If someone tried to compile every New York Times article that mentions Bob Dylan, one of the world’s best-selling musicians, that person could well miss one.
That article, about a small music festival in Mississippi, appeared in The Times 62 years ago next week, on July 7, 1963.
So why might the article be overlooked?
It isn’t necessarily because the festival, held in a “cotton patch” near Greenwood, Miss., took place early in Dylan’s long career. (His self-titled debut album was released in 1962.) It’s because in the article, the singer’s name is written as “Bobby Dillon.”
The Times certainly knew of Bob Dylan at this point; in 1961, for example, the music critic Robert Shelton wrote that Dylan was a “bright new face in folk music.” The short dispatch from Greenwood was a wire story, and the spelling was most likely an honest mistake. (The article did not carry a byline.) In a Smithsonian recording of the event, one can hear the singer introduced as “Bobby.”
Still, the article captured a moment in civil rights history. According to the article, the event had been sponsored by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which fought for civil rights. For over a year, the article stated, the group had been leading efforts to encourage Black Americans in towns in the Mississippi Delta to register to vote.
Acts included Theodore Bikel, an actor and activist; the Freedom Singers, a group of Black musicians from Albany, Ga., led by Cordell Reagon; and Pete Seeger, a folk singer and the festival’s headliner. The singers performed for free.
About a month earlier, on June 12, 1963, Medgar W. Evers, a civil rights activist and the Mississippi field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, had been shot and killed in Jackson, Miss., by Byron De La Beckwith, a member of the Ku Klux Klan. (Twice, an all-white and all-male jury failed to convict Beckwith. He was finally found guilty of the murder in his third trial, in 1994.)
At the concert, Dylan performed a new song, dedicated to Evers, “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” as reported by Jerry Mitchell in Mississippi Today. The song, wrote NPR, was meant to encapsulate the sentiment that politicians and elites were also to blame for Evers’s death.
Despite the misspelling, the Times article was filed in an archive folder for Bob Dylan, which is stored in The Times’s Morgue, the physical clippings library.
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