Introduction

After Columbia Records released Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline in April 1969, rock critics pounced. The album was the third in a row Dylan recorded in Columbia’s Nashville studios, preceded by Blonde on Blonde and John Wesley Harding. Dylan’s shift to country music in this new environment intrigued the new generation of rock critics who emerged in the mid-1960s.    

One of these critics was Ellen Willis of the New Yorker. In her column, “Records, Rock, Etc.,” Willis brought a left-wing feminist sensibility to rock criticism. And a keen ear for changes in the culture.  

Thirty years later, Willis’s name started showing up in studies of rock criticism. And in 2013, Willis became a minor character in the excellent history of rock criticism at the Village Voice, Writing the Record. Author Devon Powers met Willis as a graduate student and wrote about her lasting influence:

One sustaining lesson I have learned from her life and work is that writing history is a process of both discovering the past and negotiating it with the present. In this and many other ways, she is never very far from my thinking on these topics, and she was and continues to be one of my most insightful teachers.[1]    

In fact, by examining Willis’s 1969 review of Nashville Skyline, there is much the late Ellen Willis can teach us about that vulnerable album. What we’ll find is that Willis used Nashville Skyline as a framework to showcase her abilities in a male-dominated rock culture. Additionally, she highlighted the importance of having women critics for that culture to be genuinely democratic.

Dylan’s Countryfication

Dylan recorded Nashville Skyline in February 1969. When Columbia Records released Skyline that April, the term “country rock” had been freshly coined by Village Voice critic Richard Goldstein. He included Dylan as part of the new genre.

Thus, Dylan’s new album represented a fresh direction in rock music by returning to its roots.  Rock critics from major publications also sensed this. For instance, Pete Johnson of the L.A. Times wrote:

Bob Dylan, who – along with the Beatles – led the rock attack on traditional pop music romanticism, is currently trying to re-establish some of its virtues … Bob Dylan’s singing and writing both have a casual feeling … Vocally, Dylan is sounding better than ever. His voice has become huskier and surer … Nashville Skyline seems to me a more unified realization of Dylan’s countryfication.[2]    

New York Times critic Mike Jahn also focused on Dylan’s new singing style:

Several things set the new album apart from his previous albums …

The most obvious is that Mr. Dylan’s voice has changed again. His early albums showed a sneering, nasal voice. John Wesley Harding was deeper and more polished vocally. On this new album, he seems to have found more bass and is even more polished, perhaps too much so …

Most of the songs are about love lost, gained and hoped for. They are simple and sensitive.

Taken at face value, Nashville Skyline is a warm, friendly album. In voice and in words, Mr. Dylan has mellowed, calmed down, grown up. It isn’t that he has forgotten how to be alienated. He just seems to have learned how to be happy.[3]

An Aesthetic Conservative?

Two of the lengthiest reviews of Nashville Skyline occurred in Rolling Stone magazine and the Village Voice.

Writing in Rolling Stone, Paul Nelson, well-versed in reviewing roots music, wrote:

Bob Dylan’s ninth album poses fewer mysteries and yet, paradoxically, offers greater rewards than any of his previous work … In many ways, Nashville Skyline achieves the artistically impossible: a deep, humane, and interesting statement about being happy.[4]

This expression of contentment also fascinated Village Voice pop critic Robert Christgau. 

I think people are missing the point of Nashville Skyline, which is as it should be, since they were probably supposed to. The beauty of the album is that it is totally undemanding. In the past, it was always possible to enjoy Dylan without understanding him; I don’t think he would have achieved his post-folk popularity otherwise. Even if you found his metaphors opaque and his situations surreal, you could dig him …

However, Christgau also found a political message embedded in Skyline’s casual spirit:

Dylan retains political importance not just for the folk diehards but for everyone who cares about both Dylan and politics … But Nashville Skyline, we are told, is apolitical, inspiring some nasty gloating from the fainthearts who are beginning to fear radicalism. They’re glad the radical culture hero has turned into a good old boy.

But, Christgau wrote:

It is fatuous to believe that good art and good politics go together, and if Dylan isn’t a political conservative, he is certainly becoming an aesthetic conservative. More and more, his work emphasizes formal discipline, concision, and understatement.

Ellen Willis

At the time Christgau wrote his Nashville Skyline review, he was in a relationship with New Yorker rock critic Ellen Willis. Devon Powers wrote:  

In the early part of 1966, she met Bob Christgau, a journalist who had grown up in the same Queens neighborhood. They developed a powerful intellectual and romantic connection. The couple expanded their circle later that year when Christgau reached out to another young working-class Jewish writer named Richard Goldstein … Soon all three began writing or editing at publications where they could exercise their interest in popular culture, especially rock music.[5]

Willis published her first New Yorker column on July 6, 1968. That column filled almost two pages and established the magazine’s reputation for sharp, in-depth pop music criticism, a tradition that continues today with writers such as Amanda Petrusich. 

Rock has been Co-opted by High Culture

In Willis’s first New Yorker column, she laid out the perspective that would underpin her Nashville Skyline review:

The sociology of rock and post-rock has been based on three concepts: the star, the sound, and the scene. That sociology, like most, is firmly rooted in economics … Before rock’n’roll became self-conscious, commercial and aesthetic considerations were almost indistinguishable. The geniuses of that period, from Chuck Berry to the early Beatles and Stones, owed their greatness to the same qualities that made them best sellers.

[But now] the audience favors complex music and lyrics, a trend that threatened to get totally out of hand until Dylan’s John Wesley Harding provided some timely propaganda for simplicity. But, all this adds up to is an increasing tendency to judge pop music intrinsically the way poetry or jazz is judged … Social and economic factors … are now subordinate to the “music itself.” …

I think this tendency is regrettable. What it means is that rock has been co-opted by high culture, forced to adopt its standards … [This means] the end of rock as a radical experiment in creating mass culture on its own terms, ignoring elite definitions of what is or is not intrinsic to aesthetic experience …[6]

Therefore, Willis called for rock music that was anti-elitist and tinged with populism. She valued fan-friendly simplicity, a trait Willis saw in Dylan’s Nashville recordings. But most importantly, the column showed that Willis employed a polemical approach to rock criticism. She addressed controversial topics within her own rock critic subculture, including its growing elitism.  

This perspective shaped Willis’s review of Nashville Skyline.

The Review  

Willis published her review in the April 26, 1969, issue of the New Yorker. She said that Nashville Skyline reflected a turning point in rock music: 

Dylan has taken a vacation from mythmaking and perversity to relax and fool around with his music. As usual, his sense of timing is perfect. Nashville Skyline appears at a moment when the whole rock scene has relaxed; the era of the masterpiece, when everyone waited tensely for the latest miracle to emerge from the studio, is really over. The album also represents the culmination of a year in which Dylan-mongering fell to an all-time low – in which news of our hero was consistently homey and reassuring, like a polygraph finally straightening out …[7]

Willis welcomed this reassurance. It meant that rock’s late-1960s elitism gave way to a new simplicity and accessibility. And, Willis said that artists could refine as well as revolutionize: 

So I wasn’t even surprised that Nashville skyline wasn’t much of a surprise. Dylan has been hung up on country music for a long time – John Wesley Harding got everybody interested, but it should be remembered that Blonde on Blonde was recorded in Nashville in 1966 – and he had given every indication that he was going to keep pursuing it. …[8]

The Sound

Like other critics, Willis homed in on how country music influenced Dylan’s vocals:   

The one shocker is Dylan’s voice. He really sings – carries a tune, that is, and as a result sounds ten years older and just like a country singer, which seems to be his point … The usual relationship between Dylan’s words and his melodies is reversed. Nashville Skyline is primarily sound – country sound of several varieties. Most of the lyrics are pastiches of country-western and pop clichés…[9]

Willis wrote that Dylan surrendered his old identity to immerse himself in his new passion, country music:   

In the past, Dylan has used country music as a vehicle for self-expression; in this album he subordinates self to genre. Using examples from his earliest work, he comments on this reversal of values. In the much-publicized duet with Johnny Cash, he transforms his old song “Girl from the North Country” from an intensely adolescent, welt-schmerzy [melancholy] folk ballad into a stylized, cheerful country-western song.[10]

Then, Willis revealed Nashville Skyline’s central contradiction: acceptance as a form of resistance:

Dylan professes not to care that he hasn’t presented us with anything startling – he ain’t running any race. But ultimately, his refusal to top himself turns into a new way of topping himself; his acceptance becomes another form of belligerence. Unpredictability, he is saying, is as big a bore as anything else. Why should he have to make the revolution every time? Nashville Skyline may be a revolt against hipness, but it is sure to be one of the hippest records of the year.[11]

And, as Pete Johnson noted, it was a return to “pop music romanticism.”[12]

It is About Women

Willis gave her perspective on Nashville Skyline’s romanticism:    

The album is not only about country music. Like Another Side of Bob Dylan and Blonde on Blonde, it is about women. Dylan has always combined frankness about the power struggle between men and women with reticence about sex – an unusual combination. The conventional approach in pop music is to combine realism with a display of sexual power – indeed to identify the two – or else soften the whole male-female relationship with fantasy.

The first tendency comes out of blues and is bound up with the myth of black sexuality. The second is the product of white music and puritanism. Before Dylan (and The Beatles), American bohemians and radicals who rebelled against the hypocrisies of white middle-class culture almost invariably used blackness as a central metaphor. Dylan never did. Like all the other folkies, he learned blues riffs and sang about Mississippi, but his radicalism was modeled on Woody Guthrie’s, and his bohemianism on Allen Ginsberg’s, and blues sensibility contributed little to his melodies … his rhythms … his lyrics, or his sexual attitude.[13]

A New Tenderness

For Willis, Nashville Skyline reflected a new tenderness in Dylan’s songs:

Now he is discovering that romantic fantasy, staple of the white pop tradition, has its place. His attitude towards women, like his attitude towards everything else, has softened considerably. Nashville Skyline is an album of tender, humor-filled love songs, not a put-down in the lot … My favorite cut musically and lyrically is “Lay Lady Lay,” a low-keyed, delicate sexual invitation backed up by absolutely spectacular organ music.[14]

In short, this record fulfills a promise Dylan made us all a year ago: “Shut the light, shut the shade. /You don’t have to be afraid./ I’ll be your baby tonight.” O.K., Bobby.[15]

Willis’s winking acceptance of Dylan’s overture reminded readers that there was a female perspective in rock criticism.  

Indeed, a dominant theme in popular music was male singers expressing their love for women, or vice versa. For male music critics, this meant identifying with the male protagonists in songs. Consequently, the male-dominated field of music criticism lacked the perspectives of women writers identifying with female characters in these songs, such as the singer’s beloved in “Lay Lady Lay.”

The exclusion of women’s perspectives in rock criticism began in its earliest days.

Although women and girls financially supported the British Invasion by purchasing records and concert tickets, the only female journalists who articulated the experiences of these fans were those writing for fan magazines. However, a stigma surrounding “fan journalism” had prevented these writers from being accepted in critics’ circles. As a result, rock criticism remained within the 1960s manosphere that dominated popular culture. Yes, some of these critics embraced feminism, but who among them understood the romantic pull of “Lay Lady Lay?”  

Nashville Skyline’s Impact

Nashville Skyline served as a framework for Ellen Willis to showcase her skills in a male-dominated rock culture. In writing her review of Dylan’s masterwork, Willis had a topic worthy of her formidable skills as a cultural critic. The album, as Willis noted, avoided the macho posturing of hard rock and the art pretensions of “concept albums.” Instead, as Willis deftly laid out in detail, Nashville Skyline liberated rock musicians to return to the values of simplicity, romantic love, and an idyllic pastoralism.

Willis followed the impact of Dylan’s rural-rock into the next decade. However, following the release of Nashville Skyline came a series of blows to the 1960s counterculture dream. The student protest movement turned militant with bombings by the radical group the Weatherman (ironically named from a line in a Dylan song). Bloody killings by the Charles Manson cult grabbed headlines for weeks. The final blow was dealt by the Hell Angels at Altamont as they killed a member of the audience.

Within this dark atmosphere, Willis wrote:

A deepening sense of incipient disaster is making many of us turn inward – less in an attempt to evade external reality than in renewed appreciation of simple pleasures we have taken too much for granted. In recent months, thousands of young people have migrated to the country … In a way, to choose a rural environment over the hyperadrenergic, cynical, demanding metropolis is to return to childhood. And it is not surprising that the rock records that have meant the most to me lately are very much concerned with childhood, innocence, world-weariness, and rebirth.[16]

Joy in Living Day to Day

One of those records was Sweet Thursday, named for the band of the same name. The five-piece included keyboardist Nicky Hopkins, who, after years of playing with hard rock groups like the Rolling Stones and the Jeff Beck Group, likely found solace in his new band’s softer approach. Willis wrote that Sweet Thursday was the “best new group I’ve heard since the Band.” She said “the Dylan influence – particularly on intonation and the use of rhymes – is pervasive.”[17]

But it was in another album that Willis surprisingly heard Dylan’s influence most clearly – Abbey Road. She praised the Beatles for transcending pretentiousness and stopping their “moralizing about politics.”[18] She wrote:

The basic message of Abbey Road, like that of Nashville Skyline, is joy in living from day to day,  but this album is a lot less smug and image-conscious than Dylan’s, and his version of happiness is less bourgeois: Dylan celebrates maturity, the Beatles proclaim “One two three four five six seven, all good children go to Heaven.”[19]

Willis seemed to have slightly modified her glowing opinion of Nashville Skyline, perhaps in light of Abbey Road’s playful spirit. But it’s clear that in Dylan’s country music experiment, Willis saw hope for her generation’s music. Even from her home base in a “hyperadrenergic, cynical, demanding metropolis,” Willis heard Dylan’s romantic call for rural simplicity.

Although the magazine she wrote for, New Yorker, was outside the sphere of mainstream rock criticism dominated by Rolling Stone, Creem, and Crawdaddy, Willis, as a woman, enjoyed a status rarely given to her sex within that sphere. Within that supportive environment, Ellen Willis created an illuminating body of work that kept faith with the promise of rock ‘n’ roll to deliver simple messages of happiness to a broad audience.     

   

Notes

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[1] Devon Powers. Writing the Record (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013): 2.

[2]Pete Johnson. “Bob Dylan: Nashville Skyline,” Los Angeles Times, April 7, 1969: 70.   

[3] Mike Jahn. “Bob Dylan: Nashville Skyline”. The New York Times (1969). Bob Dylan. Rock’s Backpages. Accessed September 1, 2025. http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/bob-dylan-inashville-skylinei.

[4] Paul Nelson. “Nashville Skyline,” Rolling Stone, May 31, 1969. Retrieved Sept. 1, 2025: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/nashville-skyline-250427/.

[5] Devon Powers. Writing the Record (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013): 3.

[6] Ellen Willis. “Records: Rock, Etc.,” New Yorker, July 6, 1968: 56-58.

[7] Ellen Willis. “Records: Rock, Etc.,” New Yorker, April 26, 1969: 157, 161-62.  

[8] Ellen Willis. “Records: Rock, Etc.,” New Yorker, April 26, 1969: 157, 161-62.  

[9] Ellen Willis. “Records: Rock, Etc.,” New Yorker, April 26, 1969: 157, 161-62.  

[10] Ellen Willis. “Records: Rock, Etc.,” New Yorker, April 26, 1969: 157, 161-62.   

[11] Ellen Willis. “Records: Rock, Etc.,” New Yorker, April 26, 1969: 157, 161-62.  

[12]Pete Johnson. “Bob Dylan: Nashville Skyline,” Los Angeles Times, April 7, 1969: 70.   

[13] Ellen Willis. “Records: Rock, Etc.,” New Yorker, April 26, 1969: 157, 161-62.  

[14] Ellen Willis. “Records: Rock, Etc.,” New Yorker, April 26, 1969: 157, 161-62.  

[15] Ellen Willis. “Records: Rock, Etc.,” New Yorker, April 26, 1969: 157, 161-62.  

[16] Ellen Willis. “Records: Rock, Etc.,” New Yorker, Feb. 21, 1970: 112 and 115.

[17] Ellen Willis. “Records: Rock, Etc.,” New Yorker, Feb. 21, 1970: 116-17.

[18] Ellen Willis. “Records: Rock, Etc.,” New Yorker, Feb. 21, 1970: 115.

[19] Ellen Willis. “Records: Rock, Etc.,” New Yorker, Feb. 21, 1970: 116.