This Day in Pop Music History (1st Dylan Album: ‘Hammond’s Folly‘)

March 19, 1962—The first album by a folk singer-songwriter from Minnesota, released on this date, gave virtually no inkling that he would become part of the bedrock of his label, let alone part of the great legacy of the talent scout who signed him. Not only did Bob Dylan compose only two of the 13 tracks on his self-titled LP, but the record’s abysmal sales—less than 5,000 copies in its first year—seemed to justify the naysayers who questioned what John Hammond heard in the nasal voice of the scrawny 20-year-old in his office.

A half-century later, with Dylan having helped recoup the original investment of Columbia Records many times over, it’s easy to see why Hammond—who had discovered such jazz greats as Billie Holiday, Teddy Wilson, Benny Goodman, Count Basie, and Lionel Hampton, among many others—wanted to sign Dylan. “You’re a talented young man,” Dylan remembered Hammond’s conversation 40 years afterward. “If you can focus and control that talent, you’ll be fine.”

Already, Dylan was showing the same insouciant disregard for convention that would lead him to cross genres repeatedly over the next couple of decades. (After signing the contract Hammond gave him, he obeyed his new mentor’s request that he visit a studio publicist, then fed the flack a lot of biographical hooey: “I hated these kind of questions,” Dylan wrote in his memoir, Chronicles: Volume I. “Felt I could ignore them.”) But even he sensed the immensity of what Hammond had done for him:

“Columbia was one of the first and foremost labels in the country and for me to even get my foot in the door was serious. For starters, folk music was considered junky, second rate and only released on small labels. Big-time record companies were strictly for the elite, for music that was sanitized and pasteurized. Someone like myself would never be allowed in except under extraordinary circumstances. But John was an extraordinary man. He didn’t make schoolboy records or record schoolboy artists. He had vision and foresight, had seen and heard me, felt my thoughts and had faith in the things to come.”

Hammond would need that faith, and then some. When other Columbia execs heard the album—recorded by Hammond himself for only $400—they put up such a stink that they ended up delaying its release till four months after it was originally taped. Hammond hadn’t been able to hold onto Joan Baez, they sneered, and now he had signed this? No obvious singles sprang out at David Kapralik, Hammond’s boss.

Eventually, Hammond appealed to CBS president Goddard Lieberson to get the album released. Lieberson agreed, but his support didn’t make much of a difference in the album’s sales, anyway: With just about no advertising or promotion, the LP was virtually dead on arrival.

Several years later, Dylan would sing that “Tomorrow is a Long Time,” but it came to him rather swiftly later that year. Within a month after the release of Dylan’s album, another folksinger, Gil Turner, would perform a new song by his friend at Gerde’s Folk City, and that summer Dylan would record it himself for his next LP. A year later, Peter, Paul and Mary’s cover version of “Blowin’ in the Wind” made him, whether he liked it or not, the voice of the younger generation. Except for a couple of years in the Seventies, he has remained at Columbia Records ever since.

As for Hammond, having survived tough in-fighting at the label, he went on to sign other non-jazz musicians who would only further burnish his reputation as an uncanny judge of talent, including Stevie Ray Vaughn, Aretha Franklin and a twentysomething singer-songwriter from New Jersey that many hailed as the “New Dylan,” Bruce Springsteen. A year before his death in 1987, Hammond was inducted into the Rock 'n' Roll Fame of Fame for his contributions to the industry.