"Nettie Moore" is a folk love song written and performed by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released in 2006 as the eighth track on his album Modern Times.
Speaking to USA Today's Edna Gunderson, Dylan said that "Nettie Moore", more than any other song on Modern Times, “troubled me the most, because I wasn’t sure I was getting it right.
[2] Jon Dolan, writing in Rolling Stone, where the song placed eighth on a list of "The 25 Best Bob Dylan Songs of the 21st Century", noted that, although it has lyrical roots in the 1857 James Lord Pierpont and Marshall S. Pike composition "Gentle Nettie Moore" and other pre-20th century folk songs, Dylan's "Nettie Moore" nonetheless "feels so personal" to the songwriter because of the way he sings of wandering the earth and being "in a cowboy band".
In an article accompanying the list, critic Tyler Dunston also sees the song as a "personal account", noting that "Dylan conflates the myth of a version of himself with American music, the story of which is deeply entangled with mythology and history—from the Faustian fiction of Robert Johnson’s legendary guitar skill to the very real histories of oppression that blues and folk music arise out of and document.
"[7] On the opposite end of the spectrum, historian Sean Wilentz, seeing darker implications in the line "No knife could ever cut our love apart", interprets the song as being an oblique murder ballad in his book Bob Dylan's America.
At a train station in Tutwiler, Mississippi in 1903, W. C. Handy heard a Black man playing a blues song on a steel guitar using a knife as a slide.