Rank Strangers To Me is an old song by Albert E. Brumley, which Bob Dylan has both recorded and performed live on various occasions. The Stanley Brothers also recorded it way back when. The gift that is YouTube allows us to compare a live performance by the great Ralph Stanley (singing sometime in the not-too-distant-past with his son) to a live performance by the great Bob Dylan.

Click here to go to YouTube for Stanley’s performance or play below.

As gospel songs go, Rank Strangers To Me is something of a lament, with more than a hint of darkness. The singer is very much the lone pilgrim, and at this juncture he seems very lonely indeed. He sees people who may once have been friends, but now they are not only strangers, but rank strangers.

The dictionary defines rank something like this:

1: luxuriantly or excessively vigorous in growth
2: offensively gross or coarse
3: foul
4 a: shockingly conspicuous b: outright — used as an intensive (rank beginners)
5 (archaic) : lustful, ruttish
6: offensive in odor or flavor; especially : rancid
7: putrid, festering
8: high in amount or degree : fraught

The singer looks forward only to heaven, where he’ll see again his beloved parents, and where, moreover, “no one will be a stranger” to him.

It’s a song that has both a certain beauty and a certain harshness. In his performance of it, Dylan doesn’t shy away from the harshness. In fact, he seems to relish every particle of it. The role of the lone pilgrim, the stranger in this world, the one who is restless and yearning for his true home on high, is a role that seems — paradoxically enough — to be the most comfortable of all possible roles for Dylan.

In 1997 Dylan performed the song during a concert at Wembley Arena in London. I’m going to go out on a limb and speculate that he was probably the only person to sing this song at Wembley that year. It’s a gut-tearing vocal performance. The band then featured Bucky Baxter and Larry Campbell, along with David Kemper on drums and of-course Tony Garnier on bass.

Click here to go to YouTube or play below.

I wandered again to my home in the mountain
Where in youth’s early dawn I was happy and free
I looked for my friends but I never could find them
I found they were all rank strangers to me.

Ev’rybody I met seemed to be a rank stranger
No mother or dad not a friend could I see
They knew not my name and I knew not their faces
I found they were all rank strangers to me.

“They all moved away,” said a voice of a stranger
“To that beautiful home by the bright crystal sea”
Some beautiful day I’ll meet ‘em in heaven
Where no one will be a stranger to me.

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