"One More Cup of Coffee (Valley Below)" is a song by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, which was released as the fourth track on his seventeenth studio album Desire (1976). The song was written by Dylan, and produced by Don DeVito. The album version of "One More Cup of Coffee (Valley Below)" was recorded on July 30, 1975, and released on Desire in January 1976. Dylan said the song was influenced by his visit to a gypsy celebration at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in France on his 34th birthday.
Emmylou Harris sings with Dylan on the track; their performance received critical acclaim. Dylan performed the song live in concert 151 times from 1975 to 2009, and three of the live versions have been officially released. The White Stripes, Robert Plant and Tom Jones have all covered the song on albums.
Background and recording
"One More Cup of Coffee (Valley Below)" was the first song that Dylan wrote after the release of his critically acclaimed album Blood on the Tracks on January 20, 1975, and the only one completed by June 1975. In the preceding 18 months, he had topped the Billboard 200 charts for the first time; both Planet Waves (1974) and Blood on the Tracks reached number one. Dylan wrote the song after visiting a gypsy celebration at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in France on his 34th birthday.
Dylan said in 1978 that he had met a "gypsy king" during his stay in France, and that "in the Gypsy way of life, death is a very happy thing." Dylan biographer Clinton Heylin wrote that "One More Cup of Coffee (Valley Below)" takes the perspective of a man who is "lying with a young gypsy consort, by implication the gypsy king's daughter, but is only going through the motions" as he is preoccupied with thought of "the valley below".
One take of the song was recorded on July 28, 1975. That day's sessions featured a large band including Dylan (guitar, vocal), Emmylou Harris (vocals), Eric Clapton, Vinnie Bell, Neil Hubbard, Perry Lederman, and Jim Mullen (all guitar), Erik Frandsen (slide guitar), Rob Stoner (bass), Alan Spenner (bass), Scarlet Rivera (violin), Sheena Seidenberg (tenor saxophone), Mel Collins (tenor saxophone), Sugar Blue (harmonica), Dom Cortese (mandolin/accordion), Michael Lawrence (trumpet), Tony O'Malley (keyboards), Jody Linscott (percussion), John Sussewell (drums), and Dyan Birch, Francis Collins, and Paddy McHugh (background vocals). There were three takes on July 30, at Studio E, Columbia Recording Studios (New York), with a smaller group: Dylan, Harris, Rivera, Stoner, Seidenberg (percussion) and Howard Wyeth (drums). The version of the song released on Desire in January 1976 was the first of the three takes recorded on July 30.
Harris, who sang on the track with Dylan, later said that she had been contacted by producer Don DeVito to join the recording sessions for Desire, and that she "basically shook hands and started recording." In Harris's account, she did not know the songs before the recording sessions, and, with a copy of the lyrics to hand, "the band would start playing and [Dylan] would kind of poke me when he wanted me to jump in. Somehow I watched his mouth with one eye and the lyrics with the other." Harris was unhappy with the quality of her performance, but her request to redo it was rejected. Dylan's vocal performance was unusual. Allen Ginsberg described it as "Hebraic cantillation never heard before in U.S. song, ancient blood singing." Jack Garner of The Bellingham Herald wrote that Dylan's Hebraic chant technique represented "the first time his Jewishness has been in the forefront of his music."
Critic Oliver Trager refers to the song as a "Spanish-tinged narrative depicting a melodrama in miniature". The authors of Bob Dylan All the Songs: The Story Behind Every Track, Philippe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon, describe the song's narrator as "bewitched by a young gypsy" and suggest that "the songwriter seems to say that between love and death, the borderline is sometimes tenuous." American Studies academic Michael Denning wrote of "One More Cup of Coffee (Valley Below)" that "With its Andalusian chord progression, it is one of those classic Dylan songs that have virtually no lyric content, or – rather – whose lyric content has been so concentrated in the great chorus that the verses are almost an afterthought". In this respect, he compares it to Dylan's earlier "I Shall Be Released" and "Knockin' on Heaven's Door". The chorus is: