Eric Von Schmidt

Eric Von Schmidt was born May 28 1931. He was a folk and blues singer-songwriter of the folk/blues revival of the 1960s, a key part of the East Coast folk scene and crowd that included Bob Dylan

Eric Von Schmidt was born May 28 1931. He was a folk and blues singer-songwriter of the folk/blues revival of the 1960s, a key part of the East Coast folk scene and crowd that included Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. He is a sometimes overlooked musician of the era, as his albums are almost entirely out of print at this time, but his name remains famous, even legendary, within the folk music circuit and the music world generally. He was honored in 2000 with the ASCAP Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award , at an event which featured a reunion of the Jim Kweskin Jug Band including Fritz Richmond.

Von Schmidt is probably most well known by non-musicians for the song Baby, Let Me Follow You Down, which was for years a staple of Dylan's musical catalogue, and for which Dylan's label, Columbia Records, listed Von schmidt as author; however, Von Schmidt says he didn't actually write it . Within the wider musical community, Von Schmidt is well-known, both in the U.S. and abroad, for his contributions to dozens and dozens of albums; see the extensive discography by Stefan Wirz of Germany . He is widely credited, along with Tom Rush, for reviving and arranging the most-widely-performed version of the traditional song Wasn't That A Mighty Storm about the 1900 hurricane that destroyed Galveston, Texas.