Izzy Young was one of those guys, as I joked with him a few years ago, a central pillar, part of the US New York music Jewish mafia: fortunately he laughed at the thought. The man who gave his life to folk and roots music, finally passed his last go-round, aged 90, in Stockholm, Sweden, where he’d been resident for around 40 years, since leaving New York in the early 1970s.

Widely recognized as the man who gave an ambitious young Bob Dylan his first professional gig in New York in 1961, he remained a close friend of Dylan’s through the decades, as Dylan acknowledges in his memoir, Chronicle. But Israel Goodman Young was more than just a part of Dylan’s historic rise; he set David Bromberg on the road to solo fame, and encouraged countless others along the way, including Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Rory Block, Happy Traum, John Sebastian, Joni Mitchell, Dave Van Ronk, Tim Buckley, Tom Paxton, and almost everyone of note in the exploding early ’60s New York music scene. This was a man with an ear for great music.

His Folklore Center on Greenwich Village’s legendary MacDougall Street (number 58) was the place to go for all of those itinerant and hopeful musicians back in the day. And Izzy took them all to his heart. His voice was always full-tilt, with opinions flying fast and furious at all times. He was a true music legend who never played an instrument himself, a rare achievement indeed.

When I last sat down and chatted with him at his Folklore Centrum in Stockholm in 2016, Dylan had just been awarded the Nobel prize for literature and Izzy’s phone was clanging non-stop with media interview requests, a thought he found hilarious, as he pithily commented on the fact the “….cocks****rs, mother******s, won’t buy anything here!” But passers-by peered in his windows, eager to have just a glimpse of one of modern music’s most important supporters.

The late US musician, Tom Paley, of the New Lost City Ramblers, was a peer of Young. Reared and raised in the same corner of New York, they attended school together and were separated by a mere two weeks or so in age: Paley always joked that he called Izzy Young, ‘young Izzy,’ a memory that I shared with Young who smiled at the thought before firing off another cuss-filled observation about the state of modern music.

An elemental force, with an opinion on just about everything, Izzy Young will be a hard act to follow—we won’t see his likes again, I fear. And for all of us who had the good-fortune to know and meet the man, there will be a memory to hold, a thought to cherish and an understanding of the honor it was to have shared some time with Izzy Young.

Israel Goodman Young, March 26, 1928—Feb 4, 2019. Buried in Stockholm, Sweden, Feb 7, 2019.

—Iain Patience

Iain Patience is Editor of UK-based Blues Matters Magazine, and a regular contributor to Elmore.