A key figure in the American folk revival of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Eric von Schmidt was an early mentor to Bob Dylan, who borrowed his song arrangements and paid generous tribute to his influence. A fine singer and guitarist with a series of notable recordings to his name, in later years he concentrated on painting.
Eric von Schmidt was born into an artistic family in Bridgeport, Connecticut. His father, Harold, an illustrator who depicted the old American West taught him how to paint, but his love of music came from his mother, Forest Gilmore. He bought his first guitar when he was 17 after hearing Leadbelly sing on the radio and he began researching the archival recordings of blues and folk singers made by collectors such as John and Alan Lomax on visits to the Library of Congress in Washington D.C.
In 1952 he was drafted into the US Army to serve in the Korean War and on his discharge returned to art school, receiving a Fulbright scholarship to study painting in Italy in 1956.
After returning to America, he taught art in Florida briefly but his bohemian instincts soon took him in a different direction. Inspired by reading Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, he had begun experimenting with the hallucinogenic properties of peyote and in 1957 he moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he immersed himself in the burgeoning folk and beatnik scene, whose luminaries included Joan Baez and Tom Rush.
He made his first recordings with Rolf Cahn for the Folkways label in 1961, and by the time the 20-year-old Dylan visited Cambridge in the summer of that year, von Schmidt, ten years his senior, was considered an éminence grise of the folk revival. Dylan slept on his couch, listened to him play and copied several of his arrangements of traditional folk and blues songs.
Dylan credited his sources: when he recorded Baby Let Me Follow You Down on his debut album a few months later, he prefaced it with a spoken introduction in which he declared: “I first heard this from Ric von Schmidt. I met him one day in the green pastures of Harvard University.”
Two years later Dylan (billed as Blind Boy Grunt) contributed backing vocals and harmonica to an album recorded in London by von Schmidt and the folk singer Dick Farina. Later in 1963 he released his best-known album, The Folk Blues of Eric von Schmidt, which impressed Dylan enough to include the record among the LPs scattered around the room on the cover of Bringing It All Back Home (1965). A further nod to his influence came when the photo on the front of Dylan’s Nashville Skyline (1969) featured him in a pose that echoed the cover of von Schmidt’s 1963 album. A more direct tribute came when Dylan wrote the liner notes to von Schmidt’s 1969 album, Who Knocks the Brains Out of the Sky?
“He could sing the bird off the wire and the rubber off the tire,” Dylan wrote of his friend. “He can separate the men from the boys and the note from the noise. The bridle from the saddle and the cow from the cattle. He can play the tune of the moon. The why of the sky and the commotion of the ocean.”
Von Schmidt continued to make occasional albums but after returning to Connecticut to live in Westport, in the mid1980s he came to regard painting as his main purpose, particularly after illness restricted his ability to play the guitar, and throat cancer made it impossible for him to sing. Among his more notable works were a series of paintings called Giants of the Blues, depicting the likes of Big Bill Broonzy, Leadbelly and Muddy Waters.
He was also a writer and with Jim Rooney in 1979 wrote Baby Let Me Follow You Down: The Illustrated Story of the Cambridge Folk Years.
He was married and divorced twice and is survived by two daughters.
Eric von Schmidt, singer, songwriter and painter, was born on May 28, 1931. He died on February 2, 2007, aged 75
