Free Republic

A poem supposedly written by Bob Dylan as a teenager is an old country song, it emerged yesterday. The bombshell came just 24 hours after the original handwritten version of Little Buddy was put up for auction by Christie's. It had been touted as an example of Dylan's "brilliance even as a 16-yearold". But, as a country fan pointed out, most of the words were from a song by Canadian Hank Snow. It was recorded in 1948 - 11 years before Dylan submitted his poem to a Jewish summer camp newspaper in Wisconsin. Christie's is pressing on with the auction...

A "poem" purportedly written by a teenage Bob Dylan and up for auction at Christie's is actually a song written by the late Canadian country singer Hank Snow, the auction house said on Wednesday. Christie's announced on Tuesday the sale of the hand-written poem believed to have been written in 1957 when Dylan was 16 and away at Jewish camp. But Christie's failed to detect that the words, with a few minor variations, matched those of a song previously recorded by Snow, who died in 1999 at age 85.