No One Can Sing the Blues Like Blind Willie McTell - A Nearly Perfect Bob Dylan Song

By 1983 Bob Dylan was emerging from his Born-Again period and returning to his prophetic roots. Dylan's work had always been biblical, but from 1979 to 1981 it narrowed to the 'end-of-times' evangelical born-again variant. He toured the country for three years encouraging his audience to repent of their sins.

The critics reaction to this was scathing. Audiences booed (not for the first time in Dylan's career).

Because my background is Pentecostal, I understood it thoroughly and was painfully familiar with it. My hope was that Dylan was intelligent enough to work his way through it. We all have to crawl through shit sometimes to get to freedom (see 'Shawshank Redemption').

Dylan worked his way through it, and musically, what he created was stunning and breath taking. The album 'Jokerman" was greeted with relief by critics who thought Dylan had renounced his Pentecostalism. They didn't understand what had happened.
Dylan did not abandon it, he incorporated it within his being and became stronger, wiser and more connected than before to the Divine Force that flows through the universe. The songs he wrote in 1983 that weren't included on Jokerman were stunning, powerful and spiritual. Many of these were included in the Bootleg Series released in 1991.
One of those songs was 'Blind Willie McTell.'  Dylan on piano and Mark Knopfler on acoustic guitar are the only musicians. The song evokes the ghosts of slavery while lamenting there is no one left to sing the blues to confront those ghosts.
Dylan surveys the landscape amidst these ghosts of past oppression and sees only greed and corruption today. The only appropriate response is to sing the blues and nobody could sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell. The images Dylan invokes are haunting and disturbing. Plantations are burning, whips are cracking, rebels are yelling, tribes are moaning and the undertaker's bell is tolling.
 Filled with despair as the blues singers who reminded us of our spiritual bankruptcy are now all departed, Dylan struggles to take their place. In doing so, he does not abandon his born-again Pentecostalism. He takes from it what is true and prophetic and incorporates it into the biblical vision he always had (see 'Hard Rain's Gonna Fall' and 'I'm All Right, Ma'). What emerged was something powerful and profound. Dylan didn't think the songs belonged on the album released in 1983. The only reason Dylan has given that he didn't include 'Blind Willie McTell' on Jokerman was that he didn't get it quite right.
We never get things perfectly, we never do. But sometimes we get close. This song gets very, very close.