). The Canadian poet Stephen Scobie argues that this potential link contributes to a case for the song being about Baez, but concludes that it is not possible to be sure about who Dylan refers to in the song.

Literary allusions

Wilentz, discussing the song, comments that Dylan's writing had shifted from the days when he asked questions and supplied answers in the traditional folk-ballad idiom. Like the verses of William Blake's "The Tyger", Dylan asks a series of questions about the sad-eyed lady but never supplies any answers.

Heylin, like the Variety review, has described "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" as "pretentious", but also as "a captivating carousel of a performance". In a footnote to this passage, written for the 2000 edition of his book, Gray remarked that he felt "embarrassed" at his earlier assessment, adding that although the song's lyrics were flawed, "the recording itself, capturing at its absolute peak Dylan's incomparable capacity for intensity of communication, is a masterpiece if ever there was one."

Live performances and legacy

Dylan has never performed the song in concert, although during the "Woman In White" sequence of Dylan's film Renaldo and Clara, a live performance can be heard in the background. Dylan, accompanied by Scarlet Rivera on violin, Rob Stoner on bass, and Howie Wyeth on drums, recorded this version at a rehearsal during the Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975.

thumb|upright=0.85|alt=A woman with dark hair, looking to her right while smiling|[[Joan Baez (pictured in 1966) covered "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands", which some people thought was about her, for her 1968 album Any Day Now. It was less well received by Raymond Lowery of The News and Observer, who found it "interminable".

Richie Havens included a seven-minute version on his 1974 album Mixed Bag II, which was described by Joe Sornberger of the Edmonton Journal as an "upbeat, almost funky love tribute" that kept the spirit of the original despite being much shorter than Dylan's original.

The French alternative rock band Phoenix recorded a live, five-minute acoustic cover for the German magazine Musikexpress that Rolling Stone reviewer Daniel Kreps felt was true to the original despite the reduced duration. Similarly, Kevin Richards in American Songwriter wrote that it retained the "wistful melancholy" of Dylan's version.

A version by the Old Crow Medicine Show was described as "mid-tempo... almost celebratory" by Wayne Bledsoe in the Knoxville News Sentinel.

Andrew Stafford of The Guardian felt that Emma Swift's cover on her 2020 album Blonde on the Tracks was consistently elegant. Conversely, Hal Horowitz in American Songwriter wrote that her rendition, lacking the compelling musical accompaniment of the Blonde on Blonde version, became rather dull.

{| class="wikitable sortable" style="margin: 1em auto;"

|+ Cover versions of "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands"

!scope=col|Artist

!scope=col|Release

!scope=col|Year

!scope=col|Approximate length

|-

| data-sort-value="Baez, J"| Joan Baez

| Any Day Now

| 1968

| 11:18

|-

| data-sort-value="Havens, R"| Richie Havens

| Mixed Bag II

| 1974

| 7:52

|-

| Phoenix

| data-sort-value="Musikexpress"| For Musikexpress magazine

| 2010

| data-sort-value=5 |Nearly 5 minutes

|-

| data-sort-value="Swift, E"| Emma Swift

| Blonde on the Tracks

| 2020

| 11:57

|-

|}

In his 1980 autobiography, I, Me, Mine, George Harrison says that the song's chord changes influenced the music of his Beatles song "Long, Long, Long", which he wrote and recorded in October 1968 for the album The Beatles, also known as "The White Album". Harrison wrote: "I can't recall much about it except the chords, which I think were coming from 'Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands' – D to E minor, A, and D – those three chords and the way they moved."

Tom Waits said of "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" in 1991: "It is like Beowulf... This song can make you leave home, work on the railroad or marry a Gypsy. I think of a drifter around a fire with a tin cup under a bridge remembering a woman's hair. The song is a dream, a riddle and a prayer."

In a radio interview with broadcaster Howard Stern in January 2012, former Pink Floyd songwriter Roger Waters said, Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands' changed my life... When I heard that, I thought, 'If Bob can do it, I can do it'... it's a whole album side! And it in no way gets dull or boring. It becomes more and more hypnotic."

Personnel

Album credits according to Daryl Sanders (musicians) and Richard Buskin (technical):

Performers

  • Bob Dylanvocals, acoustic guitar, harmonica
  • Hargus "Pig" Robbinspiano
  • Al Kooperorgan
  • Charlie McCoyacoustic guitar
  • Wayne Mossacoustic guitar
  • Joe Southelectric bass
  • Kenny Buttreydrums

Technical

  • Bob Johnstonrecord producer
  • Neil Wilburnengineer
  • Mike Figlioengineer

Notes

Footnotes

Book sources

  • Lyrics from Dylan's official website.