By Unknown - https://www.flickr.com/photos/joegratz/83460811/, from the 1964 yearbook of St. Lawrence University, CC BY 2.0, Link
The song was actually written (and released) by Dylan several years previously, and some have speculated who the girl from the north country was.
One candidate, Echo Helstrom Casey, passed away last week. She was once a true love of Dylan's.
Born in Duluth in 1942, Casey grew up in a small house in the woods three miles southwest of Hibbing, the youngest of three children of Martha and Matt Helstrom, a mechanic and welder. She met and started dating Dylan, then Robert Zimmerman, in 1957 and the pair attended the Hibbing High School junior prom together before ultimately breaking up in 1958.
In her yearbook, Dylan wrote: “Let me tell you that your beauty is second to none. Love to the most beautiful girl in school.”
But there was something other than her beauty that appealed to the young Zimmerman.
“She was an important figure in his life, there’s no question about that,” said [Toby] Thompson, now a professor at Penn State. “I don’t know what he would have done if he didn’t find someone like himself. She had that spirit, that electricity that was comparable to his. She was wild in a way that he wanted to be wild. She would go off with her girlfriends in the summer and hitchhike all over the place, have adventures. She was kind of an outsider and from the wrong side of the tracks, and (Dylan) was certainly attracted to that. … In Hibbing, she was as bohemian as anybody in Greenwich Village.”
But eventually both Bob and Echo left Hibbing. Echo went south, then west.
She eventually found her way to Minneapolis, where she worked as a booker at National General Pictures. She married briefly and gave birth to her only daughter, Danae, before moving to Los Angeles in the early ’70s.
She alternated between shunning the limelight and embracing it. She had an unlisted number, but allowed a friend to post her picture next to Dylan's at a Hibbing restaurant called Zimmy's.
But it's interesting to note that these two freewheelin' folks ended up in southern California - Dylan in Malibu.
