Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands

Infobox Song
Name = Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands


Caption = Album cover
Artist = Bob Dylan
Album = Blonde on Blonde
B-side =
Released = May 16, 1966
Format =
Recorded = February 16, 1966
Genre = Folk rock
Length = 11:23
Label = Columbia
Writer = Bob Dylan
Producer =
Chart position =
Last single =
This single =
Next single =
Misc = Extra tracklisting
Album = Blonde on Blonde
Type = studio
prev_track = "Obviously 5 Believers"
prev_no = 13
this_track = "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands"
track_no = 14
next_track =
next_no =

"Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" is the last song on the Bob Dylan album "Blonde on Blonde", which was released in 1966.

History of the song

At 11:23 minutes long, the song contains five stanzas of surreal poetic imagery all pertaining, and coming back to, the woman figure. The song is in 6/8 time yet the form of the lyrics is far from traditional; Dylan's intonation at times straying 'beyond' the melody but never out of it.

It is written as a list song that comes back to a chorus line at the end of each stanza. The song is filled almost entirely with poetic symbols, such as in the first line "with your mercury mouth/in the missionary times".

Many critics have noted the similarity of 'Lowlands' to 'Lownds', the name of Dylan's wife Sara when he married her. Her maiden name was Shirley Noznisky, and her father, Isaac Noznisky, was a scrap metal dealer in Wilmington, Delaware. Critics have noted the link between "sheet metal memories of Cannery Row" and the business of Sara's father. Similarly the line "your magazine husband who one day just had to go" could be a reference to Sara's first husband, magazine photographer Hans Lownds. [Gray, "The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia", 198] Dylan acknowledged how indebted he felt to Sara for this song; in "Sara" on the album "Desire" (1976) Dylan sang:

::Stayin' up for days in the Chelsea Hotel,::Writin' "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" for you.

For his Dylan biography, "Bob Dylan: Behind The Shades, Take Two" (2000), Clinton Heylin interviewed Blonde on Blonde drummer, Kenny Buttrey. Buttrey gave this account of the recording of the song: "He ran down a verse and a chorus and he just quit and said, 'We'll do a verse and then a chorus and then I'll play my harmonica thing. Then we'll do another verse and chorus and we'll play some more harmonica and see how it goes from there.'...Not knowing how long this thing was going to be, we were preparing ourselves dramatically for a basic two to three minute record, because records just didn't go over three minutes... If you notice that record, that thing after like the second chorus starts building and building like crazy, and everybody's just peaking it up 'cause we thought, Man this is it. this is going to be the last chorus and we've got to put everything into it we can... After about ten minutes of this thing we're cracking up at each other, at what we were doing. I mean, we peaked five minutes ago. Where do we go from here?" [Heylin, "Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited", 241]

Dylan has never performed this song in concert. However, during a sequence of Dylan's film Renaldo And Clara, a live performance of the song can be heard in the background. Accompanied by violin, it has been assumed it was performed with The Rolling Thunder Revue during the tour of 1975, possibly during a rehearsal session.

Cultural significance

Joan Baez, the leading folk singer and former lover of Dylan, covered this song on her 1968 album of Dylan songs "Any Day Now". Jon Anderson also covered this song on the Yes album "Friends and Relatives Vol. 2".

References