The Big Issue

VISION MAN

Sixty years ago this September, a New York Times review of a scrawny kid from the American Midwest playing a downtown Manhattan cabaret changed forever the course of popular music. The kid was Bob Dylan and the critic was the late Robert Shelton who, in 1959, had witnessed the

Hewport Folk Festival debut of Joan Baez, rhapsodising about her “achingly pure soprano”. Shelton would write about many more debut performances, including José Feliciano, Joni Mitchell, Janis Joplin and Frank Zappa.

That night at Gerde’s, a few minutes’ walk from Washington Square in the heart of Greenwich Village, Shelton had expected to focus on the headliners, a bluegrass trio named

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