Eric von Schmidt
| Eric Von Schmidt | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Background information | |
| Born | May 28, 1931 Bridgeport, Connecticut, USA |
| Died | February 2, 2007 (age 75) Fairfield, Connecticut, USA |
| Genres | Folk, Blues |
| Occupation(s) | Singer-Songwriter, Painter |
| Instruments | Guitar, Vocals |
| Labels | Folkways, Folklore, Prestige, Smash, Poppy, Philo, Gazell, Tomato |
| Associated acts | Rolf Cahn, Richard Fariña, Geoff Muldaur, Tom Rush |
Eric Von Schmidt (May 28, 1931 – February 2, 2007) was an American singer and guitarist, songwriter, painter and illustrator, and Grammy Award recipient. He was associated with the folk boom of the late 1950s and early 1960s and a key part of the Cambridge folk music scene. As a singer and guitarist, he was considered to be the leading Cambridge specialist in country blues at the time, thus the Cambridge analogue of Greenwich Village's Dave Van Ronk. Von Schmidt co-authored with Jim Rooney Baby, Let Me Follow You Down: The Illustrated Story of the Cambridge Folk Years.
Von Schmidt's father, Harold von Schmidt, was a Western painter who did illustrations for the Saturday Evening Post. Von Schmidt began selling his own artwork while he was still a teenager. Following a stint in the army, he won a Fulbright scholarship to study art in Florence. He moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1957, where he painted and became part of the coffeehouse scene.
Von Schmidt shared his large repertory of traditional music, passing them along to new performers who were developing a more modern version of folk music. He influenced Tom Rush, with whom he revived and arranged the traditional song "Wasn’t That a Mighty Storm?" about the 1900 hurricane that destroyed Galveston, Texas. When he met Dylan, the two traded harmonica licks, drank red wine and played croquet. Dylan eagerly absorbed von Schmidt's voluminous knowledge of music, including folk, country and the blues. "I sang [Dylan] a bunch of songs, and, with that spongelike mind of his, he remembered almost all of them when he got back to New York," von Schmidt said in The Boston Globe.
Von Schmidt is widely (and erroneously) credited as the author of the song, "Baby, Let Me Follow You Down", which was for years a staple of Dylan's musical catalogue. In a spoken introduction to the song on his 1962 self-titled debut album, Dylan jokingly mentioned that he first "heard" the song from "Rick von Schmidt" and told of meeting him "in the green pastures of Harvard University." In fact, von Schmidt had adapted the song from Blind Boy Fuller and credited Reverend Gary Davis as author of "three-quarters" of the song. His 1979 book about the Cambridge scene is titled after the song.
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