“North Country Blues” is a song written by Bob Dylan and released on his 1964 album “The Times They Are a-Changin’.” It is one of Dylan’s most quietly powerful early songs — not a protest anthem but a stark, plainspoken story.
The song traces the slow death of an iron-mining town, told in the first person by a woman who has watched the mine, and with it her family and community, decline and close. Dylan grew up in Hibbing, Minnesota, in the iron-ore country of the Mesabi Range, and the song draws on that landscape and on the Woody Guthrie tradition of songs about working people and hard times.
The song’s spare melody and grave storytelling made it well suited to acoustic interpretation. The version heard here is by Mighty Poplar, a string-band “supergroup,” from their 2023 debut album.
