This morning I happened to be reading about Bob Dylan's recording of "Blowin' in the Wind," cut anew with some novel technology, the details of which didn't rivet my attention. It's expected to sell for more than $1 million at auction. There's the Dylan arc right there: idealistic composer of modern folk and protest songs, then a visionary of expansive possibilities for popular music, and now, age 81, obscenely rich capitalist for whom the need for endless money is never satiated.

If his hard-core fan base had any sense of proportion left, it would acknowledge that few within its number -- those few too far gone to be held accountable -- have listened more than twice to Dylan's "acclaimed" last album of original material. (It will be here unnamed; if you don't know it, you can look it up yourself.) You can say it's wordy, bloated, bombastic and more, but you could have -- still can, if you're so inclined -- thrown the same adjectives at the alleged masterpiece Blonde on Blonde, which at least could claim the mantle in its time of extraordinary novelty.

From being introduced to Dylan at an early, impressionable age, I find all these years later that Dylan would be a commanding presence in my life, influencing me in all sorts of ways -- good, bad and just dumb -- but most of all sending me on a journey, still in motion, into the back roads and woods where blues, folk and other grounded but mysterious music may be found. The social critic Greil Marcus has called that liminal realm the "invisible republic."

Even so, after Tempest (which even now I rank among his top half-dozen or so albums; I reviewed it here on 6 October 2012), I wondered where Dylan could go from there. That album struck me as a glorious summation of the themes -- musical, social and personal -- that Dylan had pursued practically since he composed his first song. The answer, alas, was not blowin' in the wind; rather, it was little worth noting. I passed on the three releases of Frank Sinatra songs, on the theory that if I want to listen to Sinatra, I will listen to, you know, Sinatra. Rapturously reviewed (of course), his most recent album of original material comes across more as an imitation Dylan disc than as an actual one.

So as my multitude of Dylan albums gathers dust on the shelves, I await -- on the other side of the relentless hagiography -- the inevitable revisionist backlash and the cutting down to size, in other words to a concession that Dylan was/is not a "poet" but an unusually smart, creative and ambitious songwriter who composed, out of the many hundreds of songs credited to him, some two or three dozen enduring classics. That in itself is a world-class achievement.

The songs will remain and long outlive excesses of Dylan adoration and apologia. However tiresome Dylan and all that he carries with him may have become -- at least to those of us perhaps a little ahead of the curve -- the best songs retain their power. You don't have to stop listening to them even if Dylan's versions have worn you out. In the last eight months there have been a couple of decent tribute albums by artists who grew up with Dylan in steady spin on their record players.

The stronger of them, the equal of any I've ever heard, is Lucinda Williams' Lu's Jukebox, Vol. 3: Bob's Back Pages (reviewed by me in this space on 18 December 2021). On Dirt Does Dylan, if hardly at her level, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band shows it consists of good guys who manage once again to communicate their joy in playing music together. Besides that, I am fond of them for another reason. Those of us who love trad country and Appalachian sounds are indebted to them for their role in putting together the magnificent, three-LP Will the Circle Be Unbroken, which alerted a generation of rockist hippies to the lives and art of Doc Watson, Maybelle Carter, Jimmy Martin, Merle Travis, Roy Acuff and others. More than half a century later, Circle is still a joy. It was the O Brother soundtrack of its time, except with a whole lot more songs and tunes. Personality, too.

The NGDB went on to become a popular Nashville outfit which for a few years called itself the Dirt Band before returning to its original name and eclectic identity as a purveyor of rock 'n' roll, country, folk, bluegrass and the occasional rooted singer-songwriter. The group's first big hit introduced Jerry Jeff Walker's "Mr. Bojangles" to an audience far transcending the folk scene. No one has ever considered it a gathering of geniuses and innovators, but it was and still is a friendly and perfectly able one. To appreciate what the NGDB is doing, all you need is a love of spirited downhome tunes and an appreciation for pop's roots, as envisioned by musicians who -- whatever the changing personnel over the decades -- have never quite forgotten that the whole project commenced as a jug band in Long Beach, California, in the mid-1960s.

Dirt Does Dylan is 10 songs from the Bard of Hibbing. The focus is on the early years. The youngest of them, the greeting-card sentimental "Forever Young," goes back to 1973 and should have remained there. There isn't much to be done with it, though too many have tried. On the happier side, the NGDB has a whole lot of fun with an otherwise-neglected number from Dylan's billed-as-country Nashville Skyline. While I haven't heard "Country Pie" in the Dylan version in an extended while (less politely, sometime in the last century), I recall it as little more than a filler cut. The NGDB actually improves on the original, transforming into a good-natured jug-band goof.

Opening the proceedings, the modestly obscure "Tonight I'll Be Staying Here with You," also from Skyline, feels no more distinguished than Dylan's bland original. Like a lot of other songs Dylan wrote, nobody would have paid this one any attention if it had claimed a different byline. The other cuts are standards from the folk-Dylan songbook, everything from "She Belongs to Me" and "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry" (originally, before Dylan opted not to let well enough alone, "Phantom Engineer") to the Basement Tapes-era "I Shall Be Released" and "Quinn the Eskimo." These are all excellent songs, and each is performed in an arrangement that stays generally close to Dylan's while not imitating it. I am amazed at what a moving song "Girl from the North Country" is yet. So, I might add, is Martin Carthy's reading of the traditional "The Elfin Knight" (aka "Scarborough Fair") on which it's based.

"The Times They Are A-Changin'" seems out of place here, though. In common with the bulk of protest anthems, it's tied to a particular place and a particular mood, in this case the 1960s civil-rights movement's militancy and optimism. In the third decade of the 21st century, neither applies; rage and despair, maybe. For relief from that, we could use Leonard Cohen's sinister apocalyptic humor.