Bob Dylan - Mr Tambourine Man
In early 1964, Bob Dylan wrote the timeless folk classic “Mr. Tambourine Man,” inspired by musician Bruce Langhorne and his oversized tambourine, now housed at the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. While the exact date of that composition remains unknown, according to the center and Dylan’s record label, Columbia Records, we do know when and where the song was first put to tape: May 1964, at 532 Beach Road on Siesta Key. (The best-known version of the song, from Dylan’s 1965 studio LP Bringing It All Back Home, would not be recorded until January 1965.) Dylan was staying at the home of friend and fellow musician Eric Von Schmidt when the recording was made—a series of tracks that only surfaced officially when they were included in a limited-edition vinyl LP set in 2014. Von Schmidt was a key figure in the folk scene of Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the early 1960s before he moved to Sarasota, where he was well known as a musician, poet, painter and all-around Renaissance man.
About Eric Von Schmidt
Eric von Schmidt was an American folk musician and painter. He was associated with the folk boom of the late 1950s and early 1960s and was a key part of the Cambridge folk music scene. As a singer and guitarist, he was considered to be the leading specialist in country blues in Cambridge at the time, the counterpart of Greenwich Village's Dave Van Ronk. Von Schmidt co-authored with Jim Rooney Baby, Let Me Follow You Down: The Illustrated Story of the Cambridge Folk Years.
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