When Bob Dylan recorded his first album in late November of 1961, he had been in New York less than a year, most of it spent scuffling for low-paying gigs on the coffeehouse folk music circuit based in Greenwich Village. Folk music had joined jazz as the hip musical choice of bohemian beatniks and students through the late Fifties, as a more “authentic” response to what was increasingly perceived as the gaudy insincerity of rock ’n’ roll: the raw power of originators like Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley and Little Richard was being supplanted by tame corporate copyists like Pat Boone and Fabian, and the music industry was riven by payola scandals which left a strong stench of materialist corruption around rock ’n’ roll.
For the more serious-minded young adult, American folk music offered a comparatively clean breath of righteous fresh air, having served as the rallying cry of liberals, lefties and outsiders through the conservative Eisenhower era. Just as importantly, the older, pre-war songs which were the bread and butter of any folk performer’s act came from a time before America had assumed imperial dominance over the world, and were considered unsullied by the plastic desires of the Fifties. Their themes and mythographies bore the authenticating stamp of a timeless oral tradition, and though collectors like Alan Lomax, Paul Oliver and Harry Smith may have recorded or compiled the classic folk and blues performances in the early decades of the century, there was no telling how old the songs themselves actually were, or how many generations further back they stretched. For a country which had effectively wiped out its native Indian culture during its brutal colonizing years, these songs provided a badly-needed sense of cultural heritage.
The folk movement received its biggest boost in 1958, when The Kingston Trio, a San Francisco-based folk group, had a huge, chart-topping hit with ‘Tom Dooley’, a song traceable back at least as far as 1866. Suddenly saleable, folk music started to be regarded with something approaching mild interest by the big record companies, who joined specialist labels like Folkways, Elektra and Vanguard in signing up the genre’s leading lights. Columbia had Pete Seeger and The Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem, and Vanguard itself scored a coup when the young Joan Baez became the toast of the scene after her appearance at the 1959 Newport Folk Festival.
By 1961, folk music was still largely the preserve of the die-hard traditionalists, who considered these old songs to be texts just as sacred as any fundamentalist’s Bible; their performance should be as close to the original version as possible, any deviation being deemed a bowdlerization or corruption of the song’s integrity. But there were signs of a split in the folkie ranks, between these older, “High Folk” types and a new breed of “Low Folk” performers like Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Dave Van Ronk, who sought pleasure in the music, rather than being concerned to be intellectually truthful in their interpretations. The young Dylan was very much in the latter camp, drawn by Elliott’s and Van Ronk’s unashamedly “black” inflections applied to “white” material, and he quickly developed a distinctive singing style of his own, part-Woody Guthrie, part-blues moan—which some found quite comical. Nevertheless, it was unmistakably his own. Along with the piercing blasts of harmonica (which he played in a wire brace similar to the one he had seen bluesman Jesse Fuller using during a three-week stay in Denver) and a stage style that incorporated little Chaplinesque moments of physical comedy with an engaging line of patter, Bob Dylan became an accomplished performer with an easily discernible, inimitable character.
The campus town of Cambridge, Massachusetts, had evolved a folk scene of its own. Its leading lights were Joan Baez, Tom Rush, Jim Kweskin and Eric Von Schmidt—the latter became Dylan’s host on his visits there. On one such trip, he introduced Bob to Texan folk singer Carolyn Hester and her husband Richard Fariña, who instantly took a shine to him. Hester was about to record her third album—her first on a major label—with the legendary John Hammond Sr. Always a man with an eye for the main chance, Dylan played her a couple of his own tunes, and Hester decided to use one, a blues called ‘Come Back Baby’, on her new album. Doubly fortunate, from Bob’s point of view, was the fact that the song featured an extended harmonica break, which Bob himself would play. He was, after all, a professional blues-harpist, his only recording session to date having been as a sideman, playing harmonica on an album by Harry Belafonte. (He would also play harmonica at sessions for Victoria Spivey and Big Joe Williams before Hester’s album was recorded.) Hester and Dylan agreed to meet for rehearsals at the apartment of poet Ned O’Gorman in New York, which is where John Hammond first encountered the young man who would become the crowning glory of his career in A&R.
It was already an illustrious career, to say the least. Hammond had discovered and launched the career of Billie Holiday, and had been instrumental in the successes of Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Lionel Hampton, Benny Carter and the celebrated boogie-woogie pianists Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson and Meade “Lux” Lewis. A devoted fan of jazz and blues, his ground-breaking promotion of the Spirituals To Swing concerts at Carnegie Hall in 1938/39 was the single greatest factor in the dissemination of the various forms of black music to a wider—and whiter—audience. He was, in short, a giant of 20th century music, with a proven ear for original talent.
At the rehearsal, Hammond was immediately intrigued by the young Dylan. “I saw this kid in the peaked hat playing not terribly good harmonica, but I was taken with him,” Hammond later recalled. “I asked him, ‘Can you sing? Do you write? I’d like to do a demo session with you, just to see how it is.’ It was just one of those flashes. I thought, ‘I gotta talk contract right away.’” Checking that Dylan would be available for the session, he set a recording date for the afternoon of September 29, 1961. In the interim, fate would play an auspicious part in Dylan’s life.
The New York Times chose that very day to run a glowing review, which their music critic Robert Shelton had written, of Bob’s performance at Gerdes Folk City on September 26, where he was supporting The Greenbriar Boys, a well-liked bluegrass group. Under a photo of Bob in his trademark cap, and the headline “Bob Dylan: A Distinctive Stylist,” the perspicacious Shelton raved about the “bright new face” that was “bursting at the seams with talent,” offering a detailed account of Dylan’s performing style and material, and concluding, with remarkable foresight, that “…it matters less where he has been than where he is going, and that would seem to be straight up.”
All the Village folkies were knocked out by Shelton’s piece—except for The Greenbriar Boys, who were relegated to the final four paragraphs of the review, a virtual afterthought. Dylan, unsurprisingly, was elated. He arrived at the Hester recording session clutching the review, which he showed to Hammond. “I could tell Hammond was hooked from the very start,” Hester later recalled. “The longer we worked, the more I could see Hammond’s interest in Bob developing, until the two of them were thick as thieves.” He played harmonica on three tracks of her album, including his own ‘Come Back Baby’, and secured an invitation to come in later to cut some demos of his own with Hammond. Dylan’s studio technique, the producer discovered, was undisciplined—“he popped every P, hissed every S, and habitually wandered off mike”—but Hammond heard enough in his performance to convince him that here was a major talent in the raw, who should be snapped up quickly. Dylan, of course, was exhilarated when he left the studio. “I couldn’t believe it,” he said later. “I remember walking out of the studio. I was, like, on a cloud. It was up on 7th Avenue, and when I left I happened to walk by a record store. It was one of the most thrilling moments in my life. I couldn’t believe that I was staring at all the records in the window—Frankie Laine, Frank Sinatra, Patti Page, Mitch Miller, Tony Bennett and so on—and soon I myself would be among them in the window. I guess I was pretty naive, you know.”
Hammond was fortunate in that the new Director of A&R at Columbia, David Kapralik, had been appointed a few weeks before with the brief to strengthen the company’s youth roster. “Dylan’s an extraordinary young man,” Hammond told his boss. “I don’t know if he’s going to sell, but he has something profound to say.” Such was Kapralik’s faith in Hammond’s ears that he allowed the young folkie to be signed without even hearing him. There were initial problems in signing the contract—which was for one year, with four subsequent yearly options—when Dylan, still a minor, claimed he had no parents who could sign for him; but Hammond decided to let him sign anyway, a judgment call that would cause a few problems a year or two later. At the age of 20, Bob Dylan became a Columbia recording artist.
It wasn’t that great a gamble on Columbia’s part. The album was recorded in a couple of late November afternoons, with Dylan accompanied by just his own guitar and harmonicas (which he kept moist in a glass of water), and it cost a piffling $402 to make. Hammond, who believed in catching the spontaneous flow of inspiration, rarely pushed Bob beyond two or three takes of any song, and encouraged him to vent his hostility through his performances. “There was a violent, angry emotion running through me then,” Dylan explained in his first teen magazine interview, with Seventeen magazine. “I just played guitar and harmonica and sang those songs, and that was it. Mr Hammond asked me if I wanted to sing any of them over again but I said no. I can’t see myself singing the same song twice in a row. That’s terrible.” At one point, he borrowed his girlfriend Suze Rotolo’s lipstick holder to use as a slide for his guitar on the bleak spiritual ‘In My Time Of Dyin’’ a song he never performed live. He was pleased when, during his recording of Bukka White’s ‘Fixin’ To Die’, an old black janitor stopped working and stepped into the studio to listen.
The material on Dylan’s debut album—“some stuff I’ve written, some stuff I’ve discovered, some stuff I stole”—offers a rough cross-section of the kind of songs that could be heard any night at any coffeehouse folk club in Greenwich Village in 1961. Suze Rotolo’s sister Carla worked for the musicologist Alan Lomax, and through her and other notable collectors such as Bob and Sidsel Gleason, Dylan gained access to a treasure-trove of folk classics, on albums such as Harry Smith’s celebrated six-LP Anthology Of American Folk Music and Lomax’s own noted Folk Songs Of North America compilation.
The songs he chose were picked to provide as comprehensive a demonstration of his styles as possible, though he wisely chose to downplay his interest in Woody Guthrie, apart from his own ‘Song To Woody’. Besides this and his ‘Talkin’ New York’, there was the resigned ‘Man Of Constant Sorrow’, which he had heard Judy Collins singing (as ‘Maid Of Constant Sorrow’) on his brief sojourn in Denver; ‘You’re No Good’, a song by another Denver acquaintance, the one-man blues band Jesse Fuller; revved-up versions of the old spiritual ‘Gospel Plow’ and the traveling songs ‘Highway 51’ and ‘Freight Train Blues’; ‘Fixin’ To Die’, ‘In My Time Of Dyin’’ and Blind Lemon Jefferson’s ‘See That My Grave Is Kept Clean’; a satirical romp through the traditional ‘Pretty Peggy-O’, which poked fun at more precious interpretations; a beguiling arrangement of ‘Baby Let Me Follow You Down’ which, as he explained in a spoken introduction, had been taught him by Ric Von Schmidt “in the green pastures of Harvard University,” and which would, with minor revisions, provide The Animals with their first hit as ‘Baby Let Me Walk You Home’; and another song which heavily influenced the British R&B band, the brothel lament ‘House Of The Rising Sun’.
This last inclusion would cause a bitter split in Dylan’s friendship with Dave Van Ronk, who had originally developed the dark, haunting arrangement he used, and could thus be presumed to have first option on the song in that form. Shortly after the sessions, Dylan bumped into Van Ronk and asked him if he could record the song. “I’d rather you didn’t,” replied Van Ronk, “because I’m going into the studio soon and I’d like to record it for my album.” Embarrassed, Dylan had to admit that he’d already recorded it, and couldn’t pull it from the album because Columbia wanted it included. Furious, Van Ronk stormed off, and didn’t speak to Dylan for the next two months. Bob never really regained his former friend’s full trust.
One notable aspect of the material chosen for his debut is the pervasive presence of death in many of the songs, particularly for such a young man. Bob Dylan had been preoccupied by death—obsessed, some say—since his youth in Hibbing, Minnesota, where he was involved in several car and motorcycle accidents. In New York, several friends, including Suze Rotolo, perceived an undertow of pessimistic despair beneath Dylan’s comic exterior, and it is entirely possible that this dichotomy was what attracted people to him. Years later he admitted to Robert Shelton that, during this time, he was terrified of dying before he had said all that he had to say, but that, ironically, he was partly dependent on this fear for creative inspiration. “I don’t write when I’m feeling groovy,” he explained. “I play when I’m feeling groovy. I write when I’m sick.” Of death itself, he seemed remarkably cynical: “All this talk about equality—the only thing people really have in common is that they are all going to die.”
There was a five-month wait between the recording of the album and its release, due to David Kapralik’s cold feet about his newest artist. There was no obvious single with which to promote the LP, and its cheapness meant that there was an obvious temptation to cut losses by not releasing it. Some company operatives had even tagged Dylan ‘Hammond’s Folly’, so low was their enthusiasm. Hammond, though, would have none of it. “It was the same way the first time I played Billie Holiday’s record,” he recalled, “so to me, this negative reaction was almost a recommendation, and I was more determined than ever to get Bobby’s album released.”
Going over Kapralik’s head to his friend, CBS president Goddard Lieberson, Hammond secured a release date of March 19, 1962, when Bob Dylan duly appeared with a front cover photo of Bob wearing his trademark cap and a suede sheepskin-style jacket he had chosen after seeing how cool Ian Tyson, of folk duo Ian & Sylvia, looked wearing a similar jacket on their album cover. A glance at the stringing of Bob’s guitar, however, indicates that the photograph was actually printed the wrong way round. On the back cover, Robert Shelton contributed scholarly annotations of the songs under the pseudonym Stacey Williams. Minimal promotion ensured the LP sold less than 5,000 copies in its first year, but by the time it was released, Dylan had already far outgrown the record anyway.
A sly commentary on his early days in the New York folk scene done in the talking blues style popularized by his hero Woody Guthrie, ‘Talkin’ New York’ is the earliest of Bob Dylan’s own songs to be recorded. Previously he had written other comic monologues in the same style, including ‘Talkin’ Hava Negilah Blues’, which satirized the “ethnic” folksong fashion of performers such as Harry Belafonte and Theodor Bikel, and ‘Talkin’ Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues’, a humorous riff about a disastrous boat trip which derived from a newspaper clipping shown to him by Noel Stookey (later Paul of Peter, Paul & Mary).
The talking blues is an easy mode to write in, and a devastatingly effective one to perform, involving as it does a simple, steady guitar vamp around three or four chords underneath the spoken lyrics, each verse usually capped by a sardonic, throwaway punch-line followed, in Dylan’s case, by a brief, double-time rush of harmonica which stands in for the absent chorus. In many ways, the talking blues was a direct precursor of rap music, enabling the performer to serve as a kind of journalist, reporting on current events with an immediacy and vitality denied to the more portentous, long-winded ballad form. As such, it served Woody Guthrie well during his decades as a labor activist and troubadour, and Dylan was to make good use of it through most of the Sixties, with comic riffs like ‘I Shall Be Free’ and ‘Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream’. Even flat-out rock tracks like ‘Tombstone Blues’ and ‘Highway 61 Revisited’, and surreal nightmares like ‘On The Road Again’ and ‘Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again’ are ultimately just customized versions of the talking blues.
‘Talkin’ New York’ wittily presents the young Bob Dylan as a country naïf cast adrift amid the chilly winds of the big city, eventually throwing up in “Green-witch Village,” where callous coffee-house proprietors initially turn him away for sounding too much like a hillbilly, before he gets a job playing harmonica for a dollar a day. The song oozes cynical disillusion, with Dylan even borrowing Woody Guthrie’s famous image from ‘Pretty Boy Floyd’ about people who can “rob you with a fountain pen.” But despite the narrator’s clear dislike of the harsh realities of the New York folkie’s life, he’s ultimately unable to break away completely: though he heads off for “western skies” in the final verse, he gets only as far as neighboring East Orange, New Jersey—where Guthrie resided in Greystone Hospital. The suggestion is, perhaps, that Dylan’s many visits to his ailing hero served to strengthen his ambition, to turn his steps back towards New York whenever his resolve was weakening.
Certainly, the song reflects Woody’s hold on Dylan’s imagination at the time, both in its style and in its borrowings from Guthrie songs like ‘Pretty Boy Floyd’ and ‘Talkin’ Subway’, the latter of which likewise talks of the singer’s bemusement at the way people go “down into the ground” in subway and traffic tunnels. Dylan did, however, claim to have written ‘Talkin’ New York’ at a truck stop while hitch-hiking westwards in May 1961, a trip that took him only as far as his old stamping-ground of Minneapolis.
The disenchantment which underscores ‘Talkin’ New York’ does, however, seem rather unfair. No other folk singer working in Greenwich Village at the time experienced as meteoric a rise as Dylan, who made his big-time debut at Gerde’s Folk City within months of his arrival, and recorded an album—for a major label—well before his first year in the city was up. Indeed, virtually from the moment of his arrival, he was the golden boy of the folk scene, loved and mothered by a succession of benevolent friends, such as Bob and Sid Gleason, Mikki Isaacson, Dave and Terri Van Ronk, Eve and Mac Mackenzie, and Mel and Lillian Bailey, on whose couches he appears to have crashed in rotation for several months, before acquiring his first apartment on 4th Street.
“I bummed around,” Dylan later claimed of his early days in New York. “I dug it all—the streets and the snows and the starving and the five-flight walk-ups and sleeping in rooms with ten people. I dug the trains and the shadows, the way I dug ore mines and coal mines. I just jumped right to the bottom of New York.” But though Dylan showed little compunction in using others ruthlessly—as showed by his appropriation of Dave Van Ronk’s arrangement of ‘House Of The Rising Sun’, against his friend’s express wishes—he seems to have believed that there was some sort of conspiracy operating against him in the folk scene, that people were going out of their way to retard his progress.
This perception probably originated in his frustration at trying to get coverage in folk magazines like Sing Out!, and attempting to score a record deal with the specialist folk-music labels like Elektra, Vanguard and Folkways mere months after his arrival in New York. “I went up to Folkways,” Dylan said bitterly. “I said, ‘Howdy. I’ve written some songs, will you publish them?’ They wouldn’t even look at them. I’d heard that Folkways was good. Irwin Silber didn’t even talk to me, and I never got to see Moe Asch. They just about said ‘Go!’ And I had heard that Sing Out! was supposed to be helpful and friendly, big-hearted, charitable. Must have been in the wrong place—but Sing Out! was written on the door. Whoever told me they had a big heart was wrong.”
Of all the influences which the young Bob Dylan soaked up in his late teens, the folk singer Woody Guthrie had by far the greatest impact. Indeed, so closely associated did Dylan become with the legendary troubadour that he was twice offered the lead role in a film of Guthrie’s life based on his autobiography Bound For Glory; he turned it down both times, and David Carradine eventually took the part.
The composer of more than a thousand songs, including such standards as ‘So Long, It’s Been Good To Know You’, ‘Pastures Of Plenty’ and ‘This Land Is Your Land’, Guthrie was the prototype hobo minstrel, thumbing rides and jumping freight-trains to criss-cross the USA through the Thirties and Forties, supporting leftist causes and singing of the tribulations and essential dignity of the common working man. “I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose,” he said. “Songs that run you down or songs that poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or your hard traveling… no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built. I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work.” Throughout his life, he considered himself simply a mouthpiece for the people, a journalist noting down the way things really were.
His empathy with the downtrodden was well-founded in his own experience, which was tough at the beginning, tough at its conclusion, and unremittingly hard in between. Born in Oklahoma in 1912, named Woodrow Wilson Guthrie after the American President who founded the League of Nations, his childhood was scarred by family tragedy, both his sister and father killed in fires and his mother dying from the degenerative nerve disease Huntington’s Chorea. This ailment would be passed on to her son, who would spend the last years of his life, from 1954 to his death in October 1967, in hospitals, slowly wasting away—a cruelly tragic conclusion to a life so full of movement.
By the age of 17, the orphaned Guthrie had begun the rootless drifting which would characterize a good deal of his life, joining the disenfranchised migratory workers from the ruined Dust Bowl farmlands of Oklahoma, Texas and Arkansas on their journey to the fruit farms of California—the social disaster dramatized by John Steinbeck in The Grapes Of Wrath. Taking his cue from his cousin, country singer Jack Guthrie, Woody began writing songs, adapting traditional folk tunes with his own lyrics, and quickly became the folk-poet of the underdog. Working solo, with his traveling companion Cisco Houston, or as part of The Almanac Singers with Pete Seeger, Lee Hays and Millard Lampell, Guthrie offered an alternative viewpoint to the prevailing mean-spiritedness of the times which would eventually result in the Communist witch-hunts of Senator Joe McCarthy’s notorious House Un-American Activities Committee.
Seeger, who was condemned by that committee, persuaded Guthrie to write about his own extraordinary life, and the result, Bound For Glory, caused a sensation when it was published during the Second World War. It was this autobiography which captured the interest of the young Bob Dylan in Minneapolis, where he could be found avidly devouring the book in the coffeeshops of the ‘Dinkytown’ campus/ bohemian district, memorizing passages and drawing inspiration from Guthrie’s tales of hard traveling and social injustice. Though he was by that time familiar with some of Guthrie’s material, he subsequently spent more and more of his time unearthing and learning Guthrie’s songs—a close friend from Minneapolis, David Whittaker, recalls him listening over and over again to a record of Guthrie’s half-hour epic ballad ‘Tom Joad’, day after day. Another college acquaintance, Ellen Baker, gave Dylan access to her parents’ huge collection of folk magazines, such as Sing Out!, and records by Guthrie: her parents were impressed with his interest, though like many who encountered Dylan at this period, they felt he was drawing on Guthrie’s life in a more than merely musical sense, trying to build himself a more interesting identity to replace the relatively ordinary one he had grown up with. His slim repertoire of folk songs soon bulged with Guthrie material, and his vocal inflection changed from a rather sweet voice to an imitation of the Okie’s brusque nasal twang.
Dylan’s obsession with Guthrie grew into a standing joke among Dinkytown friends, particularly his ambition to meet his hero; some would play jokes on him when he was drunk, telling him Guthrie was outside or on the phone. But he did try and contact the singer one snowy night in December 1960, Whittaker affirms, phoning Greystone Hospital in New Jersey, where Guthrie was dying of Huntington’s Chorea. The ward doctor told Dylan that Woody was too sick to come to the phone. That seemed to settle matters once and for all. “I’m going to see him,” Dylan told Whittaker, “I’m going to New York right now.” And he was off, hitch-hiking East through a blizzard.
Dylan got to meet his idol in late January or early February 1961, at the home of Bob and Sid (Sidsel) Gleason, a folk-enthusiast couple with whom Guthrie spent weekends at their place in East Orange, New Jersey, where Sundays were a kind of open-house hootenanny session for such noted luminaries of the folk scene as Pete Seeger and Cisco Houston, along with lesser lights such as Peter LaFarge, Logan English, Lionel Kilburg and Guthrie disciple Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. Dylan had apparently hitched out to Greystone Hospital a few days earlier, and had visited Guthrie’s family home in Howard Beach, Queens, where he gave Woody’s young son Arlo an impromptu harmonica lesson, but the Sunday session at the Gleasons’ was probably the first time Guthrie —or any of the folkie crowd, for that matter—was made aware of his existence. Having heard of the Gleasons in his first few weeks as a coffeehouse folkie in Greenwich Village, Dylan had called on them and secured an invite to the following Sunday’s session, where he sat quietly on the floor by the couch where Guthrie lay, frail and palsied, while Houston chatted to Guthrie about his own illness (which claimed his life later that year), and Elliott tried vainly to cheer proceedings up. It was, by all accounts, a somewhat dismal afternoon. When Dylan finally sang a few songs, the old master was impressed. “He’s a talented boy,” one of those present recalls Guthrie saying, “Gonna go far.”
Shortly after this first meeting, Dylan wrote ‘Song To Woody’, basing the melody on Guthrie’s own ‘1913 Massacre’. A sincere, if sentimental, tribute from an acolyte to an icon written in a gentle waltz-time, the song acknowledges the pupil’s debt to the master, reflects with longing upon the master’s earlier, rambling days and concludes with an assurance that the pupil, too, will seek out experiences with the same diligence and integrity. Over the following weeks, Dylan visited Guthrie several times in hospital and frequently attended the Gleasons’ weekend soirees where, much to the envious chagrin of Kilburg and English, he became a firm favorite of Woody’s. The first question Guthrie would ask when the Gleasons arrived at the hospital to pick him up was “Is the boy gonna be there?”; and when, one Sunday, the boy played ‘Song To Woody’ for him, Guthrie beamed with pleasure and assured him, “That’s damned good, Bob!” After Dylan had left, Woody told the Gleasons, “That boy’s got a voice. Maybe he won’t make it by his writing, but he can really sing it.”
The boy was growing up, however, and he grew to realize that Woody was far from the idealized hero of his imagination, that, though touched with genius, he was just as petty, irresponsible and egotistical as the next man. This undoubtedly had a significant effect on Dylan’s songwriting and performing styles and his attitude to life. A few years later, he told Nat Hentoff of The New Yorker magazine, “After I’d gotten to know him, I was going through some very bad changes, and I went to see Woody, like I’d go to somebody to confess to. But I couldn’t confess to him. It was silly. I did go and talk with him—as much as he could talk—and the talking helped. But, basically, he wasn’t able to help me at all. I finally realized that. So Woody was my last idol.”
The original song manuscript—a sheet of yellow legal paper—ended up with the Gleasons. On it is the song and Dylan’s note, “Written by Bob Dylan in Mills Bar on Bleecker Street in New York City on the 14th day of February, for Woody Guthrie.