"North Country Blues" is a song by Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan is an American singer-songwriter, musician, poet, film director and painter. He has been a major and profoundly influential figure in popular music and culture for five decades. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s when he was an informal chronicler and a seemingly...

, released on his third studio album

Studio album

A studio album is an album made up of tracks recorded in the controlled environment of a recording studio. A studio album contains newly written and recorded or previously unreleased or remixed material, distinguishing itself from a compilation or reissue album of previously recorded material, or...

 The Times They Are a-Changin'

The Times They Are a-Changin'

The Times They Are a-Changin opens with the title track, one of Dylan's most famous songs. Dylan's friend, Tony Glover, recalls visiting Dylan's apartment in September 1963, where he saw a number of song manuscripts and poems lying on a table. "The Times They Are a-Changin'" had yet to be recorded,...

in 1964. He also performed it at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival

Newport Folk Festival

The Newport Folk Festival is an American annual folk-oriented music festival in Newport, Rhode Island, which began in 1959 as a counterpart to the previously established Newport Jazz Festival...

.

Its apparently simple format (ten verses of ABCB rhyme scheme

Rhyme scheme

A rhyme scheme is the pattern of rhyme between lines of a poem or song. It is usually referred to by using letters to indicate which lines rhyme. In other words, it is the pattern of end rhymes or lines...

) and subject matter (the perils of life in a mining community and its ultimate demise) appears to have been influenced by Woody Guthrie

Woody Guthrie

Woodrow Wilson "Woody" Guthrie is best known as an American singer-songwriter and folk musician, whose musical legacy includes hundreds of political, traditional and children's songs, ballads and improvised works. He frequently performed with the slogan This Machine Kills Fascists displayed on his...

.

The specific location of the town is never stated. However, a location on the Iron Range

Iron Range

The Iron Range is a region that makes up the northeastern section of Minnesota in the United States. "The Range", as it is known by locals, is a region with multiple distinct bands of iron ore...

 in northern Minnesota

Minnesota

Minnesota is a U.S. state located in the Midwestern United States. The twelfth largest state of the U.S., it is the twenty-first most populous, with 5.3 million residents. Minnesota was carved out of the eastern half of the Minnesota Territory and admitted to the Union as the thirty-second state...

 is suggested by the song's title, Dylan's childhood residence in Hibbing, Minnesota, and the reference to "iron ore" and "red iron." The reference to "red iron pits" strongly suggests the location is on the Mesabi Range

Mesabi Range

The Mesabi Iron Range is a vast deposit of iron ore and the largest of four major iron ranges in the region collectively known as the Iron Range of Minnesota. Discovered in 1866, it is the chief deposit of iron ore in the United States. The deposit is located in northeast Minnesota, largely in...

, a portion of the Iron Range where open-pit mining

Open-pit mining

Open-pit mining or opencast mining refers to a method of extracting rock or minerals from the earth by their removal from an open pit or borrow....

 has predominated , and where Hibbing is situated.

The song opens with a deliberately conventional opening (Come gather round friends and I'll tell you a tale...). However, the darkness of the tale soon becomes apparent. Each verse contains at least one tragic situation or event:

1. For starters, speaking of the current day, "the whole town is empty."
2. When the narrator was young, her mother "took sick" and obviously died, as she was "brought up by my brother."
3. One day her brother "failed to come home, the same as my father before him." (The implication is that they failed to come home from the mine, suggesting repeated mining tragedies.)
4. Her schooling was cut short "to marry John Thomas, a miner."
5. With three children, her husband's work was cut to a one-half shift "for no reason."
6. "The man" came to town and announced that mine #11 was closing.
7. The price of the mined ore is too high and not worth digging, because it's cheaper from South America where miners work "almost for nothing."
8. Total desolation, hours last "twice as long . . . as I waited for the sun to go sinking."
9. Her husband is talking only to himself now, and one morning he up and left her "alone with three children."
10. The stores have all closed and her children "will go, as soon as they grow," because "there ain't nothing here now to hold them."

Dylan hides the fact that the narrator is a woman to the end of verse four. The song ends bleakly, as by this time the woman has lost her husband, mother, father and brother; the mine is closed and the town is virtually abandoned; and soon her children will leave her in complete isolation and desolation.

Within this apparently restricting and morose format, referred to as a "formally conservative exercise in first-person narrative" Dylan manages to achieve significant tonal and expressive variation, and the song is considered by some to be one of his most effective in the 'folk-song' genre.

In 1968, Joan Baez

Joan Baez

Joan Chandos Baez is an American folk singer, songwriter, musician and a prominent activist in the fields of human rights, peace and environmental justice....

 included a cover of "North Country Blues" on her Dylan tribute album Any Day Now.