Few songs have been sung by as many people as Bob Dylan’s “Quinn the Eskimo”. That is not in the sense of it having been widely covered, though many have recorded it. No, few songs have been sung by as many people as Quinn the Eskimo in the most literal sense — on any given Saturday for several years, it was sung by tens of thousands of people.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s (and in some cases for very much longer), “Quinn the Eskimo” was a staple of the football terraces of the UK. In general support of their team, fans would slightly change the lyric of the chorus — the DJ Bill Brewster’s first memory of football was hearing Grimsby fans trying to scan “You ain’t seen nothing ’til the Mariners win.” If their team had a player whose name vaguely rhymed, then they could be celebrated: “You’ll not see nothing like Fred Pickering!” insisted the supporters of Birmingham City. And if the team actually had a player named Quinn, so much the better. Rotherham United, a perpetually unsuccessful club from South Yorkshire, were captained from 1967 to 1972 by Johnny Quinn — nicknamed, with crushing inevitability, “The Mighty Quinn” — and ran out to a recording of the song for years.
None of that would have been foreseen by Bob Dylan when he got together with The Hawks — the backing band on his electric tours of 1965 and 1966 — in February 1967 at his house in Woodstock, New York. As the story goes, Dylan had retreated from public view after his motorcycle crash, and set about making music out of the spotlight, first in the red room of that Woodstock house, then in the basement of Big Pink, the house the Hawks were sharing in nearby Saugerties, where they evolved into The Band.
The songs were different to those Dylan had been recording before his crash. Part of that was practical: you couldn’t set up a loud rock’n’roll band in a nice house in a residential area, so he and The Hawks played quietly, often acoustically. But it wasn’t just volume: Dylan was writing differently, too. They often offered an unusually playful Dylan, and no song was more playful than “Quinn the Eskimo”.
“I don’t know what it was about,” he said in the sleeve notes of the 1985 box set Biograph. “I guess it was some kind of nursery rhyme.” The title, at least, seems to have come from the 1960 film The Savage Innocents, starring Anthony Quinn as an Inuit named Inuk. Robbie Robertson of The Hawks and The Band later confirmed it had been recorded with the actor in mind, though Dylan himself insisted in a 1968 interview he had never seen the movie.
But the song itself had nothing to do with Anthony Quinn, or the Arctic. It was a simple unravelling of delicious nonsense — “I like to do just like the rest, I like my sugar sweet / But guarding fumes and making haste, it ain’t my cup of meat” — whose strength lies in the way the words sound, not in what they say.
“Quinn the Eskimo” was one of 14 Basement Tapes songs selected for a demo album circulated late in 1967 by Dylan’s publishing company. Manfred Mann, the South African keyboard player and bandleader, recognised the potential in the roughly recorded piece of whimsy. He transformed the arrangement into something tight and poppy, and Mike D’Abo, the singer, tried to work out what Dylan had been singing, though he settled for an approximation. Mann was unhappy with the recording, but on hearing it played on a turntable set too fast and playing the song a semitone higher, he realised that it worked at that pitch, and reset the recording by that crucial semitone. In February 1968 it reached number one as “The Mighty Quinn”.
Where there’s a hit, there are covers, and they flowed. Merry Clayton — of “Gimme Shelter” fame — sang lead on The Brothers and Sisters of Los Angeles’ gospel reading in 1969. Bizarrely, it twice appeared on albums — by different artists — that also featured the bubblegum pop staple “Yummy Yummy Yummy”, first by The 1910 Fruitgum Company, then by Julie London (who somehow makes it seductive). The Hollies added a banjo and oompah brass — this was not a Dylan song to be treated with respect. (And it’s not one that’s likely to be widely cited or quoted in the context of Dylan's 80th birthday celebrations.)
Dylan’s first release of it — recorded live at the Isle of Wight festival in 1969 — came on his 1970 album Self Portrait, though no Basement Tapes recording of it came out officially until Biograph. It became a live staple for jam bands, despite its minimal opportunities for endless soloing: both the Grateful Dead and Phish played it frequently.
But the most charming version is relatively recent, from 2009, when Cornershop recorded it, loose and jangling and carefree, for their album Judy Sucks a Lemon for Breakfast. Ben Ayres of Cornershop, as it happens, is a season ticket holder at West Ham United, though he has not managed to convince his fellow fans to adopt “Quinn the Eskimo”: the Hammers remain loyal to “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles”, but that’s another Life of a Song, for another time.
What are your memories of ‘Quinn the Eskimo’? What is Bob Dylan’s most nonsensical lyric? Let us know in the comments section below.
‘The Life of a Song Volume 2: The fascinating stories behind 50 more of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Brewer’s.
Music credits: Rarity Music; Ode Records; Buddah/Legacy; EMI Catalog (USA); Parlophone UK; Columbia/Legacy; Columbia; Ample Play Recordings
Picture credit: Alamy Stock Photo