Bob Dylan And The New Folk Movement

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In the late 1960, in the basement of the upstate New York house they called Big Pink, members of The Band would marvel at just how many old tunes Bob Dylan remembered. “You could hardly name a song he didn’t know all the words to,” Robbie Robertson wrote decades later, “and you didn’t have to ask twice.” Indeed, before Dylan’s typewriter channeled the transformations of a generation and its troubled country, he was a deeply invested folk singer. He gobbled up Delta blues record, the Child Ballads of England and Scotland, and the kind of early American oddities that the likes of John Lomax and Harry Smith had collected in very different way, funneling them back through his young Midwestern bleat and emphatic guitar strum. Those songs are the basis of his 1962 self-titled debut, recorded in two single-day sessions in November 1961. A Minnesota kid obsessed with the eternal cool of James Dean, the endless hijinks of Charlie Chaplin, and the ceaseless allure of Brigitte Bardot, Dylan dropped out of college soon after he started. He summarily headed east, finding another hero, Woody Guthrie, laid up in a New Jersey hospital in the early days of 1961. They became fast friend. Dylan, meanwhile, also became the talk of New York’s teeming folk scene—his mix of energy, wit, and observational insight catapulted him through the rank. By that fall, he’d signed a record deal with Columbia, thanks to the enthusiasm of impresario John Hammond. By the end of the year, the record was done. .

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