Before Bob Dylan moved to New York to pursue music, he fell in love with Mavis Staples’ voice. By the early 1960s, he was a rising star in the Greenwich Village folk scene, and he believed that he’d fallen in love with Staples herself. Though she writes off his youthful affections as “puppy love,” Dylan expressed his desire to marry Staples. They never did tie the knot, and she doesn’t regret it. Staples joked that she dodged a bullet by not marrying Dylan.
Bob Dylan was an early fan of Mavis Staples
When Dylan still lived in Minnesota, he turned on the radio every night, which is how he first discovered the Staple Singers. The band comprised Staples, her father, and her siblings.
“I got to be acquainted with the Swan Silvertones and the Dixie Hummingbirds, the Highway Q.C.’s and all that,” Dylan said, per The New Yorker. “But the Staple Singers came on . . . and they were so different.”
He said Staples’ voice was particularly stirring to him.
“Mavis was singing stuff like ‘Yonder come little David with a rock and sling, I don’t want to meet him, he’s a dangerous man,” Dylan said. “I thought, ‘Oh, my goodness!’ That made my hair stand up. I thought, ‘That’s how the world is.'”
Mavis Staples doesn’t regret not marrying Bob Dylan
After Dylan moved to New York, he ran into the Staple Singers at a festival.
“Bob said, ‘I know the Staple Singers!'” Staples said. “He said, ‘Pops, he has a velvety voice, but Mavis gets rough sometimes.’ And then he quoted that verse in ‘Sit Down Servant.'”
Dylan and Staples continued to see each other at shows, and Dylan soon developed a case of what Staples described as “puppy love.”
“He was a cute little boy, little blue eyes, curly hair,” she said. “He and Pervis [Staples] got to be tight. They’d sit out on the stoop, drink wine.”
Eventually, Dylan told Staples’ father that he wanted to marry her. Though Staples looks back on the youthful relationship fondly, she’s glad she didn’t marry Dylan.
“I still have letters that we would write to each other,” she said. “And the only time we would see each other was when we happened to be on the same show … I was the one that dodged a bullet. I wouldn’t have been able to keep up with him.”
Still, she believes that she would have positively impacted Dylan’s life if she had become his wife.
“If I stayed with him in his life, I don’t think he would have turned to drugs like he did.”
They joked about marriage years later
In 2016, Staples toured as the opening act for Dylan, and he, in a rare move, came to talk to her before the show.
“The first show, someone knocked on my door and said someone wants to see you,” she said. “In comes Bobby. And I said, ‘Bobby, I’m so glad to see you. I been wanting to see you for so long.'”
He responded with a wry reference to their past.
“You should have married me,” he said. “You would’ve seen me every day.”
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