Bob Dylan archives open in Oklahoma; public centre planned
TULSA, Okla. — Part of music icon Bob Dylan’s once-secret 6,000-piece archive, including thousands of hours of studio sessions, film reels and caches of unpublished lyrics, has opened in Oklahoma, curators announced this week.
More than 1,000 pieces spanning Dylan’s six-decade career are available to scholars at the Gilcrease Museum’s Helmerich Center for American Research in Tulsa.
The public will get a glimpse of some of the material when the Bob Dylan Center opens in the city’s downtown Brady Arts District in about two years. The centre will, fittingly, occupy another part of a building that houses a museum devoted to Oklahoma-born Woody Guthrie, one of Dylan’s major influences.
The George Kaiser Family Foundation and the University of Tulsa announced last year that the collection had been acquired from Dylan for an estimated $15 million to $20 million. The foundation also snapped up Guthrie’s archives in 2011, paying $3 million. The Woody Guthrie Center opened two years later.