QUINN THE ESKIMO (THE MIGHTY QUINN)
“Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)” is a folk-rock song written by Bob Dylan and first recorded during The Basement Tapes sessions in 1967. The song was first released in January 1968 as “Mighty Quinn” by the British band Manfred Mann and became a great success. It has been recorded by a number of performers, often under the “Mighty Quinn” title. The subject of the song is the arrival of the mighty Quinn (an Eskimo), who changes despair into joy and chaos into rest, and attracts attention from the animals. Dylan is widely believed to have derived the title character from actor Anthony Quinn’s role as an Eskimo in the 1960 movie The Savage Innocents. (More from Wikipedia)
A few of the songs on Great White Wonder I knew already; alternate takes of “Man of Constant Sorrow” and “See that My Grave Is Kept Clean” (which both appear on Bob Dylan’s first album, Bob Dylan) are included, and “Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)” I knew as a single, “Mighty Quinn” by Manfred Mann, released in early 1968. Another song on the album, “If You Gotta Go, Go Now” was also a single for Manfred Mann (“If You Gotta Go, Go Now”) and was a hit in England, though I am not sure I had heard it before. But that’s it.
Great White Wonder opened up a whole world for me. To me, many of these songs are now as familiar and as solidly in the Bob Dylan canon as anything that I have heard on the Columbia Records studio albums released in the 1960’s, “The Death of Emmett Till” (a great old-school protest song), “Only a Hobo” (my favorite song on Great White Wonder and one of the earliest songs by anyone about the plight of the homeless), “Black Cross”, “Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)”, “If You Gotta Go, Go Now (Or Else You Got to Stay All Night)”, “Poor Lazarus”, “Baby, Please Don’t Go”, “I Shall Be Released”, “Open the Door, Homer”, “This Wheel’s on Fire”, “I Ain't Got No Home”, and “(As I Go) Ramblin’ ’Round” (the last two being Woody Guthrie songs) among them.
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Finally, I dare say that anyone buying The Basement Tapes would have expected, at a minimum, to hear those seven basement-tape songs from Great White Wonder; but the album came up short in that regard also. Only five of them are on The Basement Tapes, amazingly; “Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)” and “I Shall Be Released” are omitted from the 1975 album. To be sure, they both had previously been included in the 1971 Bob Dylan retrospective album, Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, Vol. II.
(September 2017)
