Nashville Skyline

Critical reception

By the time Nashville Skyline was recorded, the political climate in the United States had grown more polarized. In 1968, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert Kennedy (a leading candidate for the presidency) were both assassinated. Riots had broken out in several major cities, including a major one surrounding the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and a number of racially motivated riots spurred by King's assassination. A new President, Richard Nixon, was sworn into office in January 1969, but the U.S. engagement in Southeast Asia, particularly the Vietnam War, would continue for several more years. Protests over a wide range of political topics became more frequent. Dylan had been a leading cultural figure, noted for his political and social commentary throughout the 1960s. Even as he moved away from topical songs, he never lost his cultural status. However, as Clinton Heylin would write about Nashville Skyline, "if Dylan was concerned about retaining a hold on the rock constituency, making albums with Johnny Cash in Nashville was tantamount to abdication in many eyes."

Helped by a promotional appearance on The Johnny Cash Show on June 7, Nashville Skyline went on to become one of Dylan's best-selling albums. Three singles were pulled from it, all of which received significant airplay on AM radio.

Despite the dramatic, commercial shift in direction, the press also gave Nashville Skyline a warm reception. A critic for Newsweek wrote of "the great charm... and the ways Dylan, both as composer and performer, has found to exploit subtle differences on a deliberately limited emotional and verbal scale." In Rolling Stone, Paul Nelson wrote, "Nashville Skyline achieves the artistically impossible: a deep, humane, and interesting statement about being happy. It could well be... his best album." However, Nelson would retract his opinion in a review for Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits Vol. II less than three years later, writing, "I was misinformed. That's why no one should pay any attention to critics, especially the artist." In The Village Voice, Robert Christgau argued that "the beauty of the album" was in the "totally undemanding" and "one-dimensional" quality of the songs, believing Dylan had toyed with the public's expectations again by embracing a country tenor voice and aesthetic. In Christgau's opinion, "he has gone to country music because it is a repository of Jeffersonian values" of rugged individualism, anti-statism, and masculine compassion. "But he has no apparent interest in exposing, or even understanding, their subversion. For although country music appears Jeffersonian, it is really Jacksonian--intensely chauvinistic, racist, majority-oriented, and antiaristocratic in the worst as well as the best sense. That is to say, it voices both sides of populism: the democratic and the fascistic."

A few critics expressed some disappointment. Ed Ochs of Billboard wrote, "the satisfied man speaks in clichés, and blushes as if every day were Valentine's Day." Tim Souster of the BBC's The Listener magazine wrote, "One can't help feeling something is missing. Isn't this idyllic country landscape too good to be true?"

Track listing

All songs written by Bob Dylan.

Personnel

Production

Charts