Izzy Young
Figure on the US folk scene who gave Bob Dylan an early break
IZZY YOUNG, who has died aged 90, was a key figure in New York’s Greenwich Village folk music scene in the 1950s and 1960s when he launched a young aspiring singer-songwriter called Bob Dylan on his musical career by underwriting his first major concert in New York.
Lanky and thin with mischievous eyes and a gruff Bronx-jewish accent (“like a bulldozer”, wrote Dylan), Young, a trenchant columnist for the folk magazine Sing Out! and the owner of the Folklore Center on Macdougal Street, gave early breaks to a whole generation of folk singers from Odetta to Joni Mitchell and a young Patti Smith, and became friends with such figures as Woody Guthrie, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Josh White, the Rev Gary Davis – and Dylan.
Opened in 1957 the Folklore Center sold everything from books to sheet music, magazines, records and musical instruments. It had a small room in the back where musicians and counterculture figures hung out. Dylan described it as “the citadel of Americana folk music in an ancient chapel, like a shoebox’’.
Dylan, Young recalled, would hang around the back of the store, listening to records and writing songs, and it was Young who introduced the young man to the folk renegade Dave Van Ronk, a key inspiration, and also promoted his first major concert, on November 4 1961 at Carnegie Chapter Hall.
It drew an audience of 53 people and left Young $300 out of pocket. But he insisted on paying the young musician $10 and Dylan would write a song for him, entitled Talking Folklore Center.
In 2014 he put up for auction Dylan’s original manuscript of the unrecorded song (lyrics: “You get daft and I’ll get dizzy/ We’ll go down to see old Izzy/ What did the fly say to the flea/ Folklore Center is the place for me …), plus that of another unrecorded Dylan original, Go Away You Bomb, Get Away, but they failed to sell.
By 1973, however, Young had had enough of Greenwich Village. Enraged by Dylan’s decision to “go electric” and dismayed by the increasing commercialism of the folk scene, he closed the Folklore Center and decamped with his French girlfriend to Stockholm, where he opened a new centre called Folklore Centrum.
Israel Goodman Young was born on March 26 1928 on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland. Soon after his birth the family moved to the Bronx, where he grew up working in his parents’ bakery.
He first encountered folk music in 1945 when on impulse he joined Margaret Mayo’s American Square Dance Group, which he recalled as a place “where communists and musicians congregated to get up to no good’’.
Young dropped out of Brooklyn College and whiled away a few years doing odd jobs at Jewish youth camps. Meanwhile he began collecting obscure volumes on folk music and lore, of which he published a catalogue in 1955. Two years later, just short of his 30th birthday and with only about $50 in the bank, he took a lease on ramshackle premises in Macdougal Street and the Folklore Center was born.
“I was never a businessman,’’ Young said. “But that was never the point. It was always about the music, pure and simple. But hey, my sex life improved a hell of a lot after I opened the store.’’
The Stockholm Folklore Centrum closed in November 2018. “Listen, I’m broke,” Young told an interviewer in 2013. “… It would have been better for my career if I’d have died 20 years ago, as then they’d at least have a statue here for me.’’
Young is survived by a son, and by a daughter, the Swedish actress, Philomène Grandin.
Izzy Young, born March 26 1928, died February 4 2019