"Baby Let Me Follow You Down" -- from Memphis Minnie, Walter Coleman & Blind Boy Fuller through Eric von Schmidt to Bob Dylan (and beyond)

On Bob Dylan's debut album, "Baby Let Me Follow You Down" is introduced


"I first heard this from Ric von Schmidt.  He lives in Cambridge.
Ric's a blues guitar player. 
I met him one day in the... 
green pastures of Harvard University..."

Dylan performed this song throughout his career up to 1989 (additional officially released versions can be found on Live 1966, The Witmark Demos and Warner Brothers' The Last Waltz, where the song is credited to Reverend Gary Davis).

In his own and Jim Rooney's book about the Cambridge folk scene,
Baby Let Me Follow You Down (Garden City, 1979), Eric recalls:

Dylan came up once. It was Huck Finn hat time, before he made his first record... We played croquet... and Dylan was absolutely the worst player I have ever seen. He was having a ball, giggling like mad. A little spastic gnome. He could not connect the mallet with the ball!

We went driving around looking for people to join the party, playing harmonica duets all the time. When we got to my apartment he wasn't much interested in playing; he wanted to listen. So I played "He Was A Friend Of Mine," "Wasn't That A Mighty Storm, " "Baby, Let Me Lay It On You, " "Acne," and a couple of others. It was something the way he was soaking up material in those days -- like a sponge and a half.


Later somebody said, "Hey, Bob's put one of your songs on his album." They were talking about "Baby, Let Me Follow You Down" which had a spoken introduction saying he first heard it from me "...in the green fields [sic] of Harvard University." The tune was the same, and the chords were real pretty, but they weren't the same. I don't know if he changed them or if he'd heard a different version from Van Ronk.... 

The label on the record lists "R. Von Schmidt" as the composer but Witmark had copyrighted it under Dylan's name. I figured it was a good plug for me, so what the hell.

The next time I saw Bob he said, "Hey, man, that's your song" or something like that. And sure enough, a little later I got a contract signed by him listing us as co-composers. It was to become effective when I signed it.... 

So I wrote Witmark and gave them the "facts," but explained that if we co-wrote the moment I signed the contract, then we co-wrote it when the record was released and royalties should start from there. Geno [Foreman] wasn't around at the time, and I figured I could split them with him at a later date.

They wrote back a nice note thanking me for my trouble and saying that I was quite right, I didn't have a claim to the song, and they were honoring "a prior copyright. " I figured they were talking about Blind Boy Fuller's heirs or something, but they were talking about Dylan's copyright. Apparently they turned around with the "facts" I had supplied them and used them to void that copyright.

Sorry Bob. A postscript to all of this is that my ex-mentor, Manny Greenhill, now claims that the song was written by Reverend Gary Davis. Well, that's showbiz.

Eric von Schmidt and Jim Rooney, Baby, Let Me Follow You Down, Garden City, 1979, p. 75.





A 1993 article by Larry Jaffee in SongTalk: The songwriters newspaper 3 (2): 13 (1993), kindly provided by Rudi Schmid, Integrative Biology, UC Berkeley (schmid@garnet.berkeley.edu) went into further details:


[[]] signifies Rudi Schmid's insertions;
[] signifies insertions actually in article.

Witness the strange case of "Baby, Let Me Follow You Down," a song that Bob Dylan included on his [[1962]] debut album [[Bob Dylan]] on Columbia Records. Von Schmidt, now 61 years old, shared all the messy, convoluted details with SongTalk in a phone conversation from his Connecticut home.

While Von Schmidt still plays music (in the spring of 1992 he toured Italy with his partner Linda Clifford), he primarily makes his living through writing children's and history books and painting.

Dylan came to Von Schmidt's home one evening in 1960 to jam, when Eric performed for him a version of "Baby Let Me Lay It On You," which he thought was "a Blind Boy Fuller song that I had learned from another white guy, Geno Foreman."

The song later ended up on Dylan's debut album as "Baby, Let Me Follow You Down." The chords Dylan used on his song, Von Schmidt also believed, came from a Dave Van Ronk song.

"The way I played it was as close as I could get to Geno Foreman's version, which I assumed was Blind Boy Fuller, but I never heard him play this thing."

In any case, what Dylan ended up playing on the album "was not what he heard from me," Von Schmidt noted. "There is a long history to who indeed wrote this song and who has what part of the copyright," he adds.

Von Schmidt pointed out that listeners often misunderstood Dylan's spoken introduction:

"What Dylan said is not that 'I learned this song from Eric Von Schmidt,' it's that he 'first heard' it from me. But that was confusing enough to the Columbia people when they made the record. They indeed listed me (in 1962) as the author on the record's stamp, which is about as close you can [[get]] if you are going to launch a lawsuit."

"What finally broke the whole thing to some kind of completion [[is]] when [film director Martin] Scorcese did The Last Waltz, in which Dylan performed 'Baby, Let Me Follow You Down.'" ...

"What finally happened was that Manny Greenhill, who had been my manager back in the folkie days, also managed Gary Davis. He sat Gary down and asked. 'What songs did you write?' Aside from the 'Star Spangled Banner' and maybe 'Moonlight Becomes You,' it was every song that anybody heard of, Gary Davis wrote. One of them as 'Baby, Let Me Follow You Down.'"

Von Schmidt thinks there may be some justification to Davis's contention because Davis and Fuller were both from Durham, NC. 
"Blind Boy Fuller probably learned more from Gary than the other way around. ..."

Von Schmidt once heard Davis flay the song, and it was close enough for him to believe that he was its author.


[[Although Von Schmidt is credited on Dylan's albums, he]] ... has never received any royalties, despite the recognition. After Dylan's second album ..., Columbia wrote a letter to Von Schmidt, informing him that from that time on, Dylan and he would share the composition of "Baby, Let Me Follow You Down."

"So I wrote back, 'If indeed Dylan and I are co-authors of this thing, why are you starting to pay me now, instead of when the record first came out?" But in my letter back, I was scrupulously honest, when I heard the song, that I though it was a Blind Boy Fuller song, that I changed it a little bit, and Dylan had changed it a little bit.
I got this wonderful letter back [from Columbia] ... that said: 'You're quite right, Eric, you have no rights to this song' .... They didn't know who did have rights to it, but they knew I didn't have rights to it. That was that. I never got a dime."

But Von Schmidt doesn't hold any hard feelings towards Dylan, who he calls the "best PR man I ever had." "Sometimes I think I'd like to learn his version of it."

Von Schmidt still plays it his way.





Eric von Schmidt, Baby Let Me Lay It On You (Live, Torino, Italy, April 26, 1994)

EARLY VARIANTS IN MY OWN COLLECTION:

Memphis Minnie & Kansas Joe, Can I Do It For You - Part 1  (February 21, 1930)
Memphis Minnie & Kansas Joe, Can I Do It For You - Part 2  (February 21, 1930)

Walter Coleman, Mama Let Me Lay It On You (February 08, 1936)
Walter Coleman, Mama Let Me Lay It On You (June 03, 1936)

Blind Boy Fuller, Mama Let Me Lay It On You (April 29, 1936)
Blind Boy Fuller, Mama Let Me Lay It On You No. 2 (April 05, 1938)

Alan Balfour lists the following chronology of variants (dates in British fashion -- dd/mm/yyyy):

21/2/1930 Memphis Minnie Can I Do It For You  [see links above]
10/1/1935 State Street Boys Don't Tear My Clothes
8/2/1936 Walter Coleman Mama Let Me Lay It On You [see links above]
27/3/36 Sheik Johnson Baby Let Me Lay It On You
29/4/1936 Blind Boy Fuller Mama Let Me Lay It On You [see links above]
11/5/1936 Georgia White Daddy Let Me Lay It On You
26/6/36 Washboard Sam Don't You Tear My Clothes
26/l/37 Chicago Black Swans Don't You Tear My Clothes No.2
26/1/37 Billy and Mary Mack Don't You Tear My Clothes No.2
26/1/37 State Street Boys Don't You Tear My Clothes No.2
12/5/37 Harlem Hamfats Baby Don't You Tear My Clothes
25/1/38 Red Nelson Don't Tear My Clothes No.3
23/12/52 Smokey Hogg Baby Don't You Tear My Clothes
1957 Professor Longhair Baby Let Me Hold Your Hand
1959 Snooks Eaglin Don't You Tear My Clothes

Recordings in bold letters or with hyperlinks can be accessed/downloaded from this post.
If anybody has any of the missing variants, please make them available and provide the link in a commentary to this post.

Bob Dylan and The Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem - HAPPY SAINT PADRAIG'S DAY!

PAT CLANCY:
You want to know where Dylan got his stuff? There was a little folk club here in London, down in the basement; we sang in it one night... Anyway, Al Grossman paid somebody and gave them a tape-recorder, and every folk-singer that went up there was taped, and Bob Dylan got all those tapes...

LIAM CLANCY:
Yes, and the tune of "Farewell"... because whoever was singing harmony was closer to the mike than the guy singing melody, and when [Dylan] wrote his version, he wrote it to the harmony not the melody line...

Patrick Humphries Interview,
reprinted in John Bauldie, Wanted Man: In Search of Bob Dylan, London, 1992, pp. 50-51; originally published in The Telegraph 18 (Winter 1984).

Clinton Heylin disagrees:

The Clancys claim that Dylan lifted the song directly from their arrangement of the tune, but this appears to be incorrect. All evidence indicates that Dylan learned the song from Scottish folksinger Nigel Denver, another important influence on Dylan at this time. Indeed he would often ask Denver to play the song.

MARTIN CARTHY:
He would always ask me to sing "Scarborough Fair" or "Lord Franklin." If Nigel was on, he would ask him for "Kieshmul's Galley" or "The Leaving of Liverpool."

Clinton Heylin, Dylan: Behind the Shades, London, 1991, p. 62 (Penguin paperback edition).

DEREK BAILEY:
Do you think they [The Clancy Brothers] were influential on your own career? 

BOB DYLAN:
Oh yeah, enormously so, because I was around them all the time and they just sang so many songs...

Derek Bailey Interview, Slane Castle, Ireland, July 8,  1984. 

DYLAN SONGS INFLUENCED BY SONGS OF THE CLANCY BROTHERS & TOMMY MAKEM ("originals" in parentheses):

• Farewell ("The Leaving of Liverpool")
• Ramblin' Gamblin' Willie ("Brennan On the Moor")

LIAM CLANCY:
I remember meeting him [BOB DYLAN] one morning on the street -- he lived on Sullivan Street, in Greenwich Village. And I was rushing off to rehearsal, I was getting the subway, we were meeting uptown, and he stopped me in the street and he said, "Hey, man, hey, Liam, wrote a song to 'Brennan On The Moor' last night." He had it... he said, "I wanna sing it for you." Right there in the street, he starts singing this song which went on for about nine or ten verses. I remember saying to him, "You got a fantastic talent, a fantastic imagery, if you could squeeze it all in together and make the songs a bit shorter." And I said, "For God's sake, what is a seventeen-year-old [sic] Jewish kid from the Mid-West trying to sound like a seventy-year-old black man from the South?"

Liam Clancy Interview, October 16, 1992, "Highway 61 Interactive" CD ROM, transcribed by Manfred Helfert.

• Restless Farewell ("The Parting Glass") 

• With God On Our Side ("The Patriot Game")

Dylan's most famous borrowing from the Clancys was the melody from an Irish song "The Patriot Game" written by the Irish songwriter Dominic Behan, brother of Brendan Behan the writer. The melody is originally American. It appears in an Appalachian song "The Nightingale."

Nuala O'Connor, Bringing It All Back Home: The Influence of Irish Music,
BBC Books, 1991, p. 115.

TO BE EXPANDED....

Renowned Dylan author Günter Amendt & actor Dietmar Mues among four dead killed in freak accident.

One of the persons whose passion and love for Bob Dylan inspired the author of this blog for as long as he can remember, Günter Amendt, was among the four dead killed in a freak accident in Hamburg.

Although I never met Günter, his Dylan articles in Konkret magazine, his radio report of the 1984 Dylan/Baez/Santana tour and his subsequent book Reunion Sundown, as well as his other Dylan publications with their wealth of information and a fascinating prose style will be sorely missed.

A student of Adorno, sociologist Günter Amendt became famous (or notorious) through his highly controversial books Sex-Front (1970) and Das Sex-Buch (1979).

Back in 1978, he was invited by German impresario Fritz Rau to accompany Dylan and his entourage on a leg of his European tour.

In a 2001 German/French TV production for Arte ("Knockin' on Dylan's Door"), he remembered:

"During that tour by "slow train" through the Federal Republic of Germany, so to speak, it was obvious that there was going to be plenty of time, and Fritz Rau had the idea that if Dylan or someone from his band felt the need to know something of this country, he wanted someone to be present to provide answers to possible questions."




Günter Amendt's Bob Dylan publications (in addtion to numerous articles in Konkret magazine) include:

• Reunion Sundown, Jokerman 84 revisits Highway 61. Eine Robertage über Dylans Europa-Tournee 1984. Zweitausendeins, Frankfurt am Main 1985
• The Never Ending Tour. Günter Amendt über Bob Dylan. Konkret, Hamburg 1991
• Back to the Sixties. Bob Dylan zum Sechzigsten. Konkret, Hamburg 2001.  

Review of Back to the Sixties:

"Far more modest, but also far more interesting and worth seeking out this time is the little paperback 'Back To The Sixties'. Bob Dylan Zum Sechzigsten which, in spite of its title, is not a nostalgic commemoration of that mythical decade nor a birthday tribute proper, but rather a collection of reviews, letters to the press and articles on Dylan originally published from 1978 to 2001 by Günter Amendt, a social scientist, journalist and publisher, and one of the most important and respected German experts in Dylan's oeuvre. 

Many of the pieces included here had been previously collected in two other books by Amendt, 'Reunion Sundown' (1984) and 'Never Ending Tour' (1991). As with most anthologies, a few of the featured texts are eminently forgettable, but the overall quality is high.

Amendt comes from the German Left and Pacifist movements, and his approach to Dylan's work is overtly political, which can be irritating at times, particularly when, as in the older reviews, the music somehow gets lost along the way, buried under a naïve anti-American or anti-religious discourse. However, even at his most obtuse as far as the music is concerned, Amendt is always fascinating to read, and the older texts do offer a revealing insight into Dylan's reception in Germany in the late seventies and early eighties by the more radical fans. After all, those were years of turmoil, and even if of interest mainly to German readers, they are now also part of the Dylan history from their perspective.

Amendt comes through in this book as an extraordinarily lucid, perceptive and thoughtful critic of Dylan's oeuvre (his review of Time Out Of Mind is impressive, for instance), who was only clearly out of his depth (but he admits as much himself) when it came to appraising Dylan's religious albums. How so many intelligent people never managed at the time to find the music beneath the preaching still baffles me, but this is bye the bye, and of course from Amendt's dogmatically leftist point of view it must have proved nigh on impossible. He does admit his mistake while still defending his strict anti-religious stance and now praises the music he first derided, but even so, it is hard to excuse texts like his supposedly 'humorous' review of Saved ("There Is No Hope With That Pope", on pp. 64-68), or maybe I'm missing the point. He certainly does not leave the reader indifferent and at his best, Amendt is really very good: I sincerely doubt there were many Dylan specialists aware, as far back as 1986, of the importance of Dylan as performing artist, and of the fact that his albums basically contain "projects of songs that are only to be fully developed on stage. If at all." (p. 108), an idea Dylan himself has touched upon recently in several interviews.



Perhaps the most interesting text is the... script for a three-hour 60th anniversary radio broadcast on German DLF radio, which includes Amendt's personal impressions of the 1978 German tour: on the promoter's invitation, he accompanied Dylan and the band through Germany, and has many memorable anecdotes to share. The book includes a few b/w photos, of album covers mostly, but there are a couple of interesting illustrations for trainspotters in the lot, such as the room allocation list of the Grand Hotel at Nuremberg (p. 24) or the invitation card to the ceremony at which Dylan was awarded the insignia of Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres by the French Culture Minister (p. 121). A delightful little book."
(Source: The Bridge - Jotting Down Notes).

Actor Dietmar Mues (who was killed along with Amendt) in Günter Amendt's translation/production of Sam Shepard's True Dylan (two clips from Knockin' on Dylan's Door):



LINKS:
Bob Dylan author Günter Amendt dies in freak accident (Harold Lepidus)
Tödlicher Verkehrsunfall in Eppendorf (NDR)
Unfalltod in Eppendorf (FAZ) 
Polizei ermittelt wegen fahrlässiger Tötung (Der Spiegel) 
Horror-Crash reisst Promis ins Verderben (Hamburger Morgenpost)





Any copyrighted items are included here for "nonprofit educational purposes" (one of the criteria of "fair use", Copyright Act of 1976, 17 U.S.C. § 107).

"The Making of 'The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan'" - blatant "copyrighted" plagiarism of a Wikipedia article by bobdylan.com

It has been brought to my attention that bobdylan.com plagiarised (and "copyrighted", with "All Rights Reserved") a Wikipedia article, i. e. "stole" or "wrongfully appropriated" the thoughts, research and exact words of others.

And, indeed, what is presented at http://www.bobdylan.com/feature/making-freewheelin-bob-dylan is basically nothing but a slightly abridged version (minus links to footnotes and references) of what can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Freewheelin%27_Bob_Dylan.


bobdylan.com:
"Dylan began work on his second album at Columbia's Studio A in New York on April 24, 1962. The album was provisionally entitled Bob Dylan's Blues, and as late as July 1962, this would remain the working title. At this session, Dylan recorded four of his own compositions: "Sally Gal", "The Death of Emmett Till", "Rambling, Gambling Willie", and "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues". He also recorded two traditional folk songs, "Going To New Orleans" and "Corrina, Corrina", and Hank Williams' "(I Heard That) Lonesome Whistle"....
<snip> 
Dylan held another session at Studio A on December 6. Five songs, all original compositions, were recorded, three of which were eventually included on The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan: "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall", "Oxford Town", and "I Shall Be Free". Dylan also made another attempt at "Whatcha Gonna Do" and recorded a new song, "Hero Blues", but both songs were ultimately rejected and left unreleased."
claimed to be 
©2011 SONY MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT. All Rights Reserved.  

Snapshot (pdf) retrieved on March 07, 2011

Wikipedia:
"Recording in New York
Dylan began work on his second album at Columbia's Studio A in New York on April 24, 1962. The album was provisionally entitled Bob Dylan's Blues, and as late as July 1962, this would remain the working title.^[14] At this session, Dylan recorded four of his own compositions: "Sally Gal", "The Death of Emmett Till", "Rambling, Gambling Willie", and "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues". He also recorded two traditional folk songs, "Going To New Orleans" and "Corrina, Corrina", and Hank Williams' "(I Heard That) Lonesome Whistle".^[15]...
<snip>
Dylan held another session at Studio A on December 6. Five songs, all original compositions, were recorded, three of which were eventually included on The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan: "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall", "Oxford Town", and "I Shall Be Free". Dylan also made another attempt at "Whatcha Gonna Do" and recorded a new song, "Hero Blues", but both songs were ultimately rejected and left unreleased.^[27]"
Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. See Terms of Use for details.
Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.

Snapshot (pdf) retrieved on March 07, 2011 

With cut-and-paste "corporate scholarship" of such magnitude, it is no wonder that on January 31, 2011, SONY MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT, through Web Sheriff, attempted a "hostile take-over" of my own website bobdylanroots.com with no legal basis whatsoever -- it seems to be hard to present original research after alienating loyal fans and amateur researchers (who could have been valuable contributors) through intimidation and methods that border on extortion.


Thanks to Bob Stacy for the initial info!

Any "copyrighted" items are included here for "nonprofit educational purposes" (one of the criteria of "fair use", Copyright Act of 1976, 17 U.S.C. § 107) and/or to expose blatant plagiarism only. All Wrongs Reversed. 

 

As a purchasing/procurement specialist by trade, I recommend the use of the "SONY ENTERTAINMENT SIMPLIFIED KEYBOARD" (SESK) depicted in this blog post (independent studies have proven that this reduces the workload by 95 per cent).

"Plagiarism for Dummies (and how to avoid being caught)" is due to be published next month and available from the bookseller of your choice. 

A Japanese language edition will be presented at the Yokohama Book Fair in August 2011.

We regret that due to unprecedented demand the German language special first edition ("Plagiieren für Dummies und Adlige") is already sold out.

RELATED LINK:

I stole from Wikipedia but it's not plagiarism....

Excerpt:
"Stealing from Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, is not necessarily plagiarism. It can also be an experimental form of literature. Even a form of 'beauty'...." (ibid.)

R. I. P. Suze Rotolo (1943-2011)

One of the most popular events at Gerde's was the Monday night hootenanny... It was at one of these hootenannies that Susan first laid eyes on Bob Dylan.

"He would play with some guy called Mark Spoelstra. And Mark Spoelstra had lovely shoulders..."
 But it was Dylan's harmonica-playing that ultimately proved to be more of a magnet than Spoelstra's shoulders...
"When I met Dylan, what I loved about him was the way he played the harmonica... He played with an earthiness that was wonderful..."
From time to time, Susan and Dylan would run into each other at parties. At a get-together after a day-long hootenanny at Riverside Church in July, at which Dylan had performed, Susan remembers,
"I really got to know Dylan more. We were kind of flirting with each other..."

Then, it seems, all of a sudden they were a couple... Eventually, Susan and Dylan took an apartment together on West Fourth Street.
Victoria Balfour, Rock Wives -- Susan Rotolo: Bob Dylan, reprinted in Elizabeth Thomson & David Gutman, The Dylan Companion, London, 1991, pp. 73-75.

In mid-December 1961... Dylan moved into his first rented apartment, a tiny, scruffy place above Bruno's Spaghetti Shop [161 West Fourth Street], and persuaded his girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, to move in with him.

It was in the middle of West Fourth Street, in February 1963, that Dylan and Suze, together again after seven months' separation, were photographed in the snow for the cover of "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan" by Columbia staff photographer Don Hunstein...
John Bauldie, Positively 4th Street Revisited, Q, No. 104, May 1995, p. 57.


Sitting in a cafe in New York's East Village, where she now lives, Rotolo laughs at the pitfalls of memory. She and the photographer, she says, recently disagreed on exactly where they were on that cold February day in 1963. A few shots had been taken in the West 4th Street apartment she shared with Dylan. Then they all went outside, into the snow. Dylan, conscious of being in the process of creating an image for himself, pulled on a thin suede jerkin and shivered. Rotolo chose a thick sweater and a favourite loden-green winter coat, more suited to the conditions. Wrapped around each other, they walked through the slush towards the camera. Hunstein says they were on Cornelia Street. Rotolo is convinced it was Jones Street, one block closer to the apartment. "So that's just going to have to remain a mystery for all those Dylanologists," she says, with a note of mischievous delight.
Richard Williams, Tomorrow Is A Long Time, The Guardian, August 16, 2008. 

Former Greenbriar Boy John Herald reflects on that historical cover:
"It really captured the mood of the time. We all had girlfriends. We all felt that spirit."

Songwriter Carol Belsky describes the effect the cover had on her:
"Suze was the epitome of everything that was hip. I wanted to recreate the essence of that album cover. I wanted to dress like her and look like her. I wanted to be Susan Rotolo. That cover was the symbol of my generation, the free-spirited freedom."
Susan was a seventeen-year-old product of a cultured. left-wing, political family. She was... very familiar with the Village scene, because she had been hanging around there since her early teens. Susan was living in the Village with her older sister, Carla, when she began dating Dylan.
Robbie Woliver, Hoot! A 25-Year History of the Greenwich Village Music Scene, New York, NY, 1986, p. 73.
 
SUSAN ROTOLO:
People say I was an influence on him, but we influenced each other. His interests were filtered through me and my interests, like the books I had, were filtered through him. There was a book of satirical cartoons from the Depression by Art Young that I showed him. It was during that time he was beginning to write his songs. It was wonderful satire.
My interest in Brecht was certainly an influence on him. I was working for the Circle in the Square Theatre and he came to listen all the time. He was very affected by the song that Lotte Lenya's known for, "Pirate Jenny."




It was always sincere on his part. He saw something. The guy saw things. He was definitely way, way ahead. His radar was flying. He had an incredible ability to see and sponge -- there was a genius in that. The ability to create out of everything that's flying around. To synthesize it. To put it in words and music. It was not an intellectual approach that he had to research something -- he did it on his own. Quoted ibid., pp. 75-76. 

LINKS:

Suze Rotolo Homepage



"Bob Dylan's Muse Suze Rotolo Dies" 
(BBC, February 28, 2011)

Two interview video clips for BBC's "Folk America" (BBC, 2009):
Suze Rotolo, Bob Dylan's girlfriend in the early 60s, recalls watching him in the studio and the photo session that resulted in the famous Freewheelin' album cover.

Suze Rotolo talks candidly about her relationship with Bob Dylan, being his "muse" and watching him create his early work.  

NOTE: 
For legal reasons, video clips are only available to persons from the UK/with a UK IP address.

Suze Rotolo Obituary, 
The Guardian, February 28, 2011 


"Bob Dylan's Muse: Suze Rotolo, 1943-2011"  
Recordmecca, February, 28, 2011
(contains scans of two blues albums owned and annotated by Bob Dylan, plus the scan of a postcard sent from Italy where Bob mentions that he is learning the Italian song "Se Dio Vorra")







Richard Williams, "Tomorrow is a long time", 
The Guardian,  August 16, 2008 
(contains a 09:31 telephone interview with Suze Rotolo)

"In Praise of... A Freewheelin' Time",
The Guardian, March 02, 2011

David Chiu, "A quintessential 1960s Greenwich Village Romance",
The Villager, May 21-28, 2008

"Suze Rotolo: Of Dylan, New York and Art"
Fresh Air, WHYY, NPR, May 14, 2008

"Remembering Suze Rotolo, Dylan's 'Freewheeling' Muse" 
Fresh Air, WHYY, NPR, March 01, 2011

Suze Rotolo, 1943-2011 
 (The Village Voice)

Howard Fishman, "The main thing is you are your own self" 

Frank Beacham, "The Death of Suze Rotolo"

Numerous audio clips of Suze Rotolo
at Bob Dylan's American Journey, 1956-1966