Bob Dylan and Blues History

This post isn’t a history of the Folk Festival. This post is about how the hive mind of the internet helped me track down a legend about Bob Dylan playing (however briefly) in Hyde Park. But first, I want to put in a plug for people check the Folk Festival out. It’s a lot of fun, especially the random workshops and jam sessions that are free on Saturday in Ida Noyes Hall.

This year is the 64th anniversary of the University of Chicago Folk Festival on February 9 and 10. Originally, it was founded when folk music and Leftists were hanging together, Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger were playing acoustic guitar. In the early years, the festival reached out to find brilliant Blues guitarists no one had heard of, just sitting on their front porches playing among Blue Grass bands and Irish fiddlers.

Even in the 1970s, when I got to Hyde Park, the Folk Festival was a mix of brilliant amateurs and the stunning performance every year by Mama Yancey, a very frail Black woman of what seemed immense age. She was the widow of Blues great, Jimmy Yancey, who died in 1951. Every year, she had to be helped out to the stage by one of the college students. She sank into a straight chair and proceeded to belt out the Blues that she’d been singing in Hyde Park clubs forty years before, before urban renewal tore them all down. She was always the highlight every year for me.

At some time when I’d first gotten to Chicago, someone told me that Bob Dylan had played at the Medici when he was still Robert Zimmerman. The Medici was a “coffee house” then, though it’s far more famous for its pizza and burgers now. I didn’t ask questions. I was busy reading Melville in graduate school.

I decided a few years ago to ask the Hyde Park brain trust on Facebook what they thought of this urban legend. They quickly dispelled the idea that anyone played the Medici back then. It was a very tiny dispenser of espresso behind a bookstore, down the street from its current location.

People quickly remembered histories of the Folk Festival that mentioned that Bob Dylan had applied to perform in 1961 but was rejected because all he had was Woody Guthrie covers and the festival at the time was all about Authenticity. He crashed in an apartment and hung out at the workshops.

This story was confirmed when someone found an account by Mike Michaels, who was then attending the U of C. He recalled spotting Bob Dylan off by himself in Ida Noyes Hall, playing his own songs. Michaels had a show on the campus radio station, so he invited Dylan to play with him on the show.

Dylan was on his way to New York City. He played a concert in 1961 where only 57 people came. Two years later, he sold out Carnegie Hall. His rise was meteoric.

Michaels pointed out that there was another Hyde Park/Dylan connection. Some of the last gasps of the artist colony (torn down by urban renewal) was a store called the Fret Shop on 57th Street. It was able to reconstitute itself later in the Harper Court Shopping Center. Michaels recalled stepping into the Fret Shop to the sound of maniacal Blues guitar played by Michael Bloomfield, who’d been hanging out with Chicago’s Blues legends like Muddy Waters. Bloomfield joined up later with two Hyde Parkers to form the Paul Butterfield Blues Band.

In addition to performing with the Butterfield Blues Band at Newport, he played guitar with Dylan when he went electric, notoriously making music history on “Maggie’s Farm” and “Like a Rollin’ Stone.” You can see him and hear his guitar here.

Luckily, the Blues history of the area is going to be preserved at 4339 S. Lake Park Avenue at the Muddy Waters Mojo Museum.