Time passed and he asked me to play the guitar for him so he could figure out the rhymes with greater ease. He began to strum some chords and fool with some lines he had written for a new song. "Dylan and I had been killing the latter part of a Monday afternoon drinking coffee," Blue recalled for Hoot!: A Twenty-Five Year History of the Greenwich Village Music Scene. "About five o'clock, Dylan pulled out his guitar and a paper and pencil. In fact, "Blowin' in the Wind" used several of the same chords and a similar vocal phrasing.įellow singer-songwriter David Blue, another regular around the Village, was with Dylan one afternoon when he began dashing off lyrics. In Chronicles, Dylan revealed that "No More Auction Block" served as the musical inspiration for what would become, arguably, one of his most well-known compositions. Famed folk singer and civil rights activist Odetta also release her own version in 1973.
A recording of one of these performances from the Gaslight Cafe would appear on Dylan's The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961–1991. Listen to Bob Dylan Perform 'No More Auction Block'ĭylan performed the song himself, as well. "And Bob was originally a really good friend of Gil Turner’s, who was the de facto leader of the group." She has a great voice," the band's guitarist, Happy Traum, told Bedford and Bowery in 2017. "He really liked Delores Dixon, our lead singer, who is a Black, sort of gospel-oriented, wonderful singer from Queens. He sometimes heard it performed by the New World singers, a folk revival group that played the local clubs in New York. The godawful truth of that would be the all-encompassing template behind everything I would write."ĭylan was also fascinated with slavery and Reconstruction era songs like "No More Auction Block," first published in 1867 in Slave Songs of the United States. Back there, America was put on the cross, died and resurrected.
If you turned the light towards it, you could see the full complexity of human nature. "There was a broad spectrum and commonwealth that I was living upon, and the basic psychology of that life was every bit a part of it.
Not just a little bit, but a lot," he wrote.
"The age that I was living in didn't resemble this age, but yet it did in some mysterious and traditional way. That prompted him to draw parallels between their world and his own. Writings from the Civil War period, with their "language and rhetoric," interested Dylan in particular.
I needed to slow my mind down if I was going to be a composer with anything to say."īy the time Bob Dylan was released, he'd begun to more seriously consider ideas and themes that might make for good songwriting material, spending a significant amount of time reading old books and newspapers in the public library and at friends apartments. "I did everything fast: Thought fast, ate fast, talked fast and walked fast," he wrote in his 2004 memoir, Chronicles Volume One. "I even sang my songs fast. The results were both a blessing and a curse as Dylan considered what role original work might play in his up-and-coming career. But Dylan's physical and emotional momentum in the early '60s met the sweeping pace of New York City, a haven for blossoming musicians and artists of varying mediums.