CityReads│Bob Dylan Once Wrote a Protest Song with Jane Jacobs

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Bob Dylan Once Wrote a Protest Song with Jane Jacobs

Boy Dylan, Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses once crossed path.

Andreas Georgoulias and Ali Khawaja, 2010. Lower Manhattan Expressway,，

Anthony Flint, 2011. Wrestling with Moses: how Jane Jacobs took on New York's master builder and transformed the American city, Random House.

Lisa Krissoff Boehm, Steven Hunt Corey,2014. America's Urban History, Routledge.

Sources:

http://gothamist.com/2016/05/01/confirmed_bob_dylan_did_co-write_a.php

Jane Jacobs is widely credited with saving Manhattan’s Greenwich Village from destruction by a planned urban expressway in the 1960s. Jacobs spent years fighting highway-loving New York City urban planner Robert Moses. Their conflict is considered one of the great victories in urban design history.

Now it appears that Bob Dylan played a role in it, penning a protest song against Moses with Jacobs. It’s been revealed only recently when a sheet of lyrics popped up on the internet.

A sheet of lyrics for“Listen, Robert Moses”

On June 24, 2015, Tumblr user Belcimer posted a possible sheet of lyrics for “Listen, Robert Moses”, by Bob Dylan ca. 1963. Seemingly written and distributed for anti-Lower Manhattan Expressway protest. This copy of the lyrics comes from the Tuli Kupferberg collection of the Fales Library of NYU. The song appears to be lost. The author of these lyrics cannot be determined. 

Sources:

But experts and Dylanologists were incredibly skeptical about the material, the New York Public Library had no record of any recording of the song.

Is it real or hoax? A reporter from Gothamist did some follow-up research.

References in books

As indicated in a Harvard Graduate School of Design essay on the fight between Jacobs and Moses over The Lower Manhattan Expressway (LOMEX), “Bob Dylan wrote a song against it (LOMEX) ”.

Lisa Krissoff Boehm and Steven Hunt Corey wrote in their book, America's Urban History, "Popular singer-songwriter Bob Dylan even crafted a song about the anti-highway movement". 

Anthony Flint in “Wrestling With Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took on New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City” writes: “Bob Dylan - not yet the celebrity he would soon become, somewhere between the albums containing the songs ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ and the ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’ - wrote protest song about the Lower Manhattan Expressway, listing the melodic street names in the area - Delancey, Broome, Mulberry - and provided it to the anti-highway campaigners to sing at future demonstrations.”

Interview confirms

An interview with Jacobs' son Jim in April 2016 has confirmed the authenticity of the document. Jim has helped mount Jane at Home, an exhibition in Toronto about the urban activist encompassing her Pennsylvania childhood, her activist days in New York, and decades-long life in Toronto. In an interview with Globe 2 Go, he confirmed that Jacobs did approach Dylan to pen the tune to fight LOMAX—and he also claims she helped teach him how to write protest songs.

At that time, Moses was locked in a battle for the soul of Washington Square Park with Jane Jacobs at that time. Jacobs, who had just written her landmark book The Death and Life Of Great American Cities, formed the Joint Committee to Stop the Lower Manhattan Expressway to prevent the West Village from being bulldozed and redeveloped in order to relieve car congestion.

“Actually, Jane and Bob Dylan wrote a song together. Jane needed a protest song for the fight against the Lower Manhattan Expressway in New York. A friend of ours, Harry Jackson, an artist, had a folk singer sleeping on his floor. He sent Dylan around to the house. Jane helped him, telling him how a protest song was structured and how it worked. I think it was the first protest song he ever wrote.”

“Nobody recorded it. The song was Listen, Robert Moses. A copy of the lyrics has surfaced on the Internet recently. It’s not the world’s greatest song. But it’s an interesting piece.”

So that's one mystery solved. Bob Dylan did write a protest song with Jane Jacobs.

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