Bob Dylan’s Next Bootleg Series May Include His Nashville Recording Days with Johnny Cash

Still riding the high of the release of Martin Scorsese’s Netflix documentary Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story and his Rolling Thunder Revue bootleg series, it seems Dylan and his team may already know where they’re going next, according to Rolling Stone.

A source close to the Dylan team told the outlet, “We’re thinking about possibly doing Bob’s work in Nashville from John Wesley Harding through the Johnny Cash sessions as the next Bootleg Series. The outtakes from that period have never been heard.”

Dylan and his team just released a 14-disc album detailing his Rolling Thunder Revue times of 1975, and the Nashville recordings would detail the three days it took to record John Wesley Harding in November 1967 and the eight days it took to record Nashville Skyline in February 1969. Most notably, Dylan recorded a reworking of “Girl From the North Country” with Johnny Cash that then appeared on Nashville Skyline; however, much of the recordings from that day have never been heard by the public. The duo recorded versions of “Ring of Fire,” “You Are My Sunshine,” “Big River” and “Careless Love,” among several others.

The bootleg would stand apart from previous releases in Dylan’s series because it would only contain select tracks from recordings instead of every song. “We’re trying to find one really good takes of each song,” the RS source added. “The giant dumps of everything like we’ve done in recent years really aren’t my preference. I like stuff that is more curated.”

The Dylan team seem to have many other bootleg series ideas in their heads, including the recordings from his earliest folk concerts, Time Out of Mind, as well as one-offs Dylan has done from films and other ventures.

Watch a 1988 Dylan performance from the Paste archives below.