[1] As a singer and guitarist, he was considered to be the leading specialist in country blues in Cambridge at the time, the counterpart of Greenwich Village's Dave Van Ronk.

Von Schmidt co-authored with Jim Rooney Baby, Let Me Follow You Down: The Illustrated Story of the Cambridge Folk Years.

Dylan eagerly absorbed von Schmidt's voluminous knowledge of music, including folk, country and the blues.

"I sang [Dylan] a bunch of songs, and, with that spongelike mind of his, he remembered almost all of them when he got back to New York," von Schmidt said in The Boston Globe.

[4] Von Schmidt is widely (and erroneously) credited as the author of the song, "Baby, Let Me Follow You Down", which was for years a staple of Dylan's musical catalogue.

Two years later, The Folk Blues of Eric von Schmidt appeared atop a pile of records on the cover of Dylan's album Bringing It All Back Home.

In May 1964, Dylan visited Von Schmidt at his home in Sarasota, Florida and recorded several songs there, including an early version of "Mr. Tambourine Man".

He was told how much they liked Grizzly Bear [a von Schmidt song] and he then invited the whole bunch to the club, where he was about to perform the thing live.

An invitation to the glad, mad, sad, biting, exciting, frightening, crabby, happy, enlightening, hugging, chugging world of Eric Von Schmidt.

[8]Von Schmidt had a parallel career as a painter, and created album covers for Joan Baez, Cisco Houston, John Renbourn, Reverend Gary Davis, the Blue Velvet Band, Jackie Washington Landron and for James Baldwin's readings.

Von Schmidt illustrated a 1973 book of twenty-five ghost stories called The Haunting of America, by Jean Anderson.

"Eric's got that wild spirit, and he doesn't water the music down for polite society," Ramblin' Jack Elliott told The Boston Globe in 1996.