Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan (legally Robert Dylan; born Robert Allen Zimmerman, May 24, 1941) is an American singer-songwriter. Considered one of the greatest songwriters of all time, Dylan has been a major figure in popular culture over his nearly 70-year career. With an estimated more than 125 million records sold worldwide, he is one of the best-selling musicians of all time. Dylan added increasingly sophisticated lyrical techniques to the folk music of the early 1960s, infusing it "with the intellectualism of classic literature and poetry". His lyrics incorporated political, social, and philosophical influences, defying pop music conventions and appealing to the burgeoning counterculture.

Dylan was born in St. Louis County, Minnesota. He moved to New York City in 1961 to pursue a career in music. Following his 1962 debut album, Bob Dylan, featuring traditional folk and blues material, he released his breakthrough album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963), which included "Girl from the North Country" and "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall", adapting older folk songs. His songs "Blowin' in the Wind" (1963) and "The Times They Are a-Changin'" (1964) became anthems for the civil rights and antiwar movements. In 1965 and 1966, Dylan created controversy among folk purists when he used electrically amplified rock instrumentation for his albums Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited (both 1965), and Blonde on Blonde (1966). His six-minute single "Like a Rolling Stone" (1965) expanded commercial and creative boundaries in popular music.

In July 1966, a motorcycle crash led Dylan to cease touring for seven years. During this period, he recorded a large body of songs with members of the Band which produced the album The Basement Tapes (1975). Dylan explored country music and rural themes on the albums John Wesley Harding (1967), Nashville Skyline (1969) and New Morning (1970). He gained critical attention for Blood on the Tracks (1975), and Time Out of Mind (1997), the latter of which earned him the Grammy Award for Album of the Year. Dylan still releases music and has toured continuously since the late 1980s on what has become known as the Never Ending Tour. Since 1994, Dylan has published nine books of paintings and drawings, and his work has been exhibited in major art galleries. His life has been profiled in several documentaries and the biopic A Complete Unknown (2024).

Dylan's numerous accolades include an Academy Award, ten Grammy Awards and a Golden Globe Award. He was honored with the Kennedy Center Honors in 1997, National Medal of Arts in 2009, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012. Dylan has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame. He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize special citation in 2008, and the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition".

Bob Dylan was born Robert Allen Zimmerman (his Hebrew name is Shabtai Zisl ben Avraham) in St. Mary's Hospital on May 24, 1941, in Duluth, Minnesota. Dylan's paternal grandparents, Anna Kirghiz and Zigman Zimmerman, emigrated from Odessa in the Russian Empire (now Ukraine) to the United States, following the 1905 pogroms against Jews. His maternal grandparents, Florence and Ben Stone, were Lithuanian Jews who had arrived in the US in 1902. Dylan wrote that his paternal grandmother's family was originally from the Kağızman District of Kars Province, northeastern Turkey.

Dylan's father Abram Zimmerman and his mother Beatrice "Beatty" Stone were part of a small, close-knit Jewish community. They lived in Duluth until Dylan was six, when his father contracted polio and the family returned to his mother's hometown of Hibbing, where they lived for the rest of Dylan's childhood, and his father and paternal uncles ran a furniture and appliance store.

In the early 1950s, Dylan listened to the Grand Ole Opry radio show and heard the songs of Hank Williams. He later wrote: "The sound of his voice went through me like an electric rod." Dylan was also impressed by the delivery of Johnnie Ray: "He was the first singer whose voice and style, I guess, I totally fell in love with... I loved his style, wanted to dress like him too." As a teenager, Dylan heard rock and roll on radio stations broadcasting from Shreveport and Little Rock.

Dylan formed several bands while attending Hibbing High School. In the Golden Chords, he performed covers of songs by Little Richard and Elvis Presley. Their performance of Danny & the Juniors' "Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay" at their high school talent show was so loud that the principal cut the microphone. On January 31, 1959, 17-year-old Dylan saw Buddy Holly perform at the Duluth Armory, four days before Holly's fatal plane crash. Dylan was electrified and in his Nobel Prize lecture he explained: "Buddy wrote songs – songs that had beautiful melodies and imaginative verses. And he sang great – sang in more than a few voices. He was the archetype. Everything I wasn't and wanted to be."

In 1959, Dylan's high school yearbook carried the caption "Robert Zimmerman: to join 'Little Richard'". That year, as Elston Gunnn, he performed twice with Bobby Vee, playing piano and clapping. In September 1959, Dylan enrolled at the University of Minnesota. Living at the Jewish-centric fraternity Sigma Alpha Mu house, Dylan began to perform at the Ten O'Clock Scholar, a coffeehouse near campus, and became involved in the Dinkytown folk music circuit. His focus on rock and roll gave way to American folk music, as he explained in a 1985 interview:

During this period, he began to introduce himself as "Bob Dylan". In his memoir, he wrote that he considered adopting the surname Dillon before unexpectedly seeing poems by Dylan Thomas, and deciding upon the given name spelling. In a 2004 interview, he said, "You're born, you know, the wrong names, wrong parents. I mean, that happens. You call yourself what you want to call yourself. This is the land of the free."

In May 1960, Dylan dropped out of college at the end of his first year. In January 1961, he traveled to New York City to perform and visit his musical idol Woody Guthrie at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in New Jersey. Guthrie had been a revelation to Dylan and influenced his early performances. He wrote of Guthrie's impact: "The songs themselves had the infinite sweep of humanity in them... [He] was the true voice of the American spirit. I said to myself I was going to be Guthrie's greatest disciple". In addition to Guthrie, Dylan wrote in Chronicles that major influences on his early song writing included Robert Johnson's blues and what he called the "architectural forms" of Hank Williams's country songs.

From February 1961, Dylan played at clubs around Greenwich Village, befriending and picking up material from folk singers, including Dave Van Ronk, Fred Neil, Odetta, the New Lost City Ramblers and Irish musicians the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem. In September, The New York Times critic Robert Shelton boosted Dylan's career with a very enthusiastic review of his performance at Gerde's Folk City: "Bob Dylan: A Distinctive Folk-Song Stylist". That month, Dylan played harmonica on folk singer Carolyn Hester's third album, bringing him to the attention of the album's producer John Hammond, who signed Dylan to Columbia Records. Dylan's debut album, Bob Dylan, released March 19, 1962, consisted of traditional folk, blues and gospel material with just two original compositions, "Talkin' New York" and "Song to Woody". The album sold 5,000 copies in its first year, just breaking even.

On August 9, 1962, Dylan legally changed his name to Robert Dylan in the St. Louis County Court, Hibbing. His father, Abraham Zimmerman, was the witness. The same month, Dylan signed a management contract with Albert Grossman. Grossman remained Dylan's manager until 1970, and was known for his sometimes confrontational personality and protective loyalty. Dylan said, "He was kind of like a Colonel Tom Parker figure ... you could smell him coming." Tension between Grossman and John Hammond led to the latter suggesting Dylan work with the jazz producer Tom Wilson, who produced several tracks for the second album without formal credit. Wilson produced the next three albums Dylan recorded.

Dylan made his first trip to the United Kingdom from December 1962 to January 1963. He had been invited by television director Philip Saville to appear in Madhouse on Castle Street, which Saville was directing for BBC Television. At the end of the play, Dylan performed "Blowin' in the Wind", one of its first public performances. While in London, Dylan performed at London folk clubs, including the Troubadour, Les Cousins, and Bunjies. He also learned material from UK performers, including Martin Carthy.

With the release of Dylan's second album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, in May 1963, he began to make his name as a singer-songwriter. Many songs on the album were labeled protest songs, inspired partly by Guthrie and influenced by Pete Seeger's passion for topical songs. "Oxford Town" was an account of James Meredith's ordeal as the first Black student at the University of Mississippi. The first song on the album, "Blowin' in the Wind", partly derived its melody from the traditional slave song "No More Auction Block", while its lyrics questioned the status quo. The song was widely recorded by other artists and became a hit for Peter, Paul and Mary. "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" was based on the folk ballad "Lord Randall". With its apocalyptic premonitions, the song gained resonance when the Cuban Missile Crisis developed a few weeks after Dylan began performing it. Both songs marked a new direction in songwriting, blending a stream-of-consciousness, imagist lyrical attack with traditional folk form.

Dylan's topical songs led to his being viewed as more than just a songwriter. Janet Maslin wrote of Freewheelin':