Vast Dylan archive to head to US university
A trove of thousands of Bob Dylan notebooks and other artefacts — mostly unknown other than to the rock icon himself — will head to a US university to be preserved for posterity.
The University of Tulsa in Oklahoma announced on Wednesday that it had acquired more than 6,000 items from the singer’s six-decade career and would create the Bob Dylan Archive.
The archive will eventually go on permanent display in Tulsa near a recently built museum to Woody Guthrie, the folk legend and Dylan influence who was born in the Great Plains state that was once Indian Territory.
“I’m glad that my archives, which have been collected all these years, have finally found a home and are to be included with the works of Woody Guthrie and especially alongside all the valuable artefacts from the Native American Nations,” Dylan, who is famously taciturn when not singing, said in a statement.
“To me it makes a lot of sense and it’s a great honour,” said the 74 year old, revered as one of the most influential living US musicians.
Early handwritten drafts of his songs have long been studied by “Dylanologists”, but few were aware of the vast extent of the collection.
Among the items in the archive that were rumoured but not seen in the public realm — a notebook in which Dylan penned lyrics for his 1975 album Blood On The Tracks as he conversed with the New York painter Norman Raeben.
The album, while initially meeting mixed reviews, is considered a musical landmark for establishing a confessional style of songwriting as the singer reflected on his marital difficulties.
The archive will also feature memorabilia including the leather jacket worn by Dylan at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival where, in one of the defining moments of rock history, he switched to electric guitar, as well as part of the piano on which he wrote Like A Rolling Stone, one of his bestknown songs.
Dylan performs regularly and is believed to be in good health, but has increasingly paid attention to the preservation of his legacy.
In 2014, he released an exhaustive boxed-set with all the recordings from his celebrated 1967 “basement tape” sessions as he experimented in form from a house in upstate New York as he recovered from a motorcycle accident.
Dylan, who was born in Minnesota and emerged in the bars of Greenwich Village in New York City, has no obvious connection to Oklahoma other than his admiration for Guthrie.
But the University of Tulsa made a concerted pitch to buy the archive as the city tries to build a downtown devoted to American arts and culture. The price of the deal was not revealed, but The New York Times estimated it was worth US$15-20 million (532-710 million baht).