Guitarist and painter Eric von Schmidt, a major player in the blues and folk scene in Cambridge, Mass., in the late 1950s and early 1960s who influenced Bob Dylan and others, has died. He was 75.
Von Schmidt, of Westport, died in his sleep Friday at a convalescent home in Fairfield, his daughter, Caitlin von Schmidt, said Saturday. He had battled throat cancer and suffered a stroke last summer, but the cause is undetermined, she said.
His father, Harold von Schmidt, was noted for his illustrations for the Saturday Evening Post. Eric von Schmidt also painted album covers for Joan Baez and other folk musicians.
He met Dylan in the early '60s at his apartment in Harvard Square in Cambridge, where a folk scene developed and featured the likes of Baez and Tom Rush. He told The Boston Globe in an interview in 1996 that he played several songs for Dylan that day.
"With that spongelike mind of his, he remembered almost all of them when he got back to New York,'' von Schmidt told the newspaper.
On Dylan's first album, ``Bob Dylan,'' in 1962, he says at the beginning of ``Baby, Let Me Follow You Down,'' that he first heard the song from von Schmidt and adds that he met von Schmidt in ``the green pastures of the Harvard University.'' The song was based on one recorded by Blind Dog Fuller.
Dylan also wrote liner notes for von Schmidt's 1969 album, ``Who Knocked the Brains Out of the Sky.''
``He could sing the bird off the wire and the rubber off the tire,'' Dylan wrote. ``He can separate the men from the boys and the note from the noise. The bridle from the saddle and the cow from the cattle. He can play the tune of the moon. The why of the sky and the commotion of the ocean.''
In an interview with the Fairfield County Weekly News in 2004, von Schmidt said he began playing guitar when he was 17 and was inspired when he heard bluesman Leadbelly on the radio.
He said he listened to many folk and blues recordings at the Library of Congress, where his father would drop him off during trips to Washington, and went on to learn the stories and music of legends such as Robert Johnson and Woody Guthrie.
He went to Italy in 1955 to study art on a Fulbright scholarship before landing in Cambridge. His first album, ``The Folk Blues of Eric von Schmidt,'' was released in 1963.
He played at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, where Dylan famously angered folk traditionalists by playing the electric guitar.
He and Rush worked together on a new version of ``Wasn't That a Mighty Storm?,'' a traditional song about the hurricane that hit Galveston, Texas, in 1900.
One of his better known songs was ``Joshua Gone Barbados,'' which has been performed by several other artists. The ASCAP Foundation gave him its Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000.
In his later years, von Schmidt turned more to art as cancer affected his voice and he had trouble playing guitar because of Lyme disease. His paintings include a series called ``Giants of the Blues'' and depictions of the ill-fated Gen. George Custer and explorers Lewis and Clark.
Von Schmidt is survived by two daughters, Caitlin of Westport and Megan Richardson of Greenfield, Mass. They are planning a memorial service in late March or early April.
``He'll be missed by a lot of people, and he had a very full and vital life with no regrets,'' Richardson said.
Caitlin von Schmidt added, ``He did what a lot of people can't do, which is pretty much live his life by his own rules. That made it hard on the people involved with him ... but he was a very loving and generous man.''
