LEN CHANDLER

Black folksinger/composer/songwriter/poet, born May 27, 1935, Akron, OH

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LEN CHANDLER.
...we'd go to Washington Square Park... and it was there that I started seeing people like Dave Van Ronk and other folksingers... After I failed to get a teaching certificate... Hugh Romney... asked me to play with him at the Gaslight. It was mainly a scene for poets...

The whole Village scene was very heavy, and there were people like Noel Stookey, who was doing sound effects like the sound of a flushing toilet, and singing folk songs, and eventually, songs that he wrote...

By 1962, the civil rights movement was under way, and I wrote my first topical song about a bus accident that happened in Greeley, Colorado...

Kristin Baggelaar & Donald Milton, The Folk Music Encyclopedia, London, 1977, pp. 65-66

Bob Dylan (by his own admission) used the tune of the aforementioned Len Chandler song for his song "The Death of Emmett Till". The tune itself (IMO) is basically a variant of that used in Dylan's (and Dave Van Ronk's) version of "House of the Risin' Sun".

Len Chandler is also a possible and likely source for Dylan's version of "Gospel Plow".

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