Mississippi is the first song to be presented here from Bob Dylan 2001 album – Love and Theft. I would hesitate to guess that if you were to compile a list of music critics top 10 post 2000 Bob Dylan songs, Mississippi would make the list of most of them. Gee wizz that would be a difficult list to create, and a lot of excellent tracks would not make the cut, just because you can’t have a bigger list of say, 50 songs. Like Leonard Cohen, Bob’s produced so much great material in this period and he is still going at it. Shadow Kingdom, his 40th studio album and second soundtrack album was released on June 2, 2023. It is Dylan’s first album of new studio recordings since his 2020 album Rough and Rowdy Ways.

I think lyrically Mississippi is a kind of throwback to his 1997 masterpiece Not Dark Yet and musically foreshadowing where he would go on his 2006 – Thunder on the Mountain, although Mississippi is more of a country rock song whereas Thunder is a bluesy rock epic. But readers may have better suggestions as to Mississippi correlations in Dylan’s discography. Wikipedia wrote the song features a pop chord progression and has a riff and lyrical theme similar to “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again“. The song was originally recorded during the Time Out of Mind sessions (demo sessions in Fall 1996; official album sessions in January 1997) but was ultimately left off the album. Dylan rerecorded the song for Love and Theft in May 2001.

[Verse 1]
Every step of the way we walk the line
Your days are numbered, so are mine
Time is piling’ up, we struggle and we scrape
We’re all boxed in, nowhere to escape

[Verse 2]
City’s just a jungle; more games to play
Trapped in the heart of it, tryin’ to get away
I was raised in the country, I been working’ in the town
I been in trouble ever since I set my suitcase down

[Verse 3]
Got nothing’ for you, I had nothin’ before
Don’t even have anything for myself anymore
Sky full of fire, pain pourin’ down
Nothing you can sell me, I’ll see you around

[Verse 4]
All my powers of expression and thoughts so sublime
Could never do you justice in reason or rhyme
Only one thing I did wrong
Stayed in Mississippi a day too long

From the Wikipedia reference below:
Mississippi was the last track recorded for Love and Theft, and according to drummer David Kemper, it was added almost as an afterthought. As Kemper explained in an interview with Uncut magazine: “We thought we were done with Love And Theft, and then a friend of Bob’s passed him a note, and he said, ‘Oh, yeah, I forgot about this: “Mississippi”‘. And then he made a comment, ‘Did you guys ever bring the version we did down at the Lanois sessions?’ And they said, ‘Yeah, we have it right here’. And he said, “Let’s listen to it’. So they put it up on the big speakers, and I said, ‘Damn – release it’! But it was just me and Tony [Garnier], and Larry [Campbell] wasn’t on it, and Charlie [Sexton] wasn’t on it. And so we all just said, ‘Wait a minute. And Daniel is producer on it. Let’s re-record it’. So we did our version of it”.

Dylan indicated in another interview that he felt he could re-record the song precisely because the earlier versions had not leaked and were not circulating among bootleg collectors: “I’ve been criticised for not putting my best songs on certain albums but it is because I consider that the song isn’t ready yet. It’s not been recorded right. With all of my records, there’s an abundance of material left off – stuff that, for a variety of reasons, doesn’t make the final cut…Except on this album, for which we re-cut the song ‘Mississippi’. We had that on the Time Out Of Mind album. It wasn’t recorded very well but thank God, it never got out, so we recorded it again. But something like that would never have happened ten years ago. You’d have probably all heard the lousy version of it and I’d have never re-recorded it. I’m glad for once to have had the opportunity to do so.”

References:
1. Mississippi (Bob Dylan song) – Wikipedia