Blind Willie McTell (song)

The lyrics are comparable to later Dylan songs "High Water (For Charley Patton)"[5] and "Goodbye Jimmy Reed"[6] in that they pay tribute to the titular blues singer indirectly.

Dylan sings a series of plaintive verses depicting allegorical scenes which reflect on the history of American music and slavery.

Following three albums with overt Christian themes, Infidels struck most major rock critics as dealing largely with secular concerns, and they hailed it as a comeback.

When bootleggers released the outtakes from Infidels, the song was recognized as a composition approaching the quality of such classics as "Tangled Up in Blue", "Like a Rolling Stone" and "All Along the Watchtower".

In an article accompanying the list, critic Peter Tabakis describes it as "a six-minute repudiation of any argument that somehow insists Dylan's '80s output was fallow.

The song, with its spare and dramatic piano backbone by Dylan himself, accented with Knopfler's haunting guitar notes, seems performed in an open field at midnight.

[9] 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.

[14] Dylan also performed a version of the song, hailed as "absolutely stellar" by Rolling Stone, for a televised tribute to Martin Scorsese at the Critics' Choice Movie Awards in 2012.