I'm delighted to be able to announce that the University of Minnesota has acquired my papers and other material created from the late 1960s through to the late 2000s in the researching and writing of every edition of Song & Dance Man : The Art of Bob Dylan and of The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia.
The material, to be known as Michael Gray's Bob Dylan Papers, is to be held in the Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts, Upper Midwest Literary Archives, Elmer L. Andersen Library, University of Minnesota Libraries.
The institution's own announcement, to be made this weekend in the online version of the library's journal Continuum (paper copies next week), says this:
Michael Gray, a leading authority on the work of Bob Dylan, has donated his papers related to the development of his two landmark works, Song and Dance Man: The Art of Bob Dylan (1972) and The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia (2006). The collection includes all research materials, drafts of the books, publication materials, posters and flyers, and criticism, as well as other writings through multiple editions and reprintings of each work. Also included is correspondence with close associates of Dylan, including Naomi Saltzman, who was in charge of Dylan’s New York office in the early 1970s; Robert Shelton, the New York Times folk music critic who gave Dylan his first review; musician Al Kooper, who played the organ on ‘Like A Rolling Stone’; and Suze Rotolo, Dylan’s first girlfriend in New York City, who appears with him on the front cover of his second album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.
They hope to have it all ready for public access in the autumn.
I am, of course, highly gratified by the fact of this acquisition, and by the knowledge that these papers will be both safe and accessible for a very long time into the future. And I'm especially happy that they're to be kept in as appropriate a place as Bob Dylan's home state of Minnesota. They've found a direction home.
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