Lot Essay
As a songwriter and performer who has consistently been inspired by "injustice", Dylan has often displayed a sympathy with those held in prisons and other institutions. His epic protest song Hurricane is the most famous example of this trait in his work. In the early sixties, he composed a song entitled Walls Of Red Wing about a boys' reformatory. Dylan biographer, Clinton Heylin also speculates: According to a psychiatrist who was there at the time, the young [Dylan] spent some time at what has been described as a 'country club reform school' in Pennsylvania in the late fifties...It is not known how long [Dylan] was in Pennsylvania, but it seems likely that he drew upon the experience when writing about the somewhat stricter regime of a reform school in the 1963 composition 'Walls Of Red Wing'... Whether or not the poem in this lot has any autobiographical significance, its message reflects common themes in Dylan's early work: the corrupting influence of money, and the different treatment meted out by the law to rich and poor.