The last episode of the third season of Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour went out a couple of weeks back. Will there be a fourth season? From Rolling Stone, as quoted by RightWingBob:
After three years and 100 episodes, Bob Dylan’s Sirius XM program “Theme Time Radio Hour” may be leaving the airwaves. “I stopped doing those shows a while ago, and then XM Radio was combined with another one,” Dylan tells Rolling Stone. “They want to renew. They’d like more shows. But I’m not so sure.”
Personally I think that's it. It was the 100th show, and the theme was "Goodbye". And the last song to be played? Of course: Woody Guthrie's So Long, It's Been Good to Know You. [Listen to Woody and then, by way of contrast, and looking back to my post yesterday on Pete Seeger, check out The Weavers' interpretation. You'll understand exactly what Rian Malan meant about how they "managed to filter the stench of poverty and pig shit out of the proletarian music and make it wholesome and fun for Eisenhower-era squares".]
So, from the first track, Muddy Waters' "Blow Wind Blow" three years ago, to Woody Guthrie, and all points in between and either side, a wonderful portrait of the lesser-travelled by-ways of American music: a sort of update, fifty years on, of Harry Smith's famous Anthology of American Folk Music, except now the net's been cast much wider, and we get everything from Dinah Washington to Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, with excursions to Jamaica, the UK, and even Australia (oh yes: Rolf Harris with "Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport": you can't fault the man's eclecticism). In a way, too – as you can tell from those first and last tracks – it was Dylan looking at himself and what made him. Back in 1970 he released Self Portrait: without a doubt the worst-received of his albums. "What is this shit?" was, famously, critic Greil Marcus' response. This time he's done it properly. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for season four, but I'll be surprised if we get it.
Mick Hartley 
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