Dec 14

I Ain’t Got No Home Dylan

Highly Appreciated

I AIN’T GOT NO HOME (Bob Dylan)

 
“I Ain’t Got No Home”  is a song made popular by Woody Guthrie in which the singer laments the difficulties that life presents him.  It was based on the old gospel song known variously as “Can’t Feel at Home” or “I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore”, a version of which was recorded by the Carter Family in 1931.  (More from Wikipedia)
  
 
Two of his songs (Ron Franklin writes all of his own material) basically quote Bob Dylan.  The other is “We Ain’t Got No Home”, which has a title and some lyrics that are virtually the same as Woody Guthrie’s “I Ain’t Got No Home”.  In the very beginning, Dylan was described as being just one among a host of Guthrie wannabes; but “I Ain’t Got No Home” is one of the very few Guthrie songs that Dylan recorded, even before he did much songwriting – I speak as someone owning dozens of Dylan bootleg albums as well as virtually all of his Columbia and Asylum releases. 
 
(January 2012)
 
*       *       *
 
Great White Wonder opened up a whole world for me.  To me, many of these songs are now as familiar and as solidly in the Bob Dylan canon as anything that I have heard on the Columbia Records studio albums released in the 1960’s, “The Death of Emmett Till” (a great old-school protest song), “Only a Hobo” (my favorite song on Great White Wonder and one of the earliest songs by anyone about the plight of the homeless), “Black Cross”, “Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)”, “If You Gotta Go, Go Now (Or Else You Got to Stay All Night)”, “Poor Lazarus”, “Baby, Please Don’t Go”, “I Shall Be Released”, “Open the Door, Homer”, “This Wheel’s on Fire”, “I Ain’t Got No Home”, and “(As I Go) Ramblin’ ’Round” (the last two being Woody Guthrie songs) among them. 
 
(September 2017)
 
Last edited: March 22, 2021