"The fundamental principle of country pie,"Ronni Lundywrote in her 1994 cookbookShuck Beans, Stack Cakes, and Honest Fried Chicken, "holds that you mix some kind of sugar, eggs, and thickener, add whatever you've got in the kitchen, pour it in the pie shell and bake it up for dessert."
InShuck Beansshe preferred oats, black walnuts, and chocolate chips;in this year'sVictuals, in a recipe called Country Pie 4.0, Lundy tweaked things a bit, ditching the chocolate, adding dried fruit. It's changeable, is the point, and contingent. "I named it in honor of the Bob Dylan song of the same name," she wrote, "and like Dylan's best work, it's been covered and embellished since."
也五花八门都出去,像迪伦的st work. In his 50-year career the singer-songwriter has gone from folk to rock to country to gospel to old-timey to Christmas music to, uh, an album ofFrank Sinatra covers.
Today Dylan received—of all the awards in the world—theNobel Prize in Literature, for "having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition," according to the Nobel committee. This has already led to, and will continue to lead to, loud public questions regarding whether songwriting is literature. You can count me as a member of#TeamRemnick, but ultimately I don't really care—I'm content just to think about Bob Dylan and "Country Pie," a song off one of his most uncomplicatedly enjoyable albums, 1969'sNashville Skyline.
Like Lundy, Dylan is catholic in his approach to dessert:
Raspberry, strawberry, lemon and lime
What do I care?
Blueberry, apple, cherry, pumpkin and plum
Call me for dinner, honey, I'll be there
"Oh me, oh my," goes the refrain. "Love that country pie."
Nashville Skylineis a country album that showed Dylan pulling back a bit from the surrealist verbal gymnastics of his earlier work—it's a record of short, straightforward numbers, and even the singing is what some people might describe as "nice." (For folks who have trouble with the voice,Nashville Skylineis like the training wheels of Dylan albums.) He was in a much darker mood nearly a decade later onDesire, bemoaning racial injustice in "Hurricane," lamenting a failed marriage in "Sara," and tracing the contours of some mysterious, violent kingdom in "One More Cup of Coffee," which—in theory, anyway—goes great with a slice of pie. It's the bitter edge to cut through all that sweetness.
