Dylan fans will want to check out Mary Lee’s appearance on Rob Kelly’s Pod_Dylan. In that episode Mary Lee and Rob discuss Buckets of Rain.
A live performance of songs from Blood on the Tracks is available HERE.
Mary Lee Kortes’ has had a 25+ year career as a singer-songwriter. She is the leader of the band Mary Lee’s Corvette and also performs as a solo artist. She is the author of fiction (short stories and novels) and, of course, of our May 2024 Bob-Dylan-Book-Of-The Month, Dreaming of Dylan: 115 Dreams of Bob (2018) (see below for links to information on the book, including a short video!). Speaking of Mr. Dylan, Kortes released a live album that presents the whole of Blood on the Tracks, about which Rolling Stone said it revealed “quietly direct magnificence”. PLUS: Bob is among the performers that she has opened for! Her website lists six albums and a single. Mary Lee is also a social worker and deveoped an approach of expressive art therapy using music and songwriting. Her songs have been recorded by Amy Grant, Rebecca Martin and Jesse Harris, and The Pointer Sisters.
Kortes has been praised by Entertainment Weekly, The Village Voice, The Washington Post, The New York Post, and Rolling Stone. Rolling Stone called her a mix of the “mountain sunshine of Dolly Parton” and the “sweet iron” of Chrissie Hynde. More information, including press notices, a discography, and a blog, can be found on Mary Lee’s web site HERE and on Wikipedia.
One of Mary Lee Kortes’ outstanding — indeed mesmerizing — recent projects was a “concept” album the Does Anybody Know I’m Here, Songs of Beulah Rowley. The story of this album is so interesting and so well-told by Mary Lee that I won’t try to summarize in this space…click over to the fuller story on Mary Lee’s website.
See Mary Lee Kortes singing and playing William Shakespeare and Me.
Book Club Member & Dylanologist Nina Goss sent in a column from the first issue of Montague Street that Mary Lee wrote about the song Most of the Time, commenting “Our theme was Oh Mercy, and I reached out to her to ask if she'd like to contribute anything regarding her fine cover of "Most of the Time." She kindly obliged me with the attached--it's the column on the far right of the spread here. It was a moving and terrific addition to our first issue, and I'll always be grateful to her for her time.”
Peter White, April 2024
Book Club member Christopher Vanni shared these Dylan quotes on the subject of Dreams…"A song is like a dream," Dylan writes in Chronicles, "and you try to make it come true. They're like strange countries that you have to enter." Of course, you don't have to be an artist to have visited the surreal, associative, recombinational realm of dreams. But it helps. Dylan is a committed cartographer of this strange country. Dreams have long played an integral part in his art and his identity as an artist. He once told Jonathan Cott, "I'm sure of my dream self. I live in my dreams. I don't really live in the actual world."
Christopher also notes that in Graley Herren wrote in Dialogues and Dreams in Dylan's "Time Out of Mind": In a discussion with Sam Shepard, which the playwright turned into the one-act True Dylan, Dylan reflects upon his boyhood mind-merge with music by means of dreams: "I had lotsa dreams. [...] Sometimes I'd even be there in the dreams myself. Radio-station dreams. You know how, where you're a kid, you stay up late in bed, listening to the radio, and you sort of dream off the radio into sleep. That's how you used to fall asleep. That's when disc jockeys played whatever they felt like. [...] Just sorta dream off into the radio. Like you were inside the radio kinda."
Alert visitors to this site may remember that Princess Wow of the Smile Revolution has interviewed several Dylan-related guests, including Dave Van Ronk’s wife Teri Thal (she published a memoir entitled My Greenwich Village: Dave, Bob, and Me). Princess Wow also interviewed Mary Lee
Mary Lee also was part of a conversation on the TWS Podcast.
Dreams with Mr. Dyan, in no particular order: Bob Dylan’s Dream, Series of Dreams, his Dream of You, Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream, I’m Your Teeage Prayer, Talking World War III Blues, Gates of Eden, Going Going Gone, Too Much of Nothing, I’m Not There, Jokerman, To Romona, Time Passes Slowly, When You Gonna Wake Up, Romance in Durango, Emotionally Yours, Red River Shore, Senor, Cross the Green Mountains, Every Grain of Sand, I Had A Dream About You Baby, Caribbean Wind, All You Have to Do is Dream, Ballad in Plain D, Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie, Bye and Bye, Marchin’ to the City, Heartland, I Feel a Change Coming On. More? Favorites?