Baby, Let Me Follow You Down

Until I read this remembrance by David Hajdu, I didn’t know that Eric Von Schmidt had died. Mostly I know him from his influence on Bob Dylan, who says on his first album that he met him in the "green pastures of Harvard university". According to Dylan (at least in 1969), “He could sing the bird off the wire and the rubber off the tire, He can separate the men from the boys and the note from the noise. The bridle from the saddle and the cow from the cattle. He can play the tune of the moon. They why of the sky and the commotion of the ocean”. From Cambridge, where he lived, he also influenced many other folksingers, including Joan Baez, the daughter of an MIT physicist.