Dylan’s mentor later wrote a scathing attack on his decision to ‘go electric’

When a teenage Bob Dylan arrived in New York in the winter of 1961, he headed for Greenwich Village, where he found a mentor in Izzy Young and a home in his Folklore Center. ‘‘The place had an antique grace. It was like an ancient chapel, like a shoebox-sized institute,’’ Dylan wrote in his memoir Chronicles: Volume One.

Young’s music store, which doubled as a small performance space, had a small back room where Dylan was allowed to hang out, listen to records and write songs on an old typewriter. Young, who has died aged 90, was struck by

Dylan’s ability to absorb everything he heard, but was otherwise unimpressed.

‘‘Then he began writing those great songs and I realised he was really something.’’

When Dylan was ready for a wider audience, Young promoted his first formal concert at the Carnegie Chapter Hall. ‘‘People said, ‘You’re crazy!’ ’’ he recalled. ‘‘But I knew that this was the best guy I had ever heard.’’

Only 53 people bought tickets and Young lost money, but years later he noted that he had since met ‘‘at least 3000 people who claim to have been there’’.

Sardonic, ‘‘sloppily good-natured’’ and with a voice that ‘‘always seemed too loud for the room’’, Young had an enthusiasm for folk music that was inversely proportionate to his acumen as a businessman. ‘‘He was besieged with bill collectors,’’ Dylan recalled, ‘‘but it didn’t seem to faze him.’’ Once Dylan was on his way, he repaid Young by writing a song titled Talking Folklore Center, which went ‘‘Go down and buy a record or book/ Don’t just walk around and look/ You can do that when you go uptown/ When you come down here you’re on common ground.’’

But the pair fell out in the mid-1960s when Dylan ‘‘went electric’’ and Young penned a condemnation of his ‘‘betrayal’’ of folk music. Dylan responded by writing Positively 4th Street, in which Young was one of the targets of the song’s opening line: ‘‘You’ve got a lot of nerve to say you are my friend.’’

Time was a great healer, however, and the chapter about Young in Dylan’s 2004 memoir was full of affection.

Many other music legends passed through the Folklore Center, including Peter, Paul and Mary, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell and Patti Smith. ‘‘Those were my fabulous years,’’ Young said. ‘‘Don’t ask me how I survived, because I’m still trying to figure it out.’’

Israel Goodman Young was born in 1928 on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the son of Philip and Pola Young, Jewish immigrants from Poland. He grew up in the Bronx and spent his school years ‘‘trying to avoid committing myself to anything’’, but he was a keen folk dancer.

On completing his education, he worked in his father’s bakery until he found a sideline

Only 53 people bought tickets [to the first Bob Dylan concert] and Young lost money, but years later he noted that he had since met ‘‘at least 3000 people who claim to have been there’’.

dealing in folk-music books. It led to him setting up the Folklore Center in 1957 after cashing a US$1000 insurance policy to pay for the lease.

Like many in the folk scene, he counted himself a leftist. Dylan wrote approvingly of Young’s activism in fighting against ‘‘injustice and hunger and homelessness’’. He supported Cambodian refugees and worked with the Jews for Peace movement, yet his most famous victory was more parochial.

When the New York authorities banned music in Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village, where busking was a tradition, Young formed the Right to Sing Committee and organised a ‘‘beatnik riot’’ of hundreds of musicians to descend on the park one Sunday afternoon in 1961.

When Young and his guitar-wielding protesters arrived, they found ‘‘seven or eight paddy wagons waiting for us and cops on horses’’, so he organised a community singalong to the Star-Spangled Banner, figuring that the police couldn’t ‘‘hit us on the head’’ during such a display of patriotism. After an eight-month court battle, he succeeded in having the ban declared unconstitutional and the park vibrated again to the clarion sound of protest songs.

His Folklore Center remained the heart of the folk scene until 1973, when he emigrated to Europe, taking his vast collection of books, manuscripts, scrapbooks and recordings.

Keen to start a family with Catherine Grandin, his French girlfriend, he settled in Stockholm, which he thought more childfriendly than New York. His daughter, Philomene Grandin, now a Swedish TV presenter, was born a year later. She survives him, along with his son, Thilo Egenberger.

Young ran the Folklore Centrum in Stockholm for 45 years, hosting Swedish folk musicians, and international Dylan fans.

He saw Dylan one last time, at a concert in Stockholm in 2009. They enjoyed a ‘‘straight talk’’, but Young was shocked at how their lives had diverged. Young prided himself on being ‘‘the same folk-loving Jewish boy who grew up in the Bronx and never tried to change’’. –