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Fresh from the "Press Association:
Bob Dylan poem based on Snow song?

58 minutes ago

The Bob Dylan poem which is up for auction was apparently based on an existing country song.

Little Buddy, estimated to fetch 10,000 to 15,000 US dollars once it goes on sale at Christie's in New York on June 23, was "a revised version of lyrics of a Hank Snow song," the auction house said.

Fans of the late Canadian country singer "came out of the woodwork" to say they recognised the lyrics, said Christie's pop culture specialist Simeon Lipman.
(http://www.google.com/hostednews/ukpres ... 8CUJ7Mqnbw)

They're certainly careful
And there's the woodwork again. Still feelin' ok there, stephen?

I wonder if he is the person who misspelled "Eddie Murphy" as "Eddie Murphey" in the description of another lot in the same auction: http://www.christies.com/LotFinder/lot_ ... d0f0de6396

Failing to properly vet the Dylan poem is one thing, but this slight against Murphy is the true outrage. I might have to switch to Sotheby's.

It's very nice here in the woodwork!! Try me!!

Hmmm, let's see...this poem has been in existance for um,,how many years??? 67-16= 51 years!!!! Wow! I'm not shocked that anyone couldn't have figured out that it was a knock off of another's work, I mean, who has the time to research such things????

LMAO

This is too funny

I received a nice little note from the Reuters people

Dear ***** [I'm disguising my real name for fear of retribution by you-know-who!! ]

Many thanks for alerting us to the "Little Buddy" oversight. Because of your vigilance, we were able to set the record straight.

Daniel Trotta
Correspondent

Reuters News

O +1 646 223 6143
M +1 646 483 9604
thomsonreuters.com

Hey, look Mr Knight...
http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/music/a1566 ... -song.html

Yes, and that they are still planning to auction it as "hand-written lyrics", and a photo caption notes "Bob Dylan's poem is apparently based on a Hank Snow song".

Over at DylanRadio.com, this was posted this morning:
edie: @ 11:37am
I have the scoop: The camp newspaper asked for submissions of original or favorite poems, jokes and such. Bobby forgot to write "Submitted by..."


Now that does make sense and maybe let's little Bobby off the hook just a bit.....

This time.

Just to add to the mix, I've done a follow-up article on the Hank Snow/Bobby Zimmerman connection over at Dreamtime, which may be of interest to some...

http://www.dreamtimepodcast.com/2009/05 ... sited.html

Thanks to "Johanna Moore" and "The Great Wandu" for bringing "the Drunkard's Son" to my attention.

Just wait until we find out that "Mr Tambourine Man" was actually a country music song from 1955 that only had a few pressings.

"Mr. Tambourine Man" was composed by playing The Beatles' "Penny Lane" backwards and transcribing the result phonetically.

It's up to the auction house to do their due diligence in authenticating an item. They woulda been in a heap of trouble if the auctioned of the item as it was originally described. Fans should not have to alert an auction house that something is not as it seems. Oh, and I predict that this item won't realize the hammer price that is estimated now that the cat's out of the bag.

Full marks stephenoxford .. !!

Just out of curiousity, how exactly did you discover this?

Did you simply Google a couple of the lines? Or were you familiar with the work in question?

Just wondering.

great work er...btw...i want to buy that poem

i want to buy that poem

Sadly, when my old friend Bonzo went to the kennel in the sky in 1996, a friend made me up a tape of doggy dying songs, Old Shep, Ralph McTell's Old Brown Dog, Mr Bojangles &c and this was on it!

Good one Stephenoxford, sorry bout' Bonzo, btw, thank god for Bonzo otherwise we would not have found out the real story behind the poem. Well bob never had a dog when he was a teenager...he must have loved that song though, he may have imagined little buddy may have been his dog. Also he did change some of the lyrics a first there, made them good ones at that. You can see he was left handed by the left slant in his writing style. The first hand written piece ever for sale, lucky camp hazel wants to let it go. We see the first ever Bob Zimmerman signature, what a treasure, so many firsts. We know that there are many poems Beatrice kept and have been passed on to the family. But they shall never be available to us, well not in our life time I guess. We have seen Toby Thompson’s inclusion of some of bob writings at that age to echo. We then got Robert Shelton’s no direction home biography on bob with some pieces Beatrice let him copy for his book, (poems to his mum and dad). That’s all we have to my knowledge. Little buddy is a very important piece. I want to buy it!

The auction of the "Little Buddy" transcript was held today at Christie's. The transcript was sold for $12,500, including buyer's premium, slightly above Christie's low-end estimate made when they were still claiming it as a Dylan original.

Thanks for the update, Fred. I'm not surprised.

Why wouldn't a sheet of paper Bob wrote to a laundry asking for "no starch in the shirts" not be worth a cool $10K then? Or actually, sione it would be "original" material, $15K minimum.

Perhaps this can be Bob's retirement plan. he can sit on a beach in Florida and copy out the lyrics from Wilco CD booklets.