New Morning by Bob Dylan

I stumbled across this in a secondhand record shop and was intrigued by the back cover. It showed a clearly much younger Dylan than the age of the album (released in 1970) standing next to someone he looked very proud to be photographed with. It was not a Dylan album that I was particularly familiar with, really only knowing "If Not For You" and "Time Passes Slowly", both of which feature on the excellent compilation Biograph, the former also covered by George Harrison on All Things Must Pass. 

It is easy to forget those we revere today also revered their predecessors. None more so than Bob Dylan, who had already been pictured on an earlier album, Bringing It All Back Home, brandishing, among other albums, a copy of Robert Johnson's King of the Delta Blues Singers. His adoration of Woody Guthrie, and his pilgramage to see him on his deathbed, is of course well documented.

Ed Ward's 1970 Rolling Stone review of New Morning sheds more light on the origin of the 1962 photo: 

"To begin with, there's the cover. Dylan, looking like he's been through some rocky times, but confident. And the back cover, with Young Zimmerman and Victoria Spivey, self-appointed "Queen of the Blues," standing by her piano. He's holding a guitar that Big Joe Williams had just given him, and she is beaming up at him, immensely pleased. The look on his face seems to say, "I thought I could do it, and I could. Shit, man, I'm Bob Dylan, that's who I am." And indeed, that's who he was. And is."

The man who took the photo of the young Bob Dylan with Victoria Spivey was Len Kunstadt, Victoria's husband and manager.

In a 2001 interview with Rolling Stone Dylan himself reinforces the point:

Rolling Stone: It seems that some of your most impassioned and affecting performances, from night to night, are your covers of traditional folk songs.

Dylan: Folk music is where it all starts and in many ways ends. If you don't have that foundation, or if you're not knowledgeable about it and you don't know how to control that, and you don't feel historically tied to it, then what you're doing is not going to be as strong as it could be. Of course, it helps to have been born in a certain era because it would've been closer to you, or it helps to be a part of the culture when it was happening. It's not the same thing, relating to something second- or third-hand off of a record.

I think one of the best records that I've ever been even a part of was the record I made with Big Joe Williams and Victoria Spivey. Now that's a record that I hear from time to time and I don't mind listening to it. It amazes me that I was there and had done that.