The first three episodes of the new drama series Black Cake premiered today on Hulu with an interesting choice of music providing their soundtracks.
Songs like Bob Dylan’s ‘All the Tired Horses‘, which was played on Black Cake, Season 1, Episode 3, “Eleanor” as Pearl is walking down the street smiling, then turns to see a car following her.
The song continues playing through the last few minutes as Eleanor leaves Scotland, arrives in London and is talking about the necessity for being seen.
It then plays the episode out over the end credits.
How is ‘All the Tired Horses‘ a Bob Dylan song?
While ‘All the Tired Horses‘ is always billed as a song by Bob Dylan, many people get confused when they hear it as the iconic American singer’s vocals do not appear on the song at all.
Instead, we hear three women singing just two lines of lyrics over and over again:
All the tired horses in the sun
How’m I s’posed to get any ridin’ done? Hmmm. Hmmm
But yes, it is a Bob Dylan song in that the song was written by Dylan as the first track from his tenth studio album Self Portrait, which came out in June, 1970.
The women singing are Hilda Harris, Albertine Robinson, and Maeretha Stewart, but both the song and the album were released as a joke to some extent, as Dylan was tired of being called “the spokesman of a generation” and thus treated like a God.
Due to that, he decided to record and release a double album of mainly cover songs, some of which were pretty low quality as Dylan surmised, if fans hated what he released, they would move onto someone else to idolize and leave him alone.
He then titled it Self Portrait to be even more obnoxious.
The problem was, although critics detested the album, it sold like hot cakes and, yet again, Dylan soon had a hit album on his hands.
As he admitted later, yep, the joke was on him.
As for ‘All the Tired Horses‘, as strange as it is, the vocals and harmonizing are gorgeous, and the song haunting.
Listen to Boy Dylan’s ‘All the Tired Horses‘ from the Black Cake soundtrack in the video, and on the American musician’s Self Portrait album.
The first season of Black Cake is now streaming on Hulu.