2. Covenant Woman

This write-up is dedicated to Hannah Lewis.

I’m not sure what to make of Dylan slipping Covenant Woman in among the Slow Train Coming songs at the all-Gospel live shows. Was it brought some fifteen minutes forward because Slow Train didn’t have enough ballads, or because Saved had too many? Was it so that it could better work with its companion-piece Precious Angel, which was but a Slow Train behind? Was its advance appearance evidence of a special affection for the song, akin to mine?

Well, who’s to know? But one thing I will say, on the off-chance that you’re finding yourself appalled by all these Gospel songs sweeping the top of my list. My affection for the compositions of 1979 is in good company; if we’re to believe Fred Tackett (and my sense is that Dylan loves Tackett, certainly as a guitarist and maybe also as an enduring friend; in the late-era interview in which Dylan spoke with great affection of Mike Bloomfield, he used his next breath to bring up Fred and Steve Ripley of the 1981 band), this affection is at least partly shared by their creator. In a video interview from back in 2007, Tackett said, “[Dylan’s] gospel songs that he wrote were excellent, I mean, they were great. He still says some of the best music he made was that period.”—an intriguing “still,” borne out in 2017 by Dylan’s mention of In the Garden. So while Dylan’s list of his own favorites would surely feature way more 1960s songs than mine has, an undying love for the Gospel era would, if Tackett speaks the truth, be in evidence too.

Of course, what Dylan thinks of his own work is neither here nor there, for our purposes. This is Sigismund Ashlay Sludig’s unrepentantly personal list, and Covenant Woman (hand in hand with my #1) stands way up high on the mountaintop, with a view to all the mountain chains and valleys below and roundabout, as well as, off in the foggy horizon, to an outline of the ocean.

But such imagery is just to describe the song’s stature in my heart. It isn’t the image I see when I listen to Covenant Woman. As presented on Saved, it’s like a follow-up to I Believe in You; with all those chiming acoustic guitars, it’s got something of the Blood on the Tracks Minneapolis sound, and its landscape is the dusty desolation of the roads down which I Believe in You’s narrator must wander.

Over the months that I spent composing this series, I wasn’t positive about the order in which my #1 and #2 should appear. Though I kept Covenant Woman tentatively at #2 on my work-list, every time I listened to it, I would think, “Well, no... come on... this is my favorite Dylan song. It’s perfect. How could anything top it?” And I’d trundle off to listen to my selection for #1, and each time I would have to concede that, yeah, okay, Covenant Woman should stay put at #2.

Clinton Heylin has unpleasant things to say about the Saved version, but me, I think it’s beautiful. It is shorn of some of the melodic flourishes that adorned Covenant Woman live, but I think Dylan’s vocal delivery is amazing, the bassline brilliantly catchy (especially during the high refrains—“For making your prayers known...”), the organ accompaniment and solos nigh on incomparable (if In the Garden didn’t exist, I’d strike that “nigh on”), the acoustic guitars a lush bed of soil for the other instruments to twine up from. It’s a terrific contrast to the album’s spirited opening volley, A Satisfied Mind/Saved, and while I would have no complaints if more of the live vocal and piano melodies had stayed intact, I do like the way that the studio Covenant Woman’s modest sense of melody ushers in the full-on melodic wash of What Can I Do for You?

Nevertheless, the performances of Covenant Woman that I love best hail from the first week at the Warfield, with my current picks for “Covenant Woman at its most exceedingly beautiful” settling on November 2nd, 1979 and November 7th, 1979—neither on Trouble No More, unfortunately, but then the curators’ pick, November 20th (Disc 1), is no slouch either (listen to the organ solo from 5:05 to 5:42); and Trouble No More does also give us a remarkable outtake from the Saved sessions, not one that I think can trump the late take that Dylan eventually chose instead, but a good and fascinating one all the same; I love Dylan’s husky vocals, and the way he has the melody fall on the final word of each line of the verses.

Anyway, it seems that in those early November days, Bob was in touch with the spirit of his song to an uncannily deep extent, and the band was right behind him. I can never get enough of the little piano run (six or seven notes) that tended to fall between the first and second, and then between the third and fourth lines of each verse, or of the way Dylan’s voice spirals around certain words (“star,” “cup”). The refrains boast not only passion, but also very particular and surprising melodies, as well as a vocal delivery sensitive enough to allow Dylan to move from whisper-soft singing (“And I just want to tell you that I intend,” “I just want to thank you once again”) up to the wail of “prayers known unto heaven for me” in a way that feels perfectly natural.

That early November arrangement has three stages: two of them are the two sections of the refrain, one tender and one explosive, and the third is the verses, as light and powdery to the touch as fresh-fallen snow. The song is like a fire in the hearth: sometimes the flames lick lazily at the wood, sometimes they climb up around it joyfully and playfully, and sometimes the wood is burnt all the way through and the fire crackles and the flames shoot out and fill the whole furnace.

But between the lyrics and the individual elements of the music—the tempo, the drums, the organ, the piano, the bass—the impression I get is not akin to the darker songs in Planet Waves, where I feel I am safe and warm inside a house, though the house itself is surrounded by night, winter, and snow; in Covenant Woman, I feel like I am standing out in the great rolling prairie, particularly like that of Colorado’s South Park, a high plateau ensconced between even higher mountain chains; and that as I stand in the wind and the night, I see one little house in the distance, the subdued light of its fireplace gleaming out through the house’s windows. The closing lyrics of Devendra Banhart’s beautiful song The Body Breaks come to mind: “But within the dark, there is a shine / One tiny spark that is yours and mine.” A great expanse of cold wind and darkness, and in its midst, a small but disproportionately powerful blaze.

The corresponding aspect of Covenant Woman—the way the narrator’s love and gratitude toward the woman of the title, a selfless love traveling back and forth between two fragile humans, seems like a steady beacon in an overwhelming and hungry black night, a beacon that for all its frailty is pregnant with meaning and holiness (“Each small candle lights a corner of the dark,” as the central line in another of my all-time favorite songs goes)—this aspect is representative of something I love and treasure about Dylan’s Gospel period as a whole: namely, the way that those thirty or so songs (Slow Train Coming and its outtakes, Saved, and the mid-to-late-1980 compositions that either went unrecorded or filtered into the Shot of Love sessions), while basking in the light of salvation, contend with the darkness that stays put both inside and outside the believer. For every What Can I Do for You?, there is a Cover Down, Pray Through or a Yonder Comes Sin. There’s Pressing On, but there’s Trouble in Mind. There’s When He Returns, but there’s Property of Jesus too. Even inside a song that glows as bright as Covenant Woman, there’s the line, “We are strangers in a land we’re passing through.” The backdrop to faith—which is to say, life, with all its doubts, hesitations, injustices, sorrow, and suffering—never falls out of sight.

Faith, in Dylan’s music, is not an escape; it is no plastic film that covers up something cheap and makes it look shiny. Faith is a way of being in the world. Collectively, Dylan’s Gospel songs make for an amazingly rich portrait (though not, of course, an exhaustive one) of the walk of faith—notwithstanding that they were written by someone who was only just setting out upon that road! So it doesn’t surprise me to hear Tackett say that Dylan continues to value his compositions of ’79 and ’80; their power and wisdom do not seem to diminish with the passing of years or the accumulation of experience. I’ve been living with Dylan’s Gospel era for a decade, and through all these years my own faith has been expanding, becoming (in a certain sense) more complicated, and (hopefully) fuller and more fruitful too; but the songs have continued to be my friends and guides, as touching, inspiring, and commanding now as they were on first encounter. I should get back to you when I’m on my deathbed, but at this point, at least, the songs’ power, beauty, and sensitivity seem inexhaustible.

That inexhaustibility is as present in the music as in the lyrics. It’s amazing to me that these songs of Dylan’s, which strike at me so hard with their lyrical and emotional content, also align as closely as they do with my personal standards of musical excellence.

Take my beloved Jim Keltner, for example. I’m a huge fan of complicated, so-called “busy” drumming—drum parts that are full of surprises and dynamics and identifiably different parts—for the best example of what I mean, see Barriemore Barlow’s playing on Jethro Tull’s A Passion Play, or if you don’t have a spare forty-five minutes, Clive Barker on Up to Me, off of Tull’s more famous Aqualung. Like most singer-songwriters, Dylan doesn’t go in much for that kind of drumming (with prominent exceptions, to be sure, like Levon Helm on Planet Waves and Howie Wyeth on Desire and live with the Revue). In the winter months (2012-13) that I spent listening to every available boot from 1979 and 1980, I thought of Keltner as another in a line of competent but ultimately plain drummers. But the more I go back to those concerts, and the more I listen to Saved, the more I come to admire Keltner’s work. It’s subtle, but it’s wild. In those early live Covenant Womans, Jim is all over the place: sometimes tender as a night breeze against sleeping leaves, sometimes like the deep, low, long rumble that shakes the earth when a freight train goes by, and sometimes like thunder on the mountain. He’s never predictable and he never loses focus. (According to interviews with Fred Tackett, it was Jim who would get most of the musicians to dedicate a couple hours every night after the show to reviewing the recording of the concert they had just played, to see where and how they could continue to improve. Little wonder the band sounded better in 1980 than it did in 1979.) And to think that, most likely, one or two of these early live runthroughs of Covenant Woman moved Jim Keltner to tears...

The lyrics of Covenant Woman mean as much to me as Saving Grace, as much as In the Summertime.

Two elements of my becoming a Christian believer are not unlike what we know about Bob Dylan’s tale. For one thing, like Dylan in a Tucson hotel room in November 1978, my coming to faith was precipitated by a mystical experience I had on December 17th, 2005. A couple days later, in a document that’s become a sacred text of my own history, I wrote, “At long last, I have felt a powerful call to the one who offers me a peace ... [a] love that permeates into every fiber of one’s being—a perfect love. An unconditional love, perhaps. A love that requires nothing.” Something deeply elemental shifted that night—fifteen years later, I can see how massive the proportions of the shift were. After that night, I too could (and effectively did, if not so poetically) proclaim, “I’ve been broken and shattered like an empty cup / I’m just waiting on the Lord to rebuild and fill me up / And I know He will do it ’cause He’s faithful and He’s true...”

Precious Angel and Covenant Woman suggest that among the catalysts of Dylan’s surrender to Christ (“on this bloodstained ground / Take off your mask”) was a woman who had talked with him about faith and prayed to her God on his behalf (“Precious angel under the sun / How was I to know you’d be the one / To show me I was blinded, to show me I was gone / How weak was the foundation I was standing upon” ... “And to you, always, so grateful I will forever be”). My vision, too, though (probably like Dylan’s) long in the works, and certainly the culmination of thoughts and experiences that had spent years, or really my whole life, collecting into a single charged mass, transpired as the result of a beloved girl’s intervention. Like Dylan’s Angel, the girl in my life was part of a community of Christian believers (and had, as it were, “a contract with the Lord”). The fact that, as a result of her presence in my life, I had my own meeting with (as Dylan put it) “the King of Kings and Lord of Lords ... [whose] glory ... knocked me down and picked me up,” made sense to her.

That was 2005; now it’s 2020, and that girl is married (not to me) with three children. We live in different countries, on different continents. Yet the link between us, quiet and hidden though it may be, has never snapped, and the words of Covenant Woman have never ceased to be precious or true: “I just got to tell you I do intend / To stay closer than any friend / I just got to thank you once again / For making your prayers known unto heaven for me / And to you, always, so grateful I will forever be.” All the leagues of physical distance between us are powerless, ultimately, to alter what is true and real in the world of prayer and the spirit. “He must have loved me oh so much to send me someone as fine as you ... I’ll always be right by your side, I’ve got a covenant too.”

Here’s Ralf Sauter, by the way: “‘...I’ll always be right by your side, I’ve got a covenant too’ is one of the most assuring things [Dylan has] ever sung. This is a man who after a fire and brimstone battle with his own self and his desires and loss, came out carrying faith, and if there’s any testimony to that, it’s THIS SONG.”

“He must have loved me...”—that line means more to me than I can express. Not only in terms of the Covenant Woman (“shining like a morning star”) who took me by the hand and showed me the way to faith, but with regard to all those whose love has given me life. My experiences lead me to think that, once the idea of a loving personal God has ceased to seem ridiculous or unbelievable, the evidence for its truth becomes fathomless—and mystical experience aside, that evidence is nowhere clearer than in the love that has come my way from other human beings. I have had an amazingly blessed life, an amazing life, full of love—and in my understanding, much of the glory of the joy I’ve felt and of the hope that sustains me hinges on the sentiment captured in that line: “He must have loved me oh so much to send me someone as fine as you.”

I love the tenderness of “Way up yonder, great will be her reward.” The narrator doesn’t know, or finds it hard to accept, that his discovery of Christ and Christ’s love is, for her, already reward enough; the narrator is so grateful that he hopes there will be something even more beautiful in store for her, and having seen firsthand the transformations that followed from the change (see Saving Grace, What Can I Do for You?), he feels that must be the case: “great will be her reward.”

Faith is that bright cabin in the dark prairie. And God’s love can become embodied, can become visible through people. Thus “I know I can trust you to stay the way you are” leads, by the links of the “unbroken chain of events flowing one out of another” in Anton Chekhov’s short story, The Student (“ ‘The past,’ he thought, ‘is linked with the present by that chain’ [and, I Sigismund, insert here: the earth with the heavens, too] ... And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of that chain; that when he touched one end, the other quivered”), straight on to “I know that He will do it ’cause He’s faithful and He’s true.”

In the faith that guides me, humans are not considered to be perfectly reliable (which is why we have In the Garden, and Judas, and Peter), but sometimes for a moment they appear that way, and in that holy moment they exhibit the character of the Lord. For this reason, I think that no matter what may have happened between the living man who wrote Covenant Woman and the living woman who was his inspiration, the song itself refuses to fade.