In Tulsa, Okla., a former warehouse has been transformed into a repository for 100,000 items from the singer-songwriter’s archives, including manuscripts and notebooks offering a window into the painstaking craft of one of America’s foremost musical artists.
Bob Dylan’s fans have been trying to pin him down since his first album 60 years ago. He has fled from classification — changing styles and personas whenever they tried to put him in a box. So, it’s no surprise that when Dylan played in Tulsa, Oklahoma last month, he didn’t walk the few blocks down the street to visit the largest effort ever to classify his career: the Bob Dylan Center. The former paper warehouse now holds 100,000 items from the artist’s long-rumored archives. Steven Jenkins, the center’s director, showed CBS News’ John Dickerson some of the items on display, from Dylan’s letter to Jimi Hendrix about Hendrix’s remarkable cover version of “All Along the Watchtower,” to the actual tambourine that inspired the song “Mr. Tambourine Man.” The University of Tulsa and local billionaire George Kaiser bought the archive in 2016 for an estimated $20 million, partly in the hope of drawing tourism to the area. The center is a tour through the history of American popular music that grew out of the hootenannies Dylan joined in Greenwich Village apartments. In 1962, Mell and Lilian Bailey were smart enough to turn on the tape recorder in their living room, recording Dylan singing, “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” One exhibit addresses Dylan’s famous decision to play electric guitar at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, which caused such an uproar that folk legend Pete Seeger was rumored to have called for an axe to cut Dylan’s cables.
