RCA Victor LPM 2449 (USA mono) – front scan by Hans Seegers | R-0001M Midnight Special (Huddie Ledbetter “Lead Belly”) – Bob plays harmonica for Harry Belafonte on the title track of his 1962 RCA album (mono version) |
The Midnight Special is a 1962 album by Jamaican-American singer, Harry Belafonte. The album notably contains the first officially-released recording by Bob Dylan, who plays harmonica on the title track.
Harry Belafonte and his producer, Hugo Montenegro, were trying to come up with a slightly different sound for the popular singer… They decided on a hard-driving harmonica, and Dylan was asked to back up Belafonte…
He was ecstatic about the session… But he returned dejected, annoyed, angry. Belafonte is a total professional, a musical perfectionist. He will work on a song, do it again and again… until he has it exactly the way he thinks his record should sound. To Dylan… the perfection Belafonte sought was too much. He stamped back to the Smiths’ [McKenzie’s] place afterward and announced that he had quit after only one song.
Anthony Scaduto, Bob Dylan, London, 1973 (Abacus edition), pp. 86-87.
Harry Belafonte came out of the army and stayed with Hank Pearson, my neighbor upstairs, and Bobby said that one day he would like to be as big as Belafonte — that was his dream, his goal.
You know, though, I never heard how he got the job to play with Harry Belafonte on that record, but, boy, did he complain about it later, about how he had to rehearse and rehearse and rehearse, doing it the same over and over.
“Eve McKenzie Remembers,” The Telegraph 56 (final issue, Winter 1997), pp. 37-38.
Sources
http://bobdylanroots.com/belafont.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight_Special_(Harry_Belafonte_album)
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