Bob Dylan Once Proved His Soul Connection to Woody Guthrie by Letting Him Light a Cigarette
When Bob Dylan arrived in New York, one of his first stops was Woody Guthrie’s house. He idolized the folk singer and believed that talking to him would be helpful to his development as an artist. When he arrived, Guthrie’s family wasn’t allowing many visitors, but they could tell that Dylan was sincere in his intentions. They believed Dylan and Guthrie had a soul connection, which Dylan proved by encouraging Guthrie to light a cigarette.
Bob Dylan came to New York to visit Woody Guthrie
In 1961, Dylan knocked on the Guthrie family’s front door, asking to meet the musician. He had traveled from Minnesota and was planning on pursuing a career in music in New York City.
“Like seeing Woody Guthrie was one of the main reasons I came East,” Dylan told The New Yorker in 1964. “He was an idol to me. A couple of years ago, after I’d gotten to know him, I was going through some very bad changes, and I went to see Woody, like I’d go to somebody to confess to.”
At the time, though, Guthrie was spending his weekdays at a psychiatric hospital in New Jersey. He had Huntington’s Disease and only stayed at home on weekends. Though the family typically turned visitors away, they trusted Dylan.
“My mother was very sensitive to people looking at Woody and I think somehow I sensed that she trusted Bob and that he wouldn’t judge my father or be completely blown away by it in a bad way,” Guthrie’s daughter Nora explained, per the book The Ballad of Bob Dylan: A Portrait by Daniel Mark Epstein. “Some people would come expecting to see someone that maybe looked more like Pete Seeger, like a healthy, uplifted folk singer who was … sick. But not as scary. You couldn’t imagine what you were going to witness when you opened the door. And either Bob pretended that he was very composed or he really was more composed than others.”
Woody Guthrie’s family believed Bob Dylan had a spiritual connection with him
Nora believed Dylan had more composure than most because he had a spiritual connection to her father.
“He’s a spiritual homing pigeon. He knew right where to fly and land and nest and sit. I get it!” she said. “And then he went out, and did it.”
She recalled a time when Guthrie was struggling to light a cigarette. Everyone but Dylan scrambled to help him.
“Woody was trying to light a cigarette, and so here’s this guy whose hand is flying all over the place, and he’s holding this lighter, and everyone is saying, ‘Oh! I’ll light it for you,’ and Dylan kind of smacked them all down and said, ‘No he wants to do it himself,'” she said, adding, “And they just let him. And then he did. And he looked at them all with satisfaction, as if to say, You see! I can still light my cigarette! It’s little things like that that make you know that Bob was there for Woody as opposed to being there for himself.”
The younger musician became like a family member
According to Nora, many people knocked on her family’s door, searching for a sense of belonging.
“So people came and went and connected with my family in varying strong, profound ways,” she said. “They would be strangers and then they would come in the door and either my mom or dad would say ‘why don’t you stay awhile’ or they’d say ‘I don’t have anyplace to stay’ and then they’d end up living with us for a year or six months or ten weeks, whatever it was. And so, as children see it, these folks become family because they’re in your house sleeping on the couch and so your emotional impression is they’re family so there’s a lot of people I include in that.”
Dylan was one of the people Nora considered family.
“I include Bob [Dylan] in my sense of family as one of those kids who showed up at our door, because I guess he didn’t feel like he belonged where he was born or even belonged to his name and he needed a place where it was okay — for someone to say, ‘It’s okay, make up your own, be who you are.'”
