When First Unto This Country: Bob Dylan and the Little Sandy Review
Video from the third World of Bob Dylan conference in Tulsa, July 25, 2025
On July 25, between 9 and 10 PM, to close that day’s sessions of the third World of Bob Dylan conference in Tulsa, sponsored by the Institute of Bob Dylan Studies at the University of Tulsa, under the direction of Sean Latham, along Steven Jenkins, the director of the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, I took part in a presentation called “When First Unto This Country: Bob Dylan and the Little Sandy Review,” about the folk music magazine published in Minneapolis from 1959 to 1965 by Paul Nelson and Jon Pankake and the music it championed and inspired, playing and talking about different versions of the traditional ballad “When First Unto This Country”—by the Gant Family Singers in 1934, Mike Seeger with the New Lost City Ramblers in 1960, and Bob Dylan in 1989—and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”—by Pete Seeger in 1963, Bob Dylan in 1962, and Bryan Ferry in 2007. It was fun. Video by Jenny Marcus.
I looked in the biographical portion of Kevin Avery's Everything Is An Afterthought. Avery writes that Mark Nelson, Paul's son, spoke at his father's New York memorial service, collected his cremains when they were released by the medical examiner, and attended their burial in the Nelson family plot in Warren, Minnesota.
He also describes how when Mark and Michael Seidenberg went with the police to Paul's apartment after his death, Mark found his "red toddler shoes" next to a copy of Tom Nolan's biography of Ross Macdonald.
I wish I had some copies of the Sandy Review. I don't think Paul Nelson had any copies either. I was a friend of his in his last years and knew that he sold much of his stuff to pay for his mother's cancer treatments. Miss him very much.