January 29, 1961: Bob Dylan meets his idol Woody Guthrie when Guthrie was on weekend release from hospital where he was being treated for Huntington’s Chorea. Photos: John Cohen “Jack Elliott and Woody Guthrie,” 1961.
ON THIS DAY, JANUARY 29, 1961, BOB DYLAN, 19 YEARS OLD, TOOK A BUS TO MORRIS PLAINS, NEW JERSEY, WHERE HE MET FOR THE FIRST TIME HIS IDOL AND INSPIRATION WOODY GUTHRIE..
in September 1960, Bob Dylan borrowed a copy of Woody Guthrie’s autobiography Bound for Glory from a college classmate and became obsessed. Written with the encouragement of Alan Lomax and published in 1943, it rendered its protagonist an almost mythical figure. Dylan started mimicking his hero’s speech patterns and even told the crowd at the Cafe Wha? when he arrived in New York for the first time the following January: “I been travellin’ around the country, followin’ in Woody Guthrie’s footsteps.”
The “dust bowl troubadour” – author of this This Land is Your Land, whose guitar bore the legend “this machine kills fascists” – had himself almost reached the end of the road: he was now in his fourth year at the Greystone Park Psychiatric hospital in New Jersey, suffering from Huntingdon’s disease, which finally led to his death in 1967. But Dylan hunted him out there, and the two men met – Guthrie apparently giving Dylan a card after their first meeting saying: “I ain’t dead yet.” Dylan wrote, and played to his idol, a new piece of his own called Song to Woody. It met with the older man’s approval and was one of only two original compositions that made Dylan’s 1962 debut.
“LAST THOUGHTS ON WOODY GUTHRIE”
