The story is told via the links on Expecting Rain this morning. A variety of mainstream news outlets are reporting on the auction taking place at Christie’s in New York, which includes some items of Bob Dylan memorabilia. The one which really made the news is a handwritten lyric from 1957, entitled Little Buddy.

Dylan was just 16 — and still going by his given name Bob Zimmerman — when he wrote “Little Buddy” in the summer of 1957 for the newspaper at Herzl Camp in Webster, Wis.

Now the poem is being offered for sale at a Christie’s auction, where it is expected to sell for $10,000 to $15,000 on June 23.

Fellow camper and editor of the Herzl Herald, Lisa Heilicher, has decided to sell the poem to help support the camp’s $8 million capital campaign.

“I kept it with all of my stuff that I collected from camp,” Heilicher said in a telephone interview from her home in Minneapolis. “When I realized how famous he had become, I put it in a piece of plastic and stuck it in an encyclopedia” — under the letter ‘Z’ for Zimmerman.

Written on both sides of a single page, the poem tells the poignant story of Little Buddy, who is killed at the hands of a drunkard, and the boy who mourns him.

“He was such a lovely doggy/ And to me he was such fun/ But today as we played by the way/ A drunken man got mad at him/ Because he barked in joy/ He beat him and he’s dying here today,” the poem reads.

“It’s a very early example of his brilliance,” Simeon Lipman, Christie’s pop culture specialist, said. “It comes from the mind of a teenager (with) some very interesting thoughts kind of percolating in his brain.”

Interesting and brilliant thoughts indeed. The kicker comes in a link sent in later by Dag Braathen, who apparently gets the credit for the delicious exposé: Click here to read the lyric of the song Little Buddy by the great Hank Snow. (Not sure in exactly what year Hank wrote this tune, but a little research has indicated that it was not later than 1947.)

It is, word for word, the same as the poem ostensibly penned by young Robert Zimmerman at summer camp.

I don’t know which aspect of this is funnier, but I can’t stop laughing. (Not that there’s anything funny about what happened to poor little Buddy.)

Bids can be placed at Christie’s here. They were expecting it to fetch 10 to 15 thousand dollars. It’s still worth something as a piece of Dylan memorabilia, I suppose, but, as for me, I’ll stick with Hank Snow’s rendition.

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Addendum: Also see Fred Bals’ post on the subject.

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