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Australian TV show Today has apologised after mistakenly saying that Bob Dylan had died.
The breakfast show was airing a segment over the weekend about the songwriter’s documents being auctioned off in Boston for $495,000 (£373k).
However, an on-screen banner read “Late singer’s documents sell for $495 thousand,” which lead to host Richard Wilkins apologising the viewers.
“We need to make a correction now,” he said after the broadcast. “About half an hour ago on our entertainment chat, we incorrectly ran a banner on your screen about Bob Dylan. It was false and we apologise for any confusion.”
Among the documents sold at the auction were unpublished lyrics written by Dylan, as well as letters between him and late American blues musician Tony Glover and transcripts of interviews between the two.
The collection previously belonged to Glover, with the majority of the separate lots bought by an unnamed bidder.
Within the interviews transcribed in the papers, which happened in 1971, Dylan speaks about how antisemitism influenced his decision to change his name from Robert Zimmerman, the star saying: “A lot of people are under the impression that Jews are money lenders and merchants.”
It is also revealed that his 1969 song ‘Lay Lady Lay’ was originally written for Barbra Streisand, and some of the lyrics included lines Dylan wrote after visiting Woody Guthrie.
Meanwhile, Dylan released new album ‘Rough And Rowdy Ways’ back in June, which NME gave a five-star review and called “arguably his grandest poetic statement yet”. It also made the singer the only artist to have achieved a Top 40 album in every decade since the 1960s in the US.
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