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In 1963, Bob Dylan released “Girl From the North Country” on his second studio album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, and decades later, the song became the title of a Broadway musical. Girl From the North Country, which playwright Conor McPherson wrote, features songs from Dylan’s catalog of music. When Dylan saw the musical, he did so as an anonymous spectator. He said he sat in the audience and cried when the curtain fell.

A black and white picture of Bob Dylan standing in front of a window.
Bob Dylan | Express Newspapers/Getty Images

The singer recorded ‘Girl From the North Country’ in 1963

In 1963, Dylan released “Girl From the North Country” on his second album. It has long been speculated that the song could be about three important women in Dylan’s life, his girlfriends Echo Helstrom, Bonnie Beecher, or Suze Rotolo, who he was dating when he wrote the song. 

Helstrom, a high school girlfriend of Dylan, believed the song was about both herself and Beecher.

“I think it’s about both of us. I think he [told] us both that it’s our song. That’s just Bob,” Helstrom said in the book Down the Highway by Howards Sounes. “I believe it’s about both of us combined, but he [told] each of us that it’s about us individually.”

Bob Dylan cried at the end of the musical

Decades after Dylan released the song, McPherson included it and 19 other Dylan songs in Girl From the North Country. Per the musical’s official website, McPherson includes songs such as “‘Hurricane,’ ‘I Want You,’ ‘Slow Train Coming,’ ‘Forever Young’ and ‘Like A Rolling Stone‘ as they’ve never been heard before. This spiritually uplifting and beautiful story is set in Duluth, MN, in 1934, when a group of wanderers’ lives intersect at a house full of music, life and hope weaving through a story the Chicago Tribune declares is ‘Nothing less than a Broadway Revelation.'”

The musical received rave reviews, including one from Dylan himself. Famously private, Dylan opted to view it as just any other audience member. He said he found it deeply moving.

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“Sure, I’ve seen it and it affected me,” he told The New York Times in 2020. “I saw it as an anonymous spectator, not as someone who had anything to do with it. I just let it happen. The play had me crying at the end. I can’t even say why. When the curtain came down, I was stunned. I really was. Too bad Broadway shut down because I wanted to see it again.”

Broadway has since reopened after the coronavirus (COVID-19) shutdown, but it’s not clear if Dylan made it back to see the musical before its final show.

There is another musical that features Bob Dylan’s music

Girl From the North Country is the second musical to use Dylan’s songs. In 2006, dancer and author Twyla Tharp brought them to Broadway in The Times They Are A-Changing. Critics did not review the musical favorably.

“But if the choreography at times defies gravity, the show itself may be the most earthbound work Ms. Tharp has produced,” New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley wrote. “Even as the dancers seem to fly, Mr. Dylan’s lyrics are hammered, one by one, into the ground.”

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