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Folklore Center Proprietor and Concert Producer
Birth date: March 26, 1928
 Young was an old-line folk enthusiast, very sardonic, and wore heavy horn-rimmed glasses, spoke in a thick Brooklyn dialect, wore wool slacks, skinny belt and work boots, tie at a careless slant. His voice was like a bulldozer and always seemed too loud for the little room. Izzy was always a little rattled over something or other. He was sloppily good natured. In reality, a romantic. To him, folk music glittered like a mound of gold. It did for me, too.
-- from CHRONICLES
Bob Dylan loved hanging out in the Folklore Center in Greenwich Village, Izzy Young's small walk-up store, information center, and meeting place that was the hub of everything that was going on in the local scene in the early days of the urban folk revival. In CHRONICLES, Dylan says, "It was like an ancient chapel, like a shoebox sized institute." Izzy Young let Dylan listen to obscure folk records in the back room, and he also interviewed him extensively for his journals. Dylan sometimes answered Young in "plain talk," but sometimes fed him the same line of baloney about his imaginary colorful past that he was telling others around the same time. Young was an important early supporter of Dylan's, and produced his first concert at Carnegie Chapter Hall in 1961. According to Dylan in CHRONICLES, the Folklore Center was also where he first met Dave Van Ronk, who gave him his first big break in the city by inviting him to join him onstage at the Gaslight.
Izzy Young was born in New York City in 1928, and first learned about folk music while he was in high school, when he joined the American Folk Dance Group in 1945. Young briefly attended college as a premed student, but dropped out in 1950. In the mid-1950s, he met an important folk music producer named Kenneth Goldstein, who encouraged him to pursue his interest in folk music seriously and professionally. Izzy Young leased the space for the Folklore Center on MacDougal Street in 1957; he sold musical instruments, sheet music, books, and records. Young also began a concert series that featured performances by the New Lost City Ramblers (before they were even named), Paul Clayton, and Peggy Seeger. Young did not have a great business sense, and as Dylan notes, "People were always chasing him down for money, but it didn't seem to faze him. He had a lot of resilience, had even fought city hall into allowing folk music to be played in Washington Square Park. Everybody was for him." Young left the Folklore Center in New York City in 1973 and moved to Stockholm, Sweden, where he opened the Folklore Centrum.
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 about other musicians, writers, and artists who have had an impact on Bob Dylan’s music.
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