Songs Of The Day: Several By The Band

The Band’s self-titled second album helped me make it through my freshman year of college. Not a cure for homesickness, exactly, but a balm to salve doubts as to whether I belonged. It remains my favorite album ever. Most of you already know ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down’ and ‘Up On Crickle Creek’.  Maybe even ‘Rag, Mama, Rag’ and ‘Across The Great Divide’. But this album had a tremendous wellspring of great songs.  Only ‘Jawbone’, which I grew to grudgingly tolerate, fails to bring joy to me. While these songs will be familiar to fans, I think that for those of you unacquainted with the entire album, you will find something to love here. A perfect way to close out this dip into the best of 1969:

I close with this live version of the song that finished off the album.  They sounded as great live as they did on vinyl: