The Album
Linda Mason was a young Queens-born folksinger who had worked the Greenwich Village coffeehouse circuit, including stints at the Gaslight and Gerde's Folk City, before cutting this set of twelve Bob Dylan songs cut over two days at RCA Victor's Studio C in May 1964. Arriving just as Dylan himself was moving from topical protest songwriting into more personal territory, the album was conceived and marketed as one of the earliest full-length tribute records to his catalogue, pairing his then-recent political songs with his newer love ballads. Mason's clear, direct voice and the small folk-combo backing - featuring guitarist and arranger Walter Rain alongside session players including Al Gorgoni and a young John Sebastian on harmonica - aimed to present the material in a straightforward, unadorned folk-revival style rather than imitate Dylan's own phrasing. The record arrived at a moment when Dylan's songs were rapidly becoming standards covered across the folk and pop fields, and this LP stands as one of the first dedicated single-artist song-cycle tributes to his writing, offered to listeners drawn to the material before Dylan's own stylistic shift toward electric rock later that year. It received modest attention within the folk press of the period as an example of the growing cottage industry of Dylan interpretation, and it remains chiefly of historical interest today as an early marker of his songs' rapid absorption into the broader folk repertoire rather than as a landmark recording in its own right.