Bob Dylan says he wrote ‘Lay, Lady, Lay’ for Barbra Streisand to sing in uncovered interview: report
Bob Dylan said he wrote the song “Lay, Lady, Lay” for singer Barbra Streisand, according to an unpublished half-century-old interview set to be sold by a Boston auction house.
NBC News reported that Dylan was saying that he wrote the song as a tune for Streisand to sing.
Streisand said in a statement sent to the Daily News that she is “very flattered to find out that Bob Dylan wrote ‘Lay Lady Lay’ for me.”
"What I remember is getting flowers from him with a handwritten note asking me to sing a duet with him, but I just couldn’t imagine it then,” Streisand, 78, said in the statement. “Guess what, Bob, I can imagine doing it now!”
Dylan released the gentle, romantic country song in 1969. The simple tune was long said to have been written for the 1969 Oscar-winning movie “Midnight Cowboy,” according to The Associated Press.
The backstory for the song is just one of the gems illuminated by a trove of interview transcripts from 1971 due to be sold by the RR Auction company. Tony Glover, a blues musician who died last year, conducted the conversations.
Dylan, 79, has occasionally proven an unreliable narrator of his own life, and he sometimes told tall tales to journalists during the peak of his fame in the 1960s.
Interview materials and letters exchanged between Dylan and Glover are set to go up for bidding on Nov. 12.
Dylan also addressed his Jewish identity in his own handwritten annotations of an interview, according to the auction house.
One note, inked in blue marker, updates a passage to say: “A lot of people are under the impression that Jews are just money lenders and merchants. A lot of people think that all Jews are like that. Well they used to be cause that’s all that was open to them. That’s all they were allowed to do.”
With News Wire Services
