![]() Dylan’s bible was Guthrie’s autobiography, Bound for Glory (1943), a blend of fact and fiction about the Oklahoma troubadour’s travels across the United States with migrant workers uprooted by the Dust Bowl during the Great Depression. Ostensibly, Dylan, still legally Robert Zimmerman, went to New York to meet Woody Guthrie, his idol. His decision to shun college and pursue art countered prevailing trends of the time. A University of Minnesota dropout and a habitué of Minneapolis’s bohemian Dinkytown district, he had a seriousness of purpose that belied an outward shyness and a fluid identity. Though raised in the small mining town of Hibbing and just 19 years old, Dylan was hardly a greenhorn. Critics from the New York Times or other publications occasionally reviewed performances in the premier Village venues.Īgainst this backdrop, in 1961, Bob Dylan from Minnesota arrived in New York. In the better clubs, folk singers encountered agents, managers, and record company executives. Folk singers learned methods to hold a crowd’s attention. ![]() Sometimes in the intimate spaces they had to deal with rude hecklers or just simply people having loud conversations. For starters, the clubs afforded musicians the opportunity to experiment with new material and make mistakes in front of sympathetic yet discerning audiences. Village venues allowed folk singers to hone their skills. But they saw the holes in the wall as starting points for the big time of the Gaslight and Gerde’s Folk City. In the smaller rooms, troubadours made little money, and talent agents rarely scouted them. Notable arrivals included Tom Paxton from Oklahoma, Len Chandler and Phil Ochs from Ohio, Carolyn Hester from Texas, Patrick Sky from Georgia, Mark Spoelstra from California, Judy Collins and Judy Roderick from Colorado, and Ian and Sylvia Tyson from Canada. Folk singers found ample work in some 20 clubs in a five-block area. When I had concerts, painters would come, and I’d go play jazz at their art gallery openings, and I played piano while Beats read their poetry.” Īs a result of the artistic ferment in the Greenwich Village coffeehouse district by 1960, the neighborhood became the epicenter of the national folk music renaissance. Jazz composer, multi-instrumentalist, and folk singer David Amram observed, “There was a cross-pollination of music, painting, writing-an incredible world of painters, sculptors, musicians, writers, and actors, enough so we could be each other’s fans. Skilled and striving artists in close proximity challenged traditional boundaries in folk music, both in lyrics and in style. The density fostered creative interactions as well as collaboration and competition, and the Village became an engine of artistic innovation. Numerous clubs lined these colorful streets. If observers wondered why the folk music revival flowered in the Village, they needed only to walk down MacDougal Street from West 4th and make a left onto Bleecker. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Greenwich Village was a conduit of ideas, made possible by the concentration of performance spaces around Washington Square Park. ~Lenny Kaye, liner notes for “O Love Is Teasin'” (Elektra 9 60402-1-U, 1985).The following is an excerpt from the author’s book, Folk City: New York and the American Folk Music Revival, courtesy of Oxford University Press. This done, she “will die for him tomorrow,” and buried next to Sweet William in the old churchyard, a rose that blossoms from his heart, and a briar that springs from hers, “grew and grew… till they twined a true love’s knot.” She leaves and is smitten by remorse when she hears “the death bell knelling.” She asks her father to dig her grave. There is some discussion over who slighted whom. He asks for her love she coldly informs him that he is dying. In “Scarlet Town,” a young man named Sweet William lies on his death bed and calls for Barbara Allen. “ Barbara Allen” (Child 84, Roud 54) is a traditional ballad originating in England and Scotland, which immigrants introduced to theUnited States, where it became a popular folk song. Roud and Bishop described it as, “…far and away the most widely collected song in the English language - equally popular in England, Scotland and Ireland, and with hundreds of versions collected over the years in North America.” ~Bob Dylan (to Nat Hentoff – Autumn 1965) ![]() I knew people that sung Barbara Allen and stuff like that. …. And, you know, then the folk music, which I’d heard somewhat to a degree. And her name was known both far and near,
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