“Honey, I don’t want to interrupt your train of thought, but be sure that Bob puts the melody to that song, that ‘Wanted Man’…you forgot the melody,” June Carter Cash is overheard saying at the beginning of a recently released track. It features her husband Johnny Cash singing “Wanted Man” with Bob Dylan, on a previously unreleased recording, which has now been shared with the public for the first time.
The video that accompanies the previously unreleased demo has been shared on the Bob Dylan YouTube channel, on October 21, 2019, and has since garnered close to 350K in viewers in its short availability. The recording was originally recorded by Cash and Dylan in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1969. The pair had what seemed like an unlikely friendship to fans, which lasted close to four decades. During that period, they recorded together only once. It was a two-session that commenced on February 17 of that year. Dylan was finishing the recording of his album entitled “Nashville Skyline” at Columbia Studios in the Country Music Capital. Nearing the close of that project, Cash joined him. They had first met at the Newport Folk Festival in 1964 and expressed great interest in each other’s music. In “Cash: The Autobiography,” the country superstar wrote: “I had a portable record player that I’d take along on the road. And I’d put on [The] Freewheelin’ [Bob Dylan] backstage, then go out and do my show, then listen again as soon as I came off. After a while at that, I wrote Bob a letter telling him how much of a fan I was. He wrote back almost immediately, saying he’d been following my music since ‘I Walk the Line,’ and so we began a correspondence.”
