Nashville, Tennessee – Draft lyrics for Bob Dylan’s song “Mr.” Tambourine Man” sold for more than half a million dollars as part of a weekend sale of dozens of items belonging to the iconic American singer-songwriter.
Nearly 60 Dylan items were sold through Julien’s Auctions in Nashville, Tennessee, on Saturday – including photos, music sheets, his guitar, pencil drawings and an oil painting by the Nobel Prize winner for literature.
The auction house said the items sold through in-person and online bidding totaled about $1.5 million. Julian said the 50 items, including the songs that fetched the highest sales prices, came from the private collection of the late music journalist Al Aronowitz.
The typed lyrics, which consisted of three drafts of the 1965 song, were written on two sheets of yellow paper, with Dylan’s comments on the third draft.
According to Julian, citing Aronowitz’s 1973 newspaper article, Dylan wrote the original draft of the song in the journalist’s New Jersey home.
Aronowitz’s writing quoted Dylan “sitting in a swirl of chain-lit cigarette smoke at my white Formica breakfast bar with his portable typewriter, his bony, long-nailed fingers tapping out the words”. .
The auction house stated on its website that the third draft, while closer to the final version, still had significant variations from the final song.
Julian said the song appeared as the lead track on the acoustic side of his 1965 “Bringing It All Back Home” album and was the first Dylan composition to reach No. 1 in the United States and the United Kingdom.
Other top-selling items Saturday included a 1968 Dylan-signed oil-on-canvas painting for $260,000 and a custom 1983 Fender guitar he owned and played for $225,000.
Dylan, now 83, is turning heads with the release last month of his film “A Complete Unknown,” which focuses on his rise to stardom in the early 1960s. Dylan is played by Timothée Chalamet, who has worked on the role for many years. Which includes singing and playing guitar.
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