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Not only that, but Lonnie Johnson, the blues-jazz player, showed me a technique on the guitar in maybe 1964. I hadn’t really understood it when he first showed it to me. It had to do with the mathematical order of the scale on a guitar, and how to make things happen, where it gets under somebody’s skin and there’s really nothing they can do about it, because it’s mathematical. He didn’t even play that way himself. He played mostly jazz — a kind of guitar I can’t play at all, though when I think of a guitar player, I think of somebody like Eddie Lang or Charlie Christian or Freddie Green. I don’t listen to many people in the rock & roll area. Anyway, he just told me, “I want to show you something. You might be able to use this someday.” It’s more kind of an ancient way of playing. I always wanted to use this technique, but I never was really able to do it with my own songs.

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One of the things I’ve noticed about your shows is that starting in the 1990s they grew more and more musical. You’ve opened the songs up to more instrumental exploration and new textures and rhythmic shifts — like you’re trying to stretch or reinvent them — and you seem very much at the heart of that. You’re your own band director at this point.
Well, I don’t think you’ve seen me play too many mindless jams. What I do is all done with technique and certain stratagems. But they’re not intellectual ones; they’re designed to make people feel something. And I understand that it’s not necessarily the same for everyone who hears me play and sing. Everyone is feeling a different thing. I would like to be a performer who maybe could read and write music and play the violin. Then I could design a bigger band with more comprehensive parts of harmony in different arrangements, and still have the songs evolve within that. But if anything, I do know my limitations, and so I don’t try to transcend those limitations. Or if I do transcend the limitations, it’s all done with the technique I was talking about. Which is to say, you can do it whether you feel good or you don’t feel good, or no matter how you’re feeling. It really doesn’t matter. It has nothing to do with personality. It’s difficult even to find the words to talk about it.

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It seems that some of your most impassioned and affecting performances, from night to night, are your covers of traditional folk songs.
Folk music is where it all starts and in many ways ends. If you don’t have that foundation, or if you’re not knowledgeable about it and you don’t know how to control that, and you don’t feel historically tied to it, then what you’re doing is not going to be as strong as it could be. Of course, it helps to have been born in a certain era because it would’ve been closer to you, or it helps to be a part of the culture when it was happening. It’s not the same thing, relating to something second- or third-hand off of a record.

I think one of the best records that I’ve ever been even a part of was the record I made with Big Joe Williams and Victoria Spivey. Now that’s a record that I hear from time to time and I don’t mind listening to it. It amazes me that I was there and had done that.

In Invisible Republic — Greil Marcus’ book about you, the Band, the Basement Tapes sessions and the place of all that in American culture [now retitled The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes] — Marcus wrote about the importance of Harry Smith’s legendary Anthology of American Folk Music and its influence on all of your work, from your earliest to most-recent recordings.
Well, he makes way too much of that.

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Why do you say that?
Because those records were around — that Harry Smith anthology — but that’s not what everybody was listening to. Sure, there were all those songs. You could hear them at people’s houses. I know in my case, I think Dave Van Ronk had that record. But in those days we really didn’t have places to live, or places to have a lot of records. We were sort of living from this place to that — kind of a transient existence. I know I was living that way. You heard records where you could, but mostly you heard other performers. All those people [Marcus is] talking about, you could hear the actual people singing those ballads. You could hear Clarence Ashley, Doc Watson, Dock Boggs, the Memphis Jug Band, Furry Lewis. You could see those people live and in person. They were around. He intellectualizes it too much. Performers did know of that record, but it wasn’t, in retrospect, the monumental iconic recordings at the time that he makes them out to be.