In the spring of 1958, 17-year-old Robert Zimmerman invited Echo Helstrom to his high-school prom in the Minnesota mining town of Hibbing. According to the recollections of their classmates, they both danced badly.
Neither of them cared, however, for each was besotted with the other. “Let me tell you that your beauty is second to none,” the young Zimmerman wrote against Helstrom’s name in their high-school yearbook. “Love to the most beautiful girl in the school.”
Five years later, when Zimmerman had reinvented himself as Bob Dylan, he paid Helstrom’s beauty an even greater compliment by making her the muse of his folk ballad Girl From The North Country, which appeared on his breakthrough 1963 album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan: “If you’re travellin’ in the north country fair,/ Where the winds hit heavy on the borderline,/ Remember me to one who lives there,/ She once was a true love of mine.”
The lyric tenderly went on to recall how her hair “rolled and flowed all down her breast”. The song also gave its title to the hit musical Girl From The North Country, which had its premiere at the Old Vic in 2017.
Although there have been conflicting claims about the identity of Dylan’s north country love over the years, it is widely accepted that Helstrom was the inspiration. “I know the song was about me,” she said. “Bob never wrote me a letter to tell me it was. He knew he didn’t have to.” She was also the subject of a less distinguished song that Dylan wrote while they were at school in Hibbing. “He was howling over and over again, ‘I got a girl and her name is Echo,’ making up verses as he went along,” she recalled. “That was the first song I’d ever heard him sing that wasn’t written by somebody else.”
Dylan was still thinking of her when he wrote his 2004 autobiography, Chronicles Volume One. “Everybody said she looked like Brigitte Bardot and she did,” he wrote fondly. Citing Tom Sawyer’s sweetheart in Mark Twain’s picaresque tale, he went on to call her “my Becky Thatcher”.
While Dylan was busy becoming famous in the early 1960s, they drifted apart and Helstrom married Danny Shivers and gave birth to a daughter, Danae. However, they met again when Dylan unexpectedly turned up at a Hibbing high school reunion in 1969.
A decade earlier he had declared that he had to “get out of there and not come back”, but absence had made the heart grow fonder. Shortly before the school reunion he had recorded a new version of Girl From The North Country in a fit of nostalgia for his old life and performed it on television with Johnny Cash, knowing that the song’s subject was likely to be watching.
“Hey, it’s you!”, he shouted when Helstrom approached him to sign her reunion booklet. He introduced her to his wife, Sara, and she even pulled his leg, telling him that she had written him a song.
“You did? What did you call it?” Dylan asked her. “Boy From The North Country,” she told him with a smile.
Marvel Echo Star Helstrom was born in 1942 in Duluth, Minnesota, the youngest of three children. Her father, Matt Helstrom, was a mechanic whose parents came from Finland and her mother, Martha, was also of Scandinavian extraction.
It was a heritage that gifted their daughter her blond good looks, but her family came from “the other side of the tracks” to the middle-class Zimmerman family, and home was a shack in the woods out of town on Highway 73.
After they had met one night in 1957 in the L&B Café on Hibbing’s Main Street and bonded over a shared love for blues and R’n’B music, Dylan regularly hitched the three miles to her house, where he listened to her father’s country records and played his guitar on the porch. When she visited his home he played boogie-woogie for her on the family piano.
At some point he gave her his identity bracelet as a token that they were “going steady”. They felt like outsiders, she said, bohemian misfits busting to escape from the confines of a narrow-minded town. “He was very cute and I liked his personality,” she said. “He was very magnetic, even then.” He was going to be a rock’n’roll singer and she was going to be a movie star. “I couldn’t stand being like the other girls. I had to be different,” she said.
According to her mother, they talked about marriage and having a child. “They planned to call it Bob, whether it was a boy or a girl,” she claimed.
When Dylan left to go to college in Minneapolis in 1959, Helstrom followed him to the city and took a job with a record distributor. However, by then he had other girlfriends and was soon to meet Suze Rotolo, the muse who would walk arm-in-arm with him on the Freewheelin’ cover, before being replaced by a third muse, Joan Baez.
Two years later, when Dylan’s recording career was taking off, he half-heartedly asked Helstrom to go to New York with him. Married and with a child, she refused, realising that they now inhabited different worlds.
After divorcing her first husband, in 1971 she moved to California, where she married again, taking the name Casey and working as a secretary at a Hollywood movie studio. Friends recalled that she enjoyed eating her lunch on the porch of the set for the TV series The Waltons.
Once her connection to Dylan became widely known, she was pestered by obsessive fans. “She had to have an unlisted number because people were just hysterical about seeking her out. It became a burden for her,” said the writer Toby Thompson, who bore much of the blame, for it was his 1971 book Positively Main Street: An Unorthodox View of Bob Dylan that outed her. Her fame even led to an American rock group naming itself Echo Helstrom.
Dylan confirmed that they kept in sporadic touch when asked in a 1986 interview if he had heard from his former muse. “I see her occasionally,” he said. “She was an important figure in his life,” Thompson said. “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.”
Echo Helstrom, muse, was born in 1942 (precise date unknown). She died on January 18, 2018, aged 75