The Village scene collectively incubated and subsidized rising unknowns like Dylan

Evidence

Working his way into the heart of the scene, Dylan made repeated pilgrimages to visit his idol Woody Guthrie, hospitalized in New Jersey with incurable Huntington’s Disease. Crashing on various sofas, absorbing various record collections—Harry Smith’s three-disc Folkways collection Anthology of American Folk Music in particular—he performed at the Wha?, the Bizarre, and the Commons. … Dylan was a prodigy. “A Jewish boy who changed his name!” per Izzy Young. “When he came here, he sat around the Folklore Center and lived in Bob Shelton’s apartment for a month: everybody coddled him, nursed him, and encouraged him … I think there was more help with the beginning of Bob Dylan than anyone I ever met.” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 359

Categorization

• XREF: The informal mentorship/subsidy economy of free crash pads and record collections is a material condition feeding the reader’s project of explaining invention density — connects to later chapters on the scene becoming a market.
• QUESTION: How generalizable was this coddling of unknowns? Was it unique to folk’s revivalist ethos, or structural to cheap-rent scenes?