It Was 50 Years Ago Today

I was in 7th grade at Russell Sage Junior High School in Forest Hills anxiously awaiting my bar mitzvah that would take place about 6 weeks later.  I knew nothing about the folk music scene in Greenwich Village or a young singer named Bob Dylan.  On March 19, 1962 Bob Dylan released his very first album shown below.

About 7 years later I bought this album which I still have on vinyl.  I was at lunch today when I heard Darren DeVivo on WFUV play a set of very early Dylan songs.  For more information about Dylan's self-named first album please see this Rolling Stone article.

One of the songs on this album was Song to Woody, a tribute to Bob's idol Woody Guthrie.  He sang it at the BobFest at Madison Square Garden on October 16, 1992.

I'm out here a thousand miles from my home
Walking a road other men have gone down
I'm seeing a new world of people and things
Hear paupers and peasants and princes and kings.

Hey hey Woody Guthrie I wrote you a song
About a funny old world that's coming along
Seems sick and it's hungry, it's tired and it's torn
It looks like it's dying and it's hardly been born.

Hey Woody Guthrie but I know that you know
All the things that I'm saying and a many times more
I'm singing you the song but I can't you sing enough
'Cause there's not many men that've done the things that you've done.

Here's to Cisco and Sonny and Leadbelly too
And to all the good people that travelled with you
Here's to the hearts and the hands of the men
That come with the dust and are gone with the wind.

I'm leaving tomorrow but I could leave today
Somewhere down the road someday
The very last thing that I'd want to do
Is to say I've been hitting some hard travelling too