American singer-songwriter, author, and visual artist Bob Dylan and American singer-songwriter and activist Mimi Farina (1945 – 2001) at the Viking Hotel Newport, Rhode Island, July 1964. (Photo by John Byrne Cooke Estate/Getty Images)
Ok, so you know I’m obsessed with auctions. Mostly because the items on the podium are rare and so special the owner couldn’t come up with a price for them. In the realm of music, unpublished Bob Dylan lyrics meet those standards and then some.
the singer-songwriter’s musings about anti-Semitism and unpublished song lyrics has sold at auction for a total of $495,000.
Boston-based R.R. Auction said the collection privately held by the late American blues artist Tony Glover, a longtime Dylan friend and confidante, was sold as individual lots a couple weeks ago, with a majority of the key pieces going to a bidder whose identity was not made public.
The collection included transcripts of Glover’s 1971 interviews with Dylan and letters the pair exchanged. The interviews reveal that Dylan had anti-Semitism on his mind when he changed his name from Robert Zimmerman, and that he wrote “Lay Lady Lay” for Barbra Streisand.
Dylan, 79, was close with Glover, who died last year. The two men broke into music in the same Minneapolis coffeehouse scene. Glover’s widow, Cynthia Nadler, put the documents up for auction online.
