As an alum of the University of Chicago Folk Festival Coordinating Committee, and in honor of Robert “Bob Dylan” Zimmerman’s 80th birthday, I have taken it upon myself to investigate claims that B.D. was snubbed by the U.C.F.F, which has drawn many illustrious performers over the years including the Stanley Brothers, Pete Seeger, Muddy Waters, Earl Scruggs, and many others. Apparently, Bob was a fan and wanted to perform there in the early ‘60s, but the organizers turned him away.
Moishe Postone recalled Dylan’s connection to Hyde Park in a 2015 interview:
…Bob Dylan was also here first before he went to Greenwich Village. What a little schmuck he was. We all thought, Nothing will ever come of him. He’s just a bad Woody Guthrie imitator. When he started, there were various keepers of the flame. There were the communist kids, for whom folk music meant a very particular thing—Woody Guthrie.
This attitude is confirmed by accounts of Dylan’s unsuccessful audition for the inaugural festival in 1961: “The poor kid wandered around looking miserable,” according to a 2001 account by Paul Levy, a UChicago student who let Dylan stay at his Hyde Park apartment for a few days.”
But it seems like Bob pulled himself together and ultimately had a good time picking and schmoozing at festival-adjacent jam sessions, as Mike Michaels (X ‘61, an organizer of the first fest) recalled:
The festival’s opening reception took place on a Friday evening in Ida Noyes Hall and was filled with performers and students from the University and nearby colleges. It was the height of the folk boom, and having a guitar or banjo was almost as necessary as having a toothbrush—maybe more so. So the instruments were out and the jams were on. I was standing there observing the scene when my roommate, Jon Aaron, AB’64, said, “Mike, this is amazing. There’s the Stanley Brothers”—headlining bluegrass musicians Carter and Ralph Stanley—“over in that room and a gang of musicians in the other, and over in that little alcove is this strange looking guy with a funny hat and a harmonica rack playing his own songs with his guitar!” I looked over, and there he was—funny hat, pudgy face, harmonica in rack, and a guitar.
A few minutes later I had joined the jamming on my mandolin, with my bluegrass buddies Jon on guitar and David Gedalecia, X’64, on banjo. [EN: Some University of Chicago publications note drop-outs from the College with an X in place of their bachelors.] Soon I noticed the guy with the funny hat right next to us, bobbing and bouncing to our music. Well, I figured if he liked us he must be OK, so I introduced myself. He told me that his name was Bob Dylan. It turned out that we both loved Woody Guthrie, and we spent a lot of time that weekend playing together in the dorm. Dylan said he was from New Mexico and that his parents were ranchers. I had no reason not to believe him. (Within the month Dylan traveled to the East Coast and met Guthrie, his major influence and hero.)
I had been hosting a folk music show on the University radio station, WUCB, and on the Monday after the festival, this Dylan guy and I did a show of duets, mostly Guthrie songs.
Mouse Magazine has reason to speculate this snub by soon-to-be dropout college commies is what inspired the famous spite ballad “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and changed music and American history, forever.
