Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks Handwritten Lyrics Sold For $290,404

Bob Dylan’s handwritten working lyrics for two songs from Blood on the Tracks have sold for $290,404 in RR Auction’s Remarkable Rarities sale.

The double-sided sheet contains working lyrics for Idiot Wind on one side and a nearly complete working draft of You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go on the reverse. Dylan wrote the latter under its working title You’re Gonna Make Me Miss You When You Go. The manuscript includes revisions, discarded passages and an additional verse absent from the released recording.

The archive also includes a two-sided handwritten transcription of You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go by Ellen Ziffren who was known to Dylan in 1974 as Ellen Bernstein. Ziffren said she made the copy the day Dylan first played the song for her, writing in blue ballpoint on a 3-by-5-inch leaf torn from one of Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks notebooks.

“Blood on the Tracks stands among the defining albums of Dylan’s career, and here you can see two of its songs still taking shape,” said Bobby Livingston, executive vice president at RR Auction. “The revisions and discarded passages are right there on the page, along with Ellen’s firsthand history of the period and how the material was preserved.”

Ziffren was 24 and serving as Columbia Records’ director of West Coast A&R in San Francisco when she met Dylan in early 1974. She later spent time at his Minnesota farm as he composed and revised songs for Blood on the Tracks and was present during the New York recording sessions. She recently rediscovered the manuscript while clearing out a storage space.

Two additional works from Ziffren’s collection also sold. Dylan’s Blues in E (for Ellen), a drawing of Ziffren with a handwritten lyric fragment and revisions, sold for $7,563. A collaborative drawing made by Dylan and Ziffren during downtime at the Blood on the Tracks recording sessions at A&R Studios in New York sold for $2,756.

Other auction highlights included:

• an Edgar Allan Poe autograph letter postponing publication of his planned journal because of his illness, sold for $206,266
• Abraham Lincoln signed carte-de-visite portrait donated to benefit a Union soldiers’ aid society in 1864 ($149,020)
• Abigail Adams autograph letter reflecting on her youth ($94,660)
• Declaration of Independence printing from W. J. Stone’s copperplate, circa 1833 ($73,761)