Who is Bob Dylan’s ‘Girl From North Country?’
The music of Bob Dylan is full of unknowable women. Take the subject of Dylan’s 1963 track ‘Girl From The North Country’. For decades, fans and critics have debated the true identity of the girl whose hair “rolls and flows all down her breast,” with some arguing that the song was inspired by the singer-songwriter’s then-girlfriend Suze Rotolo. Others have maintained that, for this girl to have lived among the “howling winds”, she must have been one of Dylan’s high school girlfriends.
The case of ‘Girl From The North Country’ is particularly fascinating because Dylan hands us numerous clues. We know, for example, that this girl had long flowing hair, that she lived in a northern state prone to harsh winters, and that Dylan must have lived there too at some point. “Remember me to one who lives there”, he sings, “She once was a true love of mine.” Dylan wouldn’t have written a song recalling the love of a girlfriend he still had at that time, so it seems unlikely that Suze Rotolo is our girl.
We’re looking at one of the girls Dylan courted during his time at Hibbing High School in Minnesota. The most likely candidate is Echo Helstrom, who was born in Hibbing in 1942, the youngest child of Matt Helstrom, a mechanic, painter and welder, and his wife, Martha. She grew up in the woods three miles southwest of Hibbing, far from the middle-class district Robert Zimmerman called home. This is partly why the pair were so attracted to one another: he was rich, and she was poor.
Echo wasn’t Dylan’s only high-school sweetheart. He wrote countless love letters to Barbara Anne Hewitt, who inspired ‘Tangled Up In Blue’, in which Dylan, as in ‘Girl From The North Country’, wonders if this lost girl’s long red hair is still as beautiful as he remembers. Of course, Hewitt was married when she and Dylan first met, and it seems unlikely that she was immortalised in two classic Dylan songs. Echo Halstrom also has a stronger claim than Bonnie Beecher, the other ‘Girl From The North Country’, who was actually born in Minneapolis rather than Hibbing, and who recorded Dyan’s 1960 Minneapolis Party Tape at her home while they were dating.
Like Bob, Echo was into rock ‘n’ roll and listened to R&B on late-night radio. Between 1957 and 1958, they were going steady and attended their junior prom together. Writing in the 1958 High School Yearbook, Dylan wrote against Echo’s name: “Let me tell you that your beauty is second to none…. Love to the most beautiful girl in school.’ Echo’s father disapproved of Dylan, and it was only when Mr Helstrom was out that the young musician found the courage to pick up one of his three guitars and play Echo a song or two on the porch. According to Dylan, he was “the kind of guy that’s always thinking that somebody’s out to take advantage of him,” while Echo’s mother was “the kindest woman – Mother Earth.”
By the time Robert Shelton set to work on No Direction Home, Echo was a single mother working as a film company secretary in Minneapolis to support her child. In an interview with the author, she explianed that both she and Dylan had felt like outsiders in Hibbing. Dylan was dead-set on becoming a successful musician, but Echo had dreams of her own: she wanted to be a famous actress. “They planned to call their child Bob, whether it was a boy or a girl, Mrs Helstrom told Shelton. “You know how teenagers are.” Sadly, by mid-1958, Echo and Bob were drifting apart, and they broke up that summer.
They met over a decade later at the Hibbing High School Class of ’59 reunion in 1969. By then, Dylan had achieved everything he’d talked about in their youth. Life had been far less kind to Echo, who was working a job she didn’t want to support the fruit of a failed marriage. Still, she wasn’t the faintest bit proud. Echo was among the countless old friends who asked Dylan for an autograph. When he signed her programme, he garbled: “Hey! It’s you!” before turning to his wife to exclaim, “This is Echo!” That same year, Dylan re-recorded ‘Girl From The North Country’ for release on Nashville Skyline.
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