FEATURE | IZZY YOUNG
BACK IN THE DAY IZZY YOUNG
by Iain Patience
Images: Jan Venning
acknowledges in his memoir, Chronicle. But Israel Goodman Young was more than just a part of Dylan’s historic rise; he set David Bromberg on the road to solo fame, and encouraged countless others along the way, including Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Rory Block, Happy Traum, John Sebastian, Joni Mitchell, Dave Van Ronk, Tim Buckley, Tom Paxton, Rev Gary Davis, Stefan Grossman, and almost everyone of note in the exploding early ’60s New York music scene. This was a man with an ear for great music.
Izzy Young was one of those guys, as I joked with him a few years ago, a central pillar, part of the US New YorkJewish music mafia: fortunately he laughed at the thought. The man who gave his life to folk and roots music, finally passed his last go-round, aged 90, in Stockholm, Sweden, where he’d been resident for around 40 years, since leaving New York in the early 1970s. Widely recognized as the man who gave an ambitious young Bob Dylan his first professional gig in New York in 1961, he remained a close friend of Dylan’s through the decades, as Dylan 26
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David Bromberg once told me that it was Izzy who first gave him the confidence to strike out on a solo musician career following a gig, a move that was to change the guy’s life profoundly. His Folklore Center on Greenwich Village’s legendary MacDougall Street (number 58) was the place to go for all of those itinerant and hopeful musicians back in the day. And Izzy took them all to his heart. His voice was always full-tilt, with opinions flying fast and furious at all times. He was a true music legend who never played an instrument himself, a rare achievement indeed. When I last sat down and chatted with him at
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