TULSA, Okla. — For years, Bob Dylan scholars have whispered about a tiny notebook, seen by only a few, in which the master labored over the lyrics to his classic 1975 album “Blood on the Tracks.” Rolling Stone once called it “the Maltese Falcon of Dylanology” for its promise as an interpretive key.
But that notebook, it turns out, is part of a trinity. Sitting in climate-controlled storage in a museum here are two more “Blood on the Tracks” notebooks — unknown to anyone outside of Mr. Dylan’s closest circle — whose pages of microscopic script reveal even more about how Mr. Dylan wrote some of his most famous songs.
There have long been rumors that Mr. Dylan had stashed away an extensive archive. It is now revealed that he did keep a private trove of his work, dating back to his earliest days as an artist, including lyrics, correspondence, recordings, films and photographs. That archive of 6,000 pieces has recently been acquired by a group of institutions in Oklahoma for an estimated $15 million to $20 million, and is set to become a resource for academic study.
In a preview of the Bob Dylan Archive by The New York Times, it is clear that the archives are deeper and more vast than even most Dylan experts could imagine, promising untold insight into the songwriter’s work.
“It’s going to start anew the way people study Dylan,” said Sean Wilentz, the Princeton historian and author of “Bob Dylan in America,” when told about the existence of the archive.
Bought by the George Kaiser Family Foundation — whose namesake is an oil and banking billionaire — and the University of Tulsa, Mr. Dylan’s archives are now being transferred to Oklahoma, the home state of Woody Guthrie, Mr. Dylan’s early idol. After two years of cataloging and digitization, the material will take its place in Tulsa alongside a rare copy of the Declaration of Independence, a cache of Native American art and the papers of Guthrie.
Mr. Dylan said in a statement that he was glad his archives had found a home “and are to be included with the works of Woody Guthrie and especially alongside all the valuable artifacts from the Native American nations.” He added, with typical understatement, “To me it makes a lot of sense, and it’s a great honor.”
With voluminous drafts from every phase of Mr. Dylan’s career, the collection offers a comprehensive look at the working process of a legendarily secretive artist. Dozens of rewrites track the evolution of even minor songs like “Dignity,” which went through more than 40 pages of changes but was still cut from the 1989 album “Oh Mercy.”
Classics from the 1960s appear in coffee-stained fragments, their author still working out lines that generations of fans would come to know by heart. (“You know something’s happening here but you,” reads a scribbled early copy of “Ballad of a Thin Man,” omitting “don’t know what it is” and the song’s famous punch line: “Do you, Mister Jones?”) The range of hotel stationery suggests an obsessive self-editor in constant motion.
And while the archive is a further step in the canonization of Mr. Dylan, now 74, as not just a musical icon but also an American literary giant, the documents are tantalizing in what they do not reveal. A card from Barbra Streisand postmarked November 1978, for example, thanks Mr. Dylan for sending flowers and playfully suggests that they make a record together; there is no evidence of a response.
For longtime students, seeing the archive may conjure a familiar feeling of astonishment at just how deep the well of Dylanology goes. There is always far more beneath the surface than anyone could guess. One example of this phenomenon — and of how radically the material could change existing Dylan scholarship — is the “Blood on the Tracks” material.
The “little red notebook,” which by most accounts was stolen from Mr. Dylan at some point, circulated among collectors and is now held at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, with access severely restricted. But the existence of two more books shows how much raw material has been unavailable and unknown for study. The song “Tangled Up in Blue,” with its refracted scenes of a wanderer haunted by a broken relationship, gets a slightly more picaresque telling here, with a refrain absent from the finished recording: “Wish I could lose, these dusty sweatbox blues.” Even in songs that have been pored over for decades, new layers of meaning await discovery.
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