The third and last album in the vinyl edition of the new Dylan box set Another Self Portrait.

I’m listening to the vinyl version first and not concentrating too much on evaluating or analyzing the individual songs — just basking in the warmth and presence of the music on vinyl, which gets you very close to feeling you’re right there with Dylan in the studio.

It’s a good and exciting place to be.

I’m happy to report that the pressings of the vinyl set are uniformly excellent, as usual with Dylan’s modern vinyl editions.

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In addition to the Blind Willie McTell and Charley Patton albums I’ve already written about, Jack White’s label Third Man Records is also issuing the complete works of The Mississippi Sheiks on vinyl.

Most bluesmen included “white music” in their repertoires — pop hits and novelty songs — because they often played for white dances and parties, but music labels looking for “race music” rarely recorded them performing such numbers. The Mississippi Sheiks, though grounded in the blues, had a style that also directly incorporated white musical trends, with jaunty pop melodies and lyrical fiddle accompaniments.

They became wildly successful crossover musicians, with material that appealed to blacks and whites simultaneously. They thus help round out our picture of the Delta’s musical tradition which its recorded legacy distorts to a degree.

The songs of the Sheiks can be down and dirty, and deeply soulful, but just as regularly embody a spirit of musical lightheartedness that we don’t associate with the blues form.

These blues reissues by Third Man Records, all presented in excellent pressings on 180-gram vinyl, are a great bargain at $16 a pop — even cheaper when ordered in bundles which include albums from each of the three artists in question, as here:

Blues Bundle

The second album in the vinyl edition of the new Dylan box set Another Self Portrait.

It’s thrilling to see a great fighter in a title bout, but almost as interesting and illuminating to see him sparring in the gym.  There aren’t going to be any knock-outs or prizes, but you can watch the fighter thinking, trying out moves, making discoveries.

Another Self Portrait is a glimpse of Dylan in the gym, in training.  Not for the casual Dylan fan perhaps, but a treat for the fancy.  You can sense his power, though it’s not always fully deployed, you can analyze his craft, his wit, his ability to bob and weave . . . and to learn.

Those that have ears, let them hear.

Another gem from Jack White’s label Third Man Records — the first volume of the complete recordings of Charley Patton on vinyl.

Patton’s growling vocals and supernatural guitar playing stand at the very heart of the blues — he was a crucial influence on every bluesman who followed him and his art remains tremendously powerful. Bob Dylan once said that if it was up to him he would only sing Charley Patton songs at his concerts, though he conceded that his audiences probably wouldn’t approve.

I have the wonderful Revenant box set of Patton’s complete works on CD, but hearing him on vinyl is something else again.

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The first of three albums that constitute the vinyl version of the new Dylan box set Another Self Portrait.

I’ve never bought the idea that Dylan was trying to turn his fans off with the original version of Self Portrait.  He was trying to reinvent himself after the masterpiece Blonde On Blonde, an unrepeatable masterpiece on whose laurels any artist might have rested for the remainder of his career, doing endless variations on its themes and lyric strategies.

To Dylan, that would have been consigning himself to an early artistic grave, just as remaining a “protest singer” would have.  Self Portrait was not an attempt at another kind of masterpiece, it was a search for ways to a rebirth.  To the extent that Dylan exposed his searching to public view, it was a deconstruction of himself as a “master” — a presentation of himself as a novice, looking to learn more about his still evolving craft, his still evolving vision.

The search took him into the attic of American music, an attic full of stuff from grandpa and grandma’s time, of some new stuff he’d slapped together in his garage workshop, of stuff he’d found in the swap meet of popular music, intriguing but maybe not suitable for display in the living room . . . or maybe most suitable.

He couldn’t know until he hauled it all out into the light of day.  In order to make a commercial album out of it, Dylan, or his label, hired some handymen to blow the dust off the stuff from the attic, polish the tarnished brass, repaint the lopsided cabinet — and this was in some sense a betrayal of the search Dylan was on, which was not in any sense commercial.

Having just listened to the first record in the new box set, I feel that the material Dylan recorded on his search at this particular time of his life has finally come into its own — rough, improvisational, experimental, quirky, inspiring, and sometimes simply ungainly, unfortunate.  We’re back in the attic with Dylan, looking around, handling the objects up there, marveling at them, wondering about them.

Self Portrait was not a compilation of the songs that Dylan felt defined him — a misconception that made the album utterly incomprehensible — it was a grab-bag of the songs Dylan thought might help him define his future self, his future selves.

Another Self Portrait is a clearer self portrait of Dylan — the self portrait of a magpie, a wanderer, a searcher.

To Greil Marcus’s question when he first reviewed Self Portrait — “What is this shit?” — the answer is, “This is the fallow field that will grow the wheat that will feed you in years to come.”

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