In the spring of 1961 I was in my senior year at Columbia University, living in an apartment on Morningside Drive. On what I recall as a chilly gray Sunday, my friend Johnson came by; John Lee Hooker was playing at Gerde's, and did I want to go down to the Village to hear him? I did.

I had won the apartment for a couple of months in a poker game with the tenant, Mike Conant. (Or as he archly introduced himself, "Michael Bradford Conant, of the Boston Bradfords and the Boston Conants.") Conant at that time had a regular gig on weekend afternoons. He was hired to sit at a table near the front door of Cafe Bizarre. Since he was a gangly redhead with a scraggly beard, and wore a beret, the management paid him in drinks and meals so that tourists, looking in, would see that the place was an authentic Beatnik hangout.

At Gerde's, we got beers at the bar and went into the adjacent performace space. The warmup act was on, a ratty kid named Bob Dylan playing a guitar with a harmonica on a wire frame around his neck, and singing from the canon of familiar folk songs. His amplified playing and raspy singing interfered with our conversation, and his performance offered nothing special, so we adjourned to the bar to wait for the featured performer.

Consider this kid taking the name "Dylan." At that time, Dylan Thomas was famous throughout the English-speaking world, as a great poet, writer and performer (his recorded reading of "A Child's Christmas in Wales" was iconic) and also as a drunken boor. In the early '50s he had toured the U.S. giving readings and offense; he died miserably at the Chelsea Hotel, a few blocks north of the Village, in 1953.

For Bobby Zimmerman, a Jewish kid from Hibbing, Minnesota, to take the name Dylan seemed oddly over-reaching--identifying with a great poet (and difficult human being) by taking his name. That Bob Dylan within a few years emerged as a great poet (and remains a difficult man) shows foreknowledge or aspiration in a way that was not visible when he was 19.

It seems possible that the Coens, in naming their protagonist Llewyn, are making a reference that cuts both ways--Davis may be intended as authentically Welsh, in contrast to Bob Dylan. And authenticity was one of the central issues in the folk scene of the time.

The friend, Johnson, with whom I attended Gerde's that day, was a physics major at Columbia, and, like me, a middle-class white kid from the South Shore of Long Island. He was taking finger-picking blues guitar lessons with Dave Van Ronk at the Gaslight. Johnson had Folkways recordings of our blues heroes: Blind Lemon Jefferson, Mississippi John Hurt, Big Bill Broonzy, Leadbelly--black, Southern and authentic. At Gerde's Folk City, the Gaslight and other clubs we could be close to performers like John Lee Hooker and the formidable Odetta as well as itinerant, less-well-known players coming through. Authenticity in the blues was hopelessly beyond our reach. But at least we could worship the sources and not intermediaries.

Folk music was white--Appalachian--mostly old songs in a long tradition from the fringes of Britain. Songs of loss and death and resentment. Authenticity came from being raised hardscrabble poor in coal mining country and singing with your family, barefoot around the hearth. On the radio the Grand Ole Opry did present some "country" country singers, but on television it was groups like the Kingston Trio who interpreted the tradition--inauthentically, in our view.

And concurrently there was a stream of social protest music in the folk idiom. Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger were our avatars, who had earned authenticity on the picket lines and from ostracism by the dominant culture.

Bob Dylan was one of us, in the spring of 1961, a wannabe aligning himself with the folk tradition. It is a marvel that, within a year he was on his way to establishing his authenticity with his own songs.

(December 9, 2013)

More, for what it's worth, about the name Llewyn: since writing this, I was reminded that the protagonist in "No Country for Old Men" is named Llewelyn. Also, the real-life family on which J.M. Barrie based the Darlings of "Peter Pan" used the surname Llewelyn Davies.

(December 18, 2013)