TODAY’S OBITS

Robert F. (Bob) O’Neill

Joseph E. Kelley, Sr.

Janet McCarter

Anna A. Kerrigan

Ellise P. Abboud (nee Plowman)

Ann K. Tridemas

Sarah (Sally) A. Massarelli 

Cotton

Nickander Damaskos

Francis McGee

STOCKHOLM >> Izzy Young, a businessman, political activist and founding patron of the Greenwich Village folk music scene who organized Bob Dylan’s first major New York concert and devoted decades to supporting other musicians, has died at age 90.

Young’s daughter, Philomene Grandin, said Wednesday that her father died of natural causes late Monday at his home in Stockholm. Before he moved to Sweden in 1973 and went into business there, Young ran a folk music shop in New York that nurtured a generation of artists.

Starting in the 1950s, Greenwich Village was the center of a folk music revival that helped launch the careers of Dylan, Joni Mitchell and many others. Young, as much as anyone, made the revival possible. In 1957, he opened the Folklore Center, remembered by Dylan as an “ancient chapel, like a shoebox sized institute,” a vital stopping point where fans and folk performers would stop by for everything from old sheet music to obscure music books.

In 1960, Young had another inspiration — to expand folk music beyond coffee houses and bring it to a restaurant, an Italian place called Gerde’s. When Dylan moved from Minnesota to New York in the winter of 1961, Gerde’s was an early stop. He played his first professional gig there, in April. A Dylan performance at Gerde’s in September of that year was attended by The New York Times’ Robert Shelton, whose review established Dylan as a rising star and brought him his first record deal.