Artwork for 1969 Bob Dylan album "Nashville Skyline."

Fifty years ago last February, Charlie Daniels heard nine words that would forever change his life.

An aspiring 32-year-old Nashville player, Daniels took a call from producer Bob Johnston asking if he’d pinch hit on a session at Columbia’s historic Studio A.

He gladly jumped in, hanging on every note played … until the day’s scheduled guitarist showed up and he began packing his bag. That’s when he heard the session's songwriter call out.

“I don’t want another guitar player,” Daniels recalled hearing, reciting each syllable delivered with an excitement untouched by time.

“I want him.”

It was Bob Dylan who invited Daniels to stay with the band assembled that afternoon, a session that’d ultimately become part of Dylan's ninth studio effort and first full-time foray into country music, “Nashville Skyline." The record — Dylan’s third in Music City backed by members of famed studio cohort called the Nashville Cats — sees a softly crooning Midwesterner bridging freewheelin’ hippie folk-rock with country tradition.

In April, “Nashville Skyline” celebrated 50 years of influencing the artistic blur between rock ‘n’ roll and country music.

“That hybrid of folk and country and rock that he helped create during the ‘60s became a foundation for much of the music since then,” said Michael Gray, senior museum editor at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.

Zigging to the cultural zag

Dylan delivered “Nashville Skyline” to a United States blazing with cultural turmoil. Vietnam War protests continued to fill streets as many reconciled with the 1968 slayings of civil leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy.

The record offered a right turn from the 1960s counterculture penman who built a legacy on zigging when the rest of society worked so hard to zag.

“You’re either dodging or you’re drafted,” said Old Crow Medicine Show band leader Ketch Secor. Old Crow covered Dylan’s first Nashville album, “Blonde on Blonde,” in 2016 to celebrate its 50th anniversary.

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“This is the same year that Jimi Hendrix is playing ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ backwards and upside down,” he continued. “I think that the context of (“Nashville Sound”) is just as important as the music that’s contained in it.”

“It’s the height of the counterculture and yet Bob is doing something so counter to the counterculture.”

But it wasn’t improbable for Dylan to dip a toe in music showcasing steel guitar and Southern twang. He’d been raised on country and western, the AM waves carrying Hank Williams and The Carter Family from the hills of Tennessee to the shores of Lake Superior and Dylan’s native Minnesota.

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Guest star Bob Dylan, center, sings "I Threw It All Away" during a taping of "The Johnny Cash Show" at the Ryman Auditorium on May 1, 1969.

Listeners hear such influence on the longing ballad “Lay Lady Lay” or slick-pickin’ instrumental “Nashville Skyline Rag.” Dylan’s affinity for the genre may be most evident on the album’s opening track, the re-imagined “Girl From The North Country.” A smooth-voiced Johnny Cash joined Dylan for the cut — a musical nod to the improbable collision that followed.

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In the late 1960s, a collaboration between a country music icon and counterculture hero “made a dramatic statement about the potential for the two cultures to connect,” said Gray.

Cash would later earn a Grammy Award for penning the album’s liner notes, in which he wrote: “I'm proud to say that I know it/ Here-in is a hell of a poet/ And lots of other things/ And lots of other things.”

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Inside Studio A

Dylan brought his freewheelin’ spirit to the studio, Daniels recalled.

Daniels grew up a student of Dylan — an appreciator of “Gates of Eden” and “Like A Rolling Stone” who saw the songwriter as someone who would “just stick to his guns.”

The would-be fiddlin' great played on about 15 “Nashville Sound” sessions, he said.

“He was so down to earth,” Daniels said. “And so much into being one of the guys, you know? You forgot who he was. You started paying his music, basically. It was very, very relaxing.”

In Dylan, Daniels saw a songwriter relaxed with his players — the likely result from trips to Nashville for “Blonde on Blonde” and 1967 release “John Wesley Harding.”

And the foot-tappin’ swing heard behind Dylan’s subtle warmth on “Peggy Day” wasn’t built overnight.

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Tenured musician Charlie McCoy worked with Dylan on the trio of Nashville releases (and, prior to that, a chance encounter led to McCoy laying down lead guitar on “Desolation Row”); With “Blonde on Blonde,” Dylan “didn’t know what to expect” from Nashville musicians, McCoy said.

“I think on ‘Blonde On Blonde,’ I kept asking him, ‘What would you think if we did this or did that?’ He said, “I don’t know, what do you think?” McCoy said. “I quit asking him and, maybe, if we did something he didn't like, he’d say something.”

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He later added: “I think by ‘Nashville Skyline’ he trusted us. … I could feel on ‘Skyline,’ he was much more relaxed.”

The trust heard on “Nashville Skyline” doesn’t go unnoticed, either. It’s not as revered in Dylan fandom as “Blonde On Blonde,” but comfort on lick-heavy “Country Pie” or soul-leaning “To Be Alone With You” oozes from the sessions.

Or, as Dylan said to Rolling Stone: “We just take a song, I play it and everyone else sort-of fills in behind it.”

Today’s influence

Would Americana’s modern blend of country, folk, soul and rock ‘n’ roll exist without “Nashville Skyline”? Sure. Dylan wasn’t alone in opening the country-meets-rock door.

Before “Nashville Skyline,” The Byrds introduced country-western elements to psychedelia with 1967 album “Younger Than Yesterday,” an exploration that intensified as Gram Parsons entered the group.

And, following lead from Dylan and The Byrds, a slew of artists — The Monkees, Joan Baez, Linda Rondstandt — captured a taste of Nashville magic on records in the late 1960s and ‘70s.

“Because the way rock and folk artists, hippies, perceived Nashville, they never really thought of going to Nashville,” Gray said. “But once Dylan started making these masterpieces, people started taking note and they started following.”

Old Crow Medicine Show's Ketch Secor sings during the

“He really opened the floodgates.”

Still, genre lines continued to soften into 21st century Americana, where Nashville acts in country, rock, blues and folk can all claim Dylan’s influence and it’s in the spirit of converging musical worlds that “Nashville Skyline” continues to be celebrated.

Dylan’s mythology should be celebrated for centuries, not just decades, Secor said.

“Here is Bob, laying claim to — glorifying — our community in an entire album, in an entire span of albums,” Secor said. “This is what he’s gonna give us. He’s not gonna lay praise on it. He’s not gonna show up at the medallion ceremony, but he’s gonna make an album that’ll outlive him.”

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In tossing “Nashville Skyline” on the turntable, listeners hear a cultural touchstone that’s earned five decades of praise.

But, when Daniels spins the album, he hears beyond the history.

“Dammit, it was just fun,” he said. “It was a very pleasant experience.”

“There was a smile on that record, if you will.”

'Nashville Skyline' fast facts

Kris Kristofferson had a hand in making the record ... literally. Per Rolling Stone, the young songwriter worked as a janitor in the studio and drummer Kenny Buttrey asked him to hold bongos and a cowbell during "Lay Lady Lay" tracking. Kristofferson later said of Dylan that "Our generation owes him our artistic lives" for opening doors in Nashville with "Blonde on Blonde" and "Skyline."

No, Dylan wasn't talking to himself on "To Be Alone With You." On the microphone, Dylan asks, "Are we rolling, Bob?" in reference to producer Bob Johnston, who produced each of his Nashville albums.

"Girl From The North Country" isn't the only track Dylan and Cash recorded together. Rolling Stone writes that Cash joined Dylan Feb. 18, 1969 in the studio for a marathon session that included "You Are My Sunshine," "Ring of Fire," “Matchbox,” “Mystery Train,” "Big River" and “Careless Love," among others. These recordings could be released as part of a future collection, the magazine reports.

In support of "Nashville Skyline," Dylan appeared on the first episode of "The Johnny Cash Show," which ABC taped at the Ryman Auditorium. The show debuted 50 years ago this June.

Guest star Bob Dylan, center, rehearses his song "I Threw It All Away" for the first episode of "The Johnny Cash Show" at the Ryman Auditorium on May 1, 1969, for ABC-TV.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Bob Dylan's 'Nashville Skyline' turns 50: How the album changed country music