Dylan Song by Song: "I Shall Be Released" Quiz

Answer: false

The first officially recorded version appeared on The Band's 1968 debut album, "Music from the Big Pink." Richard Manuel sang lead vocals and Levon Helm and Rick Danko sang the chorus in harmony. Dylan made a casual recording of the song in 1967, as part of the basement tape sessions with The Band, and it was released on the "Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3" in 1991. "Bringing It All Back Home" was released in 1965 and did not contain the song, which was written in 1967.

Answer: Inside a prison

The song is written from the voice of a prisoner singing inside a prison, but it can be interpreted as speaking of both literal and spiritual release from prison. The song is heavily influenced by gospel music. In "The Many Roads of Bob Dylan" (2011), David Yaffe writes that the song depicts redeemed prisoners.

Answer: Happy Traum

The 1971 version had a different arrangement and slightly different lyrics. Happy Traum was a regular on the Greenwich Village music scene in the 1960s. He formed a duo with his brother, called Happy and Artie Traum, and together they released five albums. Previously, in 1962, Traum recorded a duet with Dylan on Dylan's song "Let Me Die in My Footsteps" as part of Folkways Records' "Broadside Ballads Volume 1." Traum played banjo, bass, and guitar and sang harmony on four Bob Dylan songs in 1971, including "I Shall Be Released."

Answer: true

"I Shall Be Released" came in at number six on Rolling Stone's 2019 list of the "10 Greatest Bob Dylan Songs." The magazine wrote, "With its simple, evocative tale of a prisoner yearning for freedom, this rock hymn was part of a conscious effort by Dylan to move away from the sprawling imagery of his mid-Sixties masterpieces."

Answer: face

While many of Bob Dylan's earlier lyrics had been rich with complex imagery, "I Shall Be Released" was more spartan. Beat poet and Dylan associate Allen Ginsberg, as quoted in Rolling Stone, said that Bob Dylan told him "how he was writing shorter lines, with every line meaning something. And from that time came ... 'I Shall Be Released'....

There was to be no wasted language, no wasted breath."

Answer: east

This line has Biblical overtones and might remind the listener of Matthew 24:27, "For as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be." The order is reversed here from the west to the east, in keeping with the rhyme scheme (east/released), but the faint allusion speaks of redemption and a release from the shackles of this present world.

Answer: fall

Fall here rhymes with wall. The verses (except for the chorus) are written in an ABAB rhyme scheme. Again, with statements like "every man must fall," there is a spiritual quality to the lyrics. Here there may be echoes of the concept of original sin, of the fall of Adam and Eve, and of the inevitability that every man must likewise fall. Nevertheless, the singer still hopes for redemption and yearns for freedom.

Answer: lonely

"All day long I hear him hollering so loud," the verse continues, "Just crying out that he's not to blame."

Dylan's concern here, writes Michael Gray, quoting the critic Aidan Day in his book "Song and Dance Man III," is to use "lyrics which open out into an exploration of the workings of the psyche as a whole."

Dylan performed a version of this song live at the Martin Luther King Day celebration in 1986.

Answer: true

The song has also been recorded by Ricky Nelson, The Jerry Garcia Band, Big Mama Thornton, The Zac Brown Band, The Heptones, The Slackers, and countless other musicians, It was even demoed by the Beatles in 1969 during their "Get Back / Let It Be" recording sessions.

Versions of this song can be found on several Bob Dylan compilation and live albums, including "Before the Flood," "Bob Dylan Greatest Hits Volume II," the "Bootleg Series" volumes 1-3 and volumes 5 and 11, "Bob Dylan at Budakon," "Biograph," "Dylan (2007)," and "The Rolling Thunder Revue: The 1975 Live Recordings."

Answer: David Crosby

In 1982, David Crosby, who had performed in the Byrds and Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young, was convicted of weapons charges and drug charges related to heroin and cocaine, and he served a nine-month sentence in a Texas state prison. He told "Rolling Stone" magazine, "I wrote [the chorus] on the wall. It took me hours. But I did it. And I remember taking heart from it."