BONNIE DOBSON

Bonnie Dobson (Wolfgang Glandt)

Any copyrighted material on these pages is used in "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s).
Audio files are DELIBERATELY encoded "low-fi" to enable faster streaming and are intended as "illustrations" and "appetizers" only.
Official and "hi-fi" recordings can (and should) be purchased at your local record dealer or through a number of web-based companies, like CDNow.

To order available recordings right from this site:
CDnow's Country/Folk section!

BONNIE DOBSON SONG AS TUNE SOURCE OF DYLAN COMPOSITION:

May 1962 Broadside Show, WBAI, NYC
(excerpt; transcribed from original tape by Manfred Helfert):

GIL TURNER:
I feel about Bob Dylan's songs very often that Bob is actually a kind of folk mind that he represents to all the people around. And all the ideas current are just filtered down and come out in poetry. For example, one song he wrote about the fellow that asked to be put into an institution, what was his name -- White?

BOB DYLAN:
Oh yeah... Now, he's dead now.

GIL TURNER:
He's dead now? For example, you put in one line, you say the institutions were overcrowded. And I just couldn't see that appearing in a traditional ballad stanza before you sang it. And it's actually the first song I could think of, a modern song, that uses the ideas of the 20th century Freudian psychology, the ideas of people being afraid of life, in actually a folk song.

PETE SEEGER:
Instead of talking about it, let's hear it.

AGNES "SIS" CUNNINGHAM:
That's what I was gonna say. Let him get tuned up while we're talking and we can let him give us an example of how these songs just sort of come to him and flow through him.

GIL TURNER:
Well, I think this particular song is historical in the sense that it's the first psychological song of the modern generation I've heard.

BOB DYLAN: I took this from Bonnie Dobson's tune, "Peter Amberly", I think the name of it is...

DYLAN PERFORMS "THE BALLAD OF DONALD WHITE"

• BONNIE DOBSON INTERVIEW