Bob Dylan

American folk singer-songwriter

• Born: May 24, 1941
• Place of Birth: Duluth, Minnesota

A prolific songwriter and a strikingly original singer, Dylan emerged during the 1960s and vastly expanded the audience for folk ballads, the blues, political protest songs, and country and gospel music. His recordings and performances combined these and other influences.

Early Life

Bob Dylan was born Robert Allen Zimmerman on May 24, 1941, to Abraham and Beatty Zimmerman. He spent the first six years of his life in Duluth, Minnesota, during which time he gave no indication of the musical talent that would later lead many to call him the “greatest songwriter of his generation.” Shortly after his family moved to the iron-mining town of Hibbing, Minnesota, however, his discovery of country music and the blues via late-night radio set his creative wheels in motion. By the age of ten, he had acquainted himself with the family piano and acquired his first guitar and harmonica, finding in music a sense of mystical adventure otherwise lacking in the relative desolation of his immediate surroundings.

Like many high school students of the mid- to late 1950s, Dylan became caught up in the first wave of rock and roll. He formed a series of local groups (the Shadow Blasters, the Golden Chords, Elston Gunn, and the Rock Boppers) that played the hits of the day at the occasional talent show and teen dance and that often found him shouting and pounding the piano in the style of his hero Little Richard. These groups enjoyed no lasting success, but they helped Dylan whet his appetite for bigger things.

In the summer of 1959, Dylan served as the pianist for pop singer Bobby Vee for two dates. Although this stint proved short-lived, Dylan's travels and omnivorous musical tastes led him to discover the records of folk musicians such as Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie, the latter of whom would revolutionize Dylan’s approach to music. In September 1959, Dylan enrolled at the University of Minnesota but dropped out at the end of his first year and traveled to New York City.

Life’s Work

It was Dylan’s desire to meet Guthrie, who was dying from Huntington’s disease in New Jersey, that drew him to New York City, where he became a fixture in the bohemian hotbed of Greenwich Village, absorbing myriad influences. Observant and competitive, he established a reputation as an engaging performer.

An enthusiastic New York Times review of one of his 1961 performances brought Dylan to the attention of Columbia Records, which released his eponymous debut to poor sales in 1962. By the summer of 1963, however, the folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary had scored a hit with the Dylan-composed protest anthem “Blowin’ in the Wind,” creating anticipation for Dylan’s second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, which appeared in September. Featuring original songs such as “Masters of War” and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” it proved that the success of “Blowin’ in the Wind” was no fluke.

Public response was immediate and overwhelming. Even those put off by Dylan’s rough-hewn singing and hillbilly-hipster elocution conceded the exceptional nature of his songs. The albums The Times They Are a-Changin’ and Another Side of Bob Dylan followed in 1964, elevating him to near-messianic status within the folk revival movement.

That status was tested by Dylan’s fifth album, Bringing It All Back Home (1965), which introduced his use of electric instrumentation. His status also was tested by his amplified performance with Paul Butterfield’s Blues Band at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Purists viewed his “going electric” and his increasingly surrealistic lyrics as “selling out.” Undaunted, Dylan followed with the even louder and more surrealistic albums Highway 61 Revisited (1965) and Blonde on Blonde (1966), three top-ten singles (“Like a Rolling Stone,” “Positively Fourth Street,” “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35”), and a 1966 European tour.

In July 1966, Dylan was seriously injured in an accident while riding his motorcycle near his home in Woodstock, New York, and spent the next two years in virtual seclusion (although he recorded demos with the Band in 1967 that would eventually be released to great acclaim in 1975 as The Basement Tapes). He reactivated his public profile with the hauntingly allegorical, mostly acoustic John Wesley Harding in 1968.

With the overtly country Nashville Skyline (1969), Dylan began three decades of stylistic and public-image changes. From an aborted 1970 collaboration with the poet Archibald MacLeish and a 1974 reunion with the Band to explorations of romantic despair in Blood on the Tracks (1974) and Oh Mercy (1989) and bold proclamations of Christian faith in Slow Train Coming (1979) and Saved (1980), Dylan’s zigzagging eventually took a toll on his sales. Although his career-spanning anthologies Biograph (1985) and The Bootleg Series Vols. 1–3 (Rare and Unreleased) (1991) and his 1988 and 1990 albums as a member of the Traveling Wilburys (with George Harrison, Roy Orbison, Jeff Lynne, and Tom Petty) sold well, none of the thirteen solo studio or live albums that he released between 1980 and 1995 topped the charts. His appearance on the charity single “We Are the World” and at the subsequent Live Aid benefit concert (1985), his tours with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers (1986) and the Grateful Dead (1987), and his role in the film Hearts of Fire (1987) generally confirmed his diminished cultural relevancy.

Unknown to the public at the time, Dylan had divorced his first wife, Sara Lownds Dylan, in 1977, and married his backup singer Carolyn Dennis (then pregnant with their daughter) in 1986. (They divorced in 1992.) In retrospect, such personal turmoil and the nonstop touring that he undertook in the middle of it all likely accounted for some of the distracted quality of his work during this time.

In 1997, between his hospitalization for a nearly fatal heart infection in May and his performance before Pope John Paul II at the Twenty-third Eucharistic Congress in September, Dylan released what was widely considered one of his strongest albums ever, Time Out of Mind. It won the Grammy Award for album of the year the following year and proved a harbinger of the well-received recordings that he would release in the twenty-first century.

In 2001, Dylan received an Academy Award for best original song for "Things Have Changed," which he had penned for the 2000 film Wonder Boys. In 2006, Dylan released the album Modern Times, which was widely praised by critics and audiences. Modern Times was Dylan's first album to debut at number one on the Billboard 200 and his first album to top the charts since the 1976 release of Desire. For Modern Times, Dylan was nominated for three Grammy Awards, winning the awards for best contemporary folk/Americana album and best solo rock vocal performance for the song "Someday Baby." In 2009, Dylan released the album Together through Life, which also debuted at number one on the Billboard 200. His first Christmas album, Christmas in the Heart, was also released in 2009. Dylan's thirty-fifth studio album, Tempest, peaked at number three on the Billboard 200 following its release in September 2012. Also in 2012, Dylan was presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama. In 2013, Dylan was awarded the French Legion of Honor.

The year 2014 saw the release of The Basement Tapes Complete, a definitive compilation of the tracks recorded by Dylan and the Band in 1967, some of which were previously released on the 1975 album. The exhaustive new box set was another entry in the official releases of material previously popular among fans as bootlegs. In February 2015, Dylan's next studio album, Shadows in the Night, was released, containing covers of popular songs from the 1920s through the early 1960s. Though the songs are linked through the fact that singer Frank Sinatra recorded famous versions of each, Dylan himself as well as many critics suggested Shadows in the Night was less a group of Sinatra covers and more a new way of looking at familiar classics. The album received mostly positive reviews, and Dylan continued touring into 2015.

In October 2016, Dylan controversially made history when he became the first musician to be awarded the literary world's highest honor, the Nobel Prize in Literature, with the Swedish Academy defending its decision on the basis of Dylan's many years of compiled lyrics being comparable to poetry. While Dylan was rather silent on the news for several days following the announcement, celebrities and artists (including several authors) took to the internet to voice their opinions about the surprise winner, which were somewhat divided. Supporters claimed that Dylan's work had often been inspired by literature and specifically poets, and that he had published written works in the past; a collection celebrating his compositions over the years had been published in 2014 and a revised edition was pushed for release in November. Critics, on the other hand, lambasted the choice as an inappropriate crossover for the level of literature typically required of the category. Finally breaking his silence toward the end of October, Dylan said in an interview for the Telegraph that he appreciated the honor and would try to make the acceptance ceremony.

In 2020, Dylan sold his entire songwriting catalog to Universal Music in what was purported to be the largest acquisition ever of the publishing rights of a single songwriter. Under the deal, the music publishing company obtained the rights to more than six hundred of Dylan's songs. Dylan also released a new album in 2020 called Rough and Rowdy Ways, a rhythm and blues album that received positive reviews. The following year, Dylan experienced controversy again when claims surfaced that he had sexually abused a twelve-year-old girl in 1965. The lawsuit, made by an anonymous woman, alleged that Dylan drugged and abused the minor over a period of two months. The allegations were denied by Dylan and others close to him, and in 2022 a federal court in New York officially dismissed the case. After the year 2021 saw the release of a new live performance by Dylan that was only accessible for a limited time through internet streaming, in 2023 Dylan put out an album titled Shadow Kingdom, which consisted of reinterpretations of several songs from earlier in his musical catalog. He continued to tour and release new albums of live tracks and previously unreleased material throughout the early 2020s, including a massive box set titled The 1974 Live Recordings, with over 430 songs, in 2024.

Significance

Bob Dylan is one of the most influential and most covered songwriters in history. Rod Stewart, Eric Clapton, and Joe Cocker have routinely covered his songs, with the Byrds, Joan Baez, Bryan Ferry, Maria Muldaur, and the Grateful Dead even devoting entire albums to Dylan compositions. The list, meanwhile, of artists who have recorded at least one Dylan song is as diverse as it is long, and it includes the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Cash, U2, Cher, Bruce Springsteen, George Harrison, Stevie Wonder, Van Morrison, the Staple Singers, PJ Harvey, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, the Roches, the Ramones, the Neville Brothers, Rage Against the Machine, Norah Jones, and Adele among its better-known members.

Bibliography

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