“Long-Sidetracked” Tape Recording of a 1965 Interview with Joan Baez and Bob Dylan Now Part of Southern Folklife Collection, UNC-Chapel Hill Libraries

From the News & Observer:

In 1965, singer-songwriter Bob Dylan crashed the gates of pop fame, searing Top 40 radio with “Like a Rolling Stone” and devastating the gentle image of folk music at the Newport Folk Festival.
Dylan also visited Raleigh that year, playing an influential March 19 concert at NC State’s Reynolds Coliseum with Joan Baez. That night, the musicians took time for a frank and funny backstage interview with two UNC-Chapel Hill students, giving them their full attention – despite the students’ total lack of press credentials.
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A long-sidetracked tape recording and photograph from that encounter recently surfaced at UNC’s Southern Folklife Collection [Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, UNC-Chapel Hill University Libraries] , a real find given the decades of fans and scholars’ obsessive study of Dylan.
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Word of a mostly unheard 12-minute interview from this key year has spread from Chapel Hill to the Bob Dylan Archive in Tulsa, Okla., to an avid Dylan collector in Australia and others. It was digitized in the fall, both to preserve the information and to make it more accessible.
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The interviewer and donor of the tape is Bebo White, a 1967 UNC graduate who is now a distinguished California academic. He appears in the 1965 photo as a fresh-faced student in a coat and tie, smiling next to the distinctively cool Dylan and Baez. It’s a sort of visual allegory for the 1960s’ counter-cultural fracture of America.

Read the Complete Article (about 2900 words +images]
Note: The recording is not available online at this time but can be heard at the Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library in Chapel Hill. 
Direct to Southern Folklife Collection Website
Direct to UNC Digital Collections
Direct to University of North Carolina Libraries Releases Rare Archival Recording of Doc Watson on CD and LP

Filed under: Archives and Special Collections, Digital Collections, Interactive Tools, Interviews, Libraries, News, Profiles