VARIOUS ARTISTS – HOW MANY ROADS

Subtitled Black America sings Bob Dylan, this collection testifies to the unique popularity of Dylan’s songs among black musicians in the wake of the US civil rights movement. This is a compilation rather than a tribute album, and as such, most of the recordings date from the ’60s and early ’70s. There’s no Outkast performing Subterranean Homesick Blues here, no John Legend or Alicia Keyes offering contemporary versions. What’s on offer is classic soul, mostly. The late Solomon Burke’s take on Maggie’s Farm is all growling saxes, clipped guitars and swaggering defiance. “It’s a shame the way she makes me scrub those floors,” he seethes. Occasionally the the singer and the song connect less successfully.  Con Funk Shun’s Mr. Tambourine Man is a funky jam with a Dylan lyric on top: it’s enjoyable but inessential. Highlights include the lurching, death-mask country-blues of Masters of War as performed by The Staple Singers; Major Harris’s gritty, drawling, ghetto -sermonising  Like A Rolling Stone, and Nina Simone’s impossibly tender – and arguably definitive – Just Like A Woman.
****1/2