Tony Glover's Archive, For Sale in November

Tony Glover, May 1965, via and © RR Auction 2020

Minnesota writer, musician, and blues-harmonica deity Tony “Little Sun” Glover — born David Curtis Glover in 1939, and active in his art up until his death in May 2019 — should be best remembered for his many decades as a founding member of Koerner, Ray, and Glover and for his biography, with Scott Dirks and Ward Gaines, Blues With A Feeling: The Little Walter Story (2002). With his friends “Spider” John Koerner and Dave “Snaker” Ray, Glover was a star of the Minneapolis folk scene from 1962 until Ray’s death in 2002. From their early appearances at the Newport Folk Festival and their classic album Blues, Rags and Hollers (1963), KRG helped protect, preserve, and promote American folk music and particularly the blues for forty years.

One of the musicians they met, befriended, and with whom Glover stayed in touch was Bobby Zimmerman, who arrived at the University of Minnesota as a student in the autumn of 1959, and at that time renamed himself Bob Dylan. In Chronicles Vol. 1 (2004), Dylan recalls his early days playing with his new friends in and around Dinkytown: “There was Dave Ray, a high school kid who sang Leadbelly and Bo Diddley songs on a twelve-string guitar, probably the only twelve-string quitar in the entire Midwest — and then there was Tony Glover, a harp player who played with me and Koerner sometimes. He sang a few songs, but mostly played the harp — cupped it in his hands and played like Sonny Terry or Little Walter.” Dylan readily admitted he couldn’t play like Glover and didn’t try to; he used a harp rack instead. “Glover’s playing was known and talked about around town, but nobody commented on mine.” Here, try a little twelve-bar rhythm with Tony.

The announcement this week that Glover’s widow Cynthia Nadler is selling his vast and important music archive through RR Auction of Massachusetts has sparked excitement among musicians, archivists, historians, and fans. RR are rightly showcasing Glover’s Bob Dylan Archive, but much more is for sale as well. Doug Brinkley has written for Rolling Stone about Dylan’s correspondence with Glover ($), quoting at length from some remarkable letters included. All are to be sold individually in an online auction that closes November 19th. I am hoping that all the letters end up in the Bob Dylan Archive in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where they belong: the excerpts available are a particularly important documentation of Dylan’s early days.

My favorite comes from time Dylan was spending in summer and fall of 1964, in Woodstock, New York. Woodstock was to be home for him and his young family by the end of the decade, but in November 1964, Dylan was staying in the home of his manager Albert Grossman and Sally Grossman in Bearsville with Joan Baez. He is composing on the typewriter — the way he would write, when one was available, until around 1967. At this time, Dylan began writing his song drafts, and letters and postcards, in longhand, with the drafts in small notebooks that were easily portable wherever he was. This wonderful letter scrolls out like Tarantula, like the Beat poetry he so appreciated at the time (Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky were among the visitors to Bearsville, while Dylan and Baez were there). Winter is coming, and the Catskills are getting cold. The Grossmans’ “groovy silent house” (owned today by Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer) is both a haven and a perfect point for exploring the nearby stretch of hills and Hudson Valley, with its “strange towns round here very ancient,” "the “old stone buildings - rip van winkle icabod crane demon horseback people / abandoned hotels within twenty mountain mile radius” and “mystic country no smell of any city.” That warm fireplace in the house is just the way Rick Danko would remember it in 1967, when a roaring fire in it induced him to move to Woodstock himself. Dylan and his friends go into Kingston to shoot pool. He loves the namelessness and secret of the Catskills, where a “vagabondcanadian hitchhike boy wonder poetsperhaps can imagine….”

Another typed letter, this one from December 1963, freestyles down the page with personal and political observations: “My guitar strings have escaped my eyesight…they remain with me now as a friend a flashin dashin friend who stands in front a me makin me look better…an its gettin so now that I'm growin not t need it…an soon I expect I will shout my words without it. for it's colors are wearin off on me an soon I myself will vanish into the sound hole…an all that will be going down will be stark naked undressed obscene flesh colored songs…yes maybe lunatic…ha you ask about harps I cant even understand how my own harp fits into me…it has the fuckin job of tryin t meet me hard hard…oh pity my own poor harp I am a writer of words I am honest I do not mean t harm nothin an nobody save that that runs against the boards of nature its a big nature…sometimes a circus nature an other times a courtroom nature but above all it is my nature an I own stock in it as much as anybody an I will defend my clown courthouse with the eyes of a lawyer.” Dylan also mentions that he’s recently donated to “snick,” or SNCC, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. Earlier in 1963, SNCC had saved thirty-three African-American high school girls imprisoned in the Leesburg Stockade in Leesburg, Georgia after a protest March from Friendship Baptist Church to a segregated movie theater. Photographer Danny Lyon managed to get into the Stockade and photograph the girls in the horrible conditions under which they were being kept, and abused — at one point a guard threw a rattlesnake among them — and the published photographs led to outrage and the girls’ freedom.

These unpublished lyrics to a song, below, tentatively entitled “Brooklyn’s Stony Island Mind” — surely playing off Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s 1958 A Coney Island of the Mind, itself named from Henry Miller — were written after Glover, John Hammond, Jr., and Dylan visited Woody Guthrie in the spring of 1962. According to Glover, Dylan wrote them in the back seat of the car as they returned to Greenwich Village.

via RRAuction.com

Lot #5002 is a special item from Dylan’s days in his first NYC apartment of his own, which he shared with Suze Rotolo. Described as an “ALS signed ‘I, Me, Bob—161 West 4th Street Apt 3A,’” which is the address of Bob and Suze’s apartment, the letter tells Glover about a visit he’d had from their mutual friend, musician and photographer John Cohen: “I saw and talked with John Cohn last night for a while—he seems to have some grand ol time in Minneapolice—…told him and talked & babbled all about me I guess—no difference I can see tho—.” Cohen’s photographs of Dylan remain among the most intimate ever taken of him. Here’s Dylan on a New York City rooftop in 1962, the same year as this letter, holding his harmonica cupped in his hands à la Tony Glover:

Bob Dylan by John Cohen, 1962, via and © Getty

There’s a poster from Dylan’s 1961 appearance at Gerde’s Folk City, and a program from his 1961 concert at Carnegie Hall. There are a collection of Columbia Records studio photographs of Dylan, some very rarely seen and one I’d never seen before at all. There are never before reproduced photographs of Dylan chilling with Glover, backstage in Minneapolis in November 1965, before Dylan, Levon Helm, and Robbie Robertson went out and let the crowd have it. There are photos from the Newport Folk Festival and Dylan’s letter-poem “For Dave Glover” that was included in a Newport program. There is a copy of the 1963 number of Broadside that featured the sheet music for Dylan’s Masters of War, illustrated by Rotolo.

Glover’s reel-to-reel of the “Minnesota Party Tape” and another set of 1961 recordings, and his notes from a 1971 interview with Dylan, have garnered the most attention. There are other transcripts of unreleased interviews with Dylan being auctioned, but the 1971 interview contains Dylan’s handwritten corrections on all but one page, of the several “takes” of the interview. Each revision is offered as a separate lot. What Dylan has lined out, still clearly legible, is often as interesting as what remains:

The Dylan-related items for sale include an extensive clipping file, Glover’s copies of Dylan’s albums official and bootlegged, tapes, cds, proof or advance reading copies of books by and about Dylan, and his archive of books on Dylan. Michael Gray’s Bob Dylan Encyclopedia and Sean Wilentz’s Bob Dylan In America look to be much consulted, and the latter brandishes an excellent bookmark set into its pages.

Glover’s archives, as I said, are vast. Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon, and The Doors were among his acquaintances and interviewees. There’s an inscribed copy of The New Creatures from Jim Morrison and an inscribed copy of Junkie from William S. Burroughs, and a signed copy of Jack Kerouac’s Visions of Cody. There’s a signed Annie Leibowitz of my favorite photograph of Keith Richards taken to date. There’s an interview tape and original photos of Pete Townshend. Tony’s own guitars, a full run of The Little Sandy Review, correspondence with Greil Marcus and with Pete Seeger, press kits for dozens of artists, and beautiful letters from Joan Baez are all for sale. There’s a brick from Sonny Boy Williamson’s house and a letter from Brownie McGhee. It is all solid gold, but I’ll leave you, before you run off to spend the rest of the day browsing the RR Auction website, with this telegram from Dylan to Glover, October 12, 1998. Glover had written the liner notes for The Bootleg Series Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live 1966, The 'Royal Albert Hall' Concert, which was released on the following day. Glover was awarded the Deems Taylor Award from ASCAP for the liner notes; but Dylan’s gracious and heartfelt thanks for his friend’s fine writing is more moving than any award could be.

all images, unless otherwise noted, via RR Auction / The Tony Glover Archive 2020

all previously unpublished words and lyrics of Bob Dylan are © Bob Dylan

Rich, Dean, and Scott: this one’s for you, o Minnesota guys x