When Judy Collins watched Bob Dylan write ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’
Judy Collins was one of the major players in the early 1960s folk scene. As one of the first artists to achieve crossover success in the mainstream, Collins paved the way for everyone from Joni Mitchell to Joan Baez. Although she is a talented songwriter in her own right, Collins’ biggest hits were her interpretations of other artists’ songs, including Joni Mitchell’s ‘Both Sides Now’ and Stephen Sondheim’s ‘Send in the Clowns’.
Collins also happened to be at the nexus point of some of rock’s greatest origin stories. She was the major player in facilitating the creation of John Phillips’ ‘Me and My Uncle’, a song that later took on legendary status when it became one of the most played songs in the Grateful Dead’s live repertoire. Phillips claims that he made up the song on the spot to Collins, but Collins has poked a number of holes in Phillips’ famous story.
Collins also inspired Stephen Stills’ ‘Suite: Judy Blue Eyes’, a song that recounted the former couple’s relationship. Stills eventually brought the track to his new collaborators, David Crosby and Graham Nash, who recorded the track and made it the opening song on their debut album, Crosby, Stills, and Nash. Collins had friendships with a number of major musicians of the 1960s, including a mercurial figure by the name of Bob Dylan.
As Collins explained in the Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast episode entitled ‘Skull & Roses: Side C’, the night that she leaned ‘Me and My Uncle’ was later mirrored when she heard Dylan fumbling around with a new song. “It’s a very ’60s story; it’s funny because it’s sort of like my showing up the same year, ’63, I was at a party in Woodstock at Al Grossman’s,” Collins explained. “I woke up in the middle of the night, and I heard Dylan singing and writing ‘Tambourine Man’. I might have been a little bit drunk, but I wasn’t very drunk, and certainly enough to sit still down in the basement three flights down to listen to him for two hours while he wrote ‘Tambourine Man’.”
Although Collins puts the writing of the song both in 1963 and at the house of Albert Grossman, Dylan’s then-manager, most sources claim that Dylan wrote the song in 1964. Collins herself had early recalled that Dylan had finished the song at her home in the book Revolution in the Air. Although the exact facts might be a bit fuzzy, it seems that Collins has a solid memory of hearing Dylan work on ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ sometime before Dylan officially recorded the song in January of 1965.
Check out ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ down below.
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