Talk:Eric Von Schmidt

In Need Of Significant Rewriting
Von Schmidt was a major if under-appreciated figure in the '50s-'60s folk revival, not simply an adjunct to Zimmerman/Dylan's brief flirtation with folk music. As written, the article is simply more of the kind of Dylan hagiography that permeates Wikipedia and elsewhere. I'll begin a more accurate and comprehensive rewrite in a week or two, with sources, of course. For now - tweaking of the lede. 03:32, 16 June 2011 (UTC)


 * The Biography section is still two-thirds Dylan. That should change. TheScotch (talk) 08:41, 5 August 2016 (UTC)

Lead
This is the current lead (I categorically refuse to write lede). "Eric Von Schmidt (May 28, 1931 – February 2, 2007) was an American folk music singer-songwriter and Grammy Award recipient. He was associated with the folk/blues revival of the 1960s and a key part of the East Coast folk music scene[1] that included Bob Dylan[2] and Joan Baez."

The second footnote takes us to a Von Schmidt website seemingly entirely devoted to art that never mentions Bob Dylan--or if it does, I can't find where. The first footnote takes us to some website where we find this passage: "Eric Von Schmidt was one of the prime movers of the folk music movement in Cambridge in the early '60's. Baez and Dylan, among others, have been indebted to him for material time and again." That seems to me not at all equivalent to the second sentence in the lead. For one thing, Von Schmidt is associated with the Boston/Cambridge scene particularly, not the "East Coast" (why is this capitalized?) music scene. In fact, the Greenwich Village scene and the Boston/Cambridge scene are nearly always depicted as a separate and distinct (although there was a bit of interaction). For another thing, the source does not intend to make Von Schmidt subordinate to Dylan and Baez. For a third thing, the folk revival refers to a movement that began in the 1930's; the folk scene in Cambridge occurred at the tail end of this, during the section of the folk revival called the "folk boom". For a fourth thing, Von Schmidt was a singer and occasionally a songwriter, but he wasn't a singer-songwriter. For a fifth thing, his work in illustration and painting needs to be mentioned in the lead. TheScotch (talk) 09:20, 4 August 2016 (UTC)