“Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)” was written by Bob Dylan and first recorded during The Basement Tapes sessions in 1967.

The song was recorded in December 1967 and first released in January 1968 as the “Mighty Quinn” by Manfred Mann. There are a lot of folk legends about where the inspiration came from:

It is possible that Dylan came up with the idea for this after seeing the 1959 Nicholas Ray movie called The Savage Innocents. In that movie, Anthony Quinn played an Eskimo named Inuk.

The Grateful Dead occasionally played this at their shows. Here’s one story that circulated about the song: The Grateful Dead years ago had a wild LSD party in a New York City hotel during a tour visit. Allegedly, one of the party guests was Bob Dylan. One of the other guests at the hotel didn’t appreciate the noise and voiced several complaints.

It was actor Anthony Quinn who’d played an Eskimo in The Savage Innocents. That could have inspired a partying Dylan to write a strange and funny song like this.

One theory is that “The Mighty Quinn” is Sheriff Larry Quinlan, who raided the Castillia Foundation land in Millbrook, New York and arrested Dr. Timothy Leary and his group of hippies. Quinlan confiscated all the LSD and other drugs at the scene. In this scenario, the “pigeons” are informers.

Mike D’Abo of Manfred Mann:

“We met in a publisher’s house as Bob Dylan was making some new material available to other artists. We heard about 10 songs and I thought ‘This Wheel’s On Fire’ would be the one to do, but Manfred liked The Mighty Quinn, which was called ‘Quinn The Eskimo’ then.

It was sung in a rambling monotone but Manfred had recognized its potential. He sold me on the idea of doing this song, but I had to make up some of the words as I couldn’t make out everything he was saying. It was like learning a song phonetically in a foreign language. I have never had the first idea what the song is about except that it seems to be ‘Hey, gang, gather round, something exciting is going to happen ’cause the big man’s coming.’ As to who the big man is and why he is an Eskimo, I don’t know.”

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