Song of the Day 7/24: Bryan Ferry, “Positively 4th Street”

Bob Dylan has had some excellent musical interpreters over the years — the Byrds, the Band, early Rod Stewart — but one of the most consistent and surprising is Roxy Music lead singer Bryan Ferry. Ferry’s mannered, louche vocals would seem an odd match for the material, but he has covered Dylan repeatedly since his first solo album in 1974, when he reworked “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” to polarizing effect. In 2007 he recorded an LP, “Dylanesque,” consisting entirely of Dylan covers, including this delicate reading of what might be the nastiest fuck-you song of Dylan’s entire career, giving it a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger tone that reveals the hurt beneath the vitriol.

Dylan recorded the song during the sessions for “Highway 61 Revisited,” but it was released only as a single, to follow “Like a Rolling Stone,” until its release on Dylan’s 1967 Greatest Hits LP. His version features a cheerful melody with organ flourishes by Al Kooper to offset the scabrous lyrics. Nobody has ever determined the identify of Dylan’s target, but nearly every folkie from early-’60s Greenwich Village has been named as a suspect. The song reached No. 7 on the Billboard charts in 1965.