Bob Dylan papers including letters and unpublished lyrics sell for £373,000 at auction
Collection of papers was previously held by Dylan’s longtime friend and confidant Tony Glover
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Your support makes all the difference.A collection of long-lost Bob Dylan documents, including unpublished song lyrics and his thoughts on antisemitism, has sold for $495,000 (£373,000) at auction.
Boston-based auction house RR Auction said that the collection – previously held by late American blues artist Tony Glover, a longtime friend and confidant of the musician – was sold in separate lots.
The majority went to a bidder whose identity has not been made public.
Included in the collection were transcripts of interviews between Dylan and Glover that took place in 1971, as well as letters they sent to one another.
The interviews revealed that Dylan was thinking about antisemitism when he changed his name from Robert Zimmerman – “a lot of people are under the impression that Jews are just money lenders and merchants,” he said – and that “Lay Lady Lay” was written for Barbra Streisand.
The items also included lyrics that Dylan wrote after visiting folk legend Woody Guthrie in May 1962. The lines, never made public until last month, read:
“My eyes are cracked I think I been framed / I can’t seem to remember the sound of my name / What did he teach you I heard someone shout / Did he teach you to wheel & wind yourself out / Did he teach you to reveal, respect, and repent the blues / No Jack he taught me how to sleep in my shoes.”
Dylan, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, broke into music around the same Minneapolis coffee house scene as Glover, who died last year.
The documents were put up for auction by his widow.
Additional reporting by Associated Press.
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