Facts Bob Dylan’s Debut Album
1- Bob Dylan’s Debut Album recorded November 20 and 22, 1961, and released on March 19, 1962
2- Lenght of Album is 36:54
3- Producer of Album is John H. Hammond
4- Genre of The Album is Folk and country blues
5- The cap Dylan’s wearing on the sleeve was a regular element of his walking, talking homage to hero Woody Guthrie.
“cunductor hat”. conductor hat???…I always thought it was a Huck Finn/Woody Guthrie type hat because he was then in the throes of adolescent fever for anything Dust Bowl Woody
6- Album features folk standards, plus two original compositions, “Talkin’ New York” and “Song to Woody“.
7 The album cover features a reversed photo of Dylan holding his acoustic guitar. This was done to prevent the neck of the guitar from obscuring Columbia’s logo.
The cover image was shot by Columbia in-house photographer Don Hunstein
8- The album did not initially sell well either, and Dylan was for a time known as “Hammond’s Folly” in record company circles. Mitch Miller, Columbia’s chief of A&R at the time, said U.S. sales totaled about 2,500 copies. Bob Dylan remains Dylan’s only release not to chart at all in the US, although it eventually reached #13 in the UK charts in 1965 Despite the album’s poor performance, financially it was not disastrous because the album was very cheap to record.
9- Bob Dylan Wrote “Song to Woody” in a Bleecker Street Bar
The handwritten lyrics for the song wound up with Bob Gleason and his wife, Sidsel, a New Jersey couple who were friends with Guthrie and often hosted his Sunday get-togethers with emerging folk singers. They include the inscription: “Written by Bob Dylan in Mills Bar on Bleecker Street in New York City on the 14th day of February, for Woody Guthrie.”
10 The recording cost of album was $402
11- Shelton Helped Out With The Liner Notes
Hammond enlisted Dylan’s first reviewer, Robert Shelton, to write the liner notes for Bob Dylan. “The Times music department had an unwritten code that members should have nothing to do with the production of recordings that they might review,” Shelton wrote in No Direction Home. “But nearly every member earned supplementary income by writing liner notes, anonymously or pseudonymously.” As “Stacey Williams,” Shelton wrote that Dylan’s steel-string playing “runs strongly in the blues vein, although he will vary it with country configurations.
12- UK blues band The Animals claimed Dylan stopped playing his version of ‘House Of The Risin’ Sun’ when The Animals hit big with theirs, because he was accused of ripping them off.
12- ‘Pretty Peggy-O’ is adapted from the Scottish folk song ‘The Bonnie Lass o’ Fyvie’ and would later be tackled in various shape-shifting forms by Joan Baez, Simon & Garfunkel and former hairspray-rockers Jefferson Starship.
13- Dylan was 20 years old when he released his self-titled debut album in 1962
14- “Song to Woody” – The song conveys Dylan’s appreciation of folk legend Woody Guthrie. The tune is based on Guthrie’s song “1913 Massacre
15 The Song “Gospel Plow” (also known as “Hold On“) is a traditional American folk song. It is listed in the Roud Folk Song Index, number 10075. The title is biblical, based on Luke 9:62.
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x155k7w_bob-dylan-gospel-plow-1962-digitally-remastered_music
16- Talkin’ New York is the second song on Bob Dylan’s eponymous first album. A talking blues, it describes his feelings on arriving in New York City, his time playing coffee houses in Greenwich Village and his life up to getting a record deal. The lyrics express the difficulty he had finding gigs as a result of his unique sound, “You sound like a hillbilly; We want folk singers here.”
Read more : 24 January 1961 Bob Dylan arrived Newyork and visited Cafe Wha?
17- “In My Time of Dying” (also called “Jesus Make Up My Dying Bed” or a variation thereof) is a traditional gospel music song that has been recorded by numerous musicians
Dylan had never sung ‘In My Time of Dyin’ ‘ prior to this recording session. He does not recall where he first heard it. The guitar is fretted with the lipstick holder [ makeshift slide ] he borrowed from his girl, Suze Rotolo, who sat devotedly and wide-eyed through the recording session
https://mentalfloss.com/article/77388/10-folk-facts-about-bob-dylans-first-album
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Dylan_(album)
