decades, that little rehearsal has emerged as one of Dylan’s greatest songs — or even, perhaps, in the right mood, his greatest recording. From the start, it had a burgeoning charisma: the more you played it, the more it demanded that the volume go up, a fraction every time, until you hit the limit and realized it still wasn’t loud enough". Drive-By Truckers' Patterson Hood cited it as his favorite Dylan song in a 2021 Stereogum article, writing, "With McTell as a starting point, Dylan constructed a time travel from slave days through the Jim Crow South with a kitchen sink full of delta imagery, Bible scripture, and vaudevillian shuck and jive. Yet, as it goes with the best of songs, it also remains elusive and mysterious, benefitting as much from what it leaves out as for what it actually says". Michael Gray's book Song and Dance Man III: The Art of Bob Dylan (2000) includes a chapter on this song and its musical and historical background. The Guardian in one of its article from 2021 included the song on a list of "80 Bob Dylan songs everyone should know". In live performance "Blind Willie McTell" was a concert staple for the Band throughout the 1990s. They also recorded it for their 1993 album Jericho. Dylan later claimed in a Rolling Stone interview that hearing the Band's version of the song inspired him to begin performing it at his own concerts: Dylan can't possibly be sorry that the world has had the benefit of hearing, for instance, "Blind Willie McTell", – an outtake from 1983's Infidels that has subsequently risen as high in most people's Dylan pantheon as a song can rise, and that he himself has played live since. Can he? Bob Dylan – "I started playing it live because I heard the Band doing it. Most likely it was a demo, probably showing the musicians how it should go. It was never developed fully, I never got around to completing it. There wouldn't have been any other reason for leaving it off the record. It's like taking a painting by Monet or Picasso – goin' to his house and lookin' at a half-finished painting and grabbing it and selling it to people who are 'Picasso fans.' According to his official website, Dylan performed the song 226 times on the Never Ending Tour between 1997 and 2017. An August