Bob Dylan
May 24, 1941 — Duluth, Minnesota
Bob Dylan is an American singer-songwriter widely considered one of the greatest songwriters of all time, whose 69-year career has sold over 125 million records worldwide, earned him the Nobel Prize in Literature, and permanently altered the relationship between popular music and poetry.
From Duluth to Greenwich Village
Robert Allen Zimmerman was born May 24, 1941 in Duluth, Minnesota, and grew up in the iron-ore town of Hibbing. He was obsessed from early adolescence with rock and roll and rhythm and blues, and taught himself piano and guitar, performing in local bands before leaving for the University of Minnesota in 1959. He stayed barely a semester, then headed to New York City — drawn by the folk music scene centered in Greenwich Village — and arrived in January 1961. Renaming himself Bob Dylan (after the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas), he began performing at coffeehouses and quickly attracted the attention of Columbia Records, who signed him at 20. His debut album contained two original songs; within two years he had written some of the most celebrated protest songs in American history.
Voice of a Generation, Then Something Else
Albums like The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963), The Times They Are a-Changin' (1964), and Bringing It All Back Home (1965) made him the defining songwriter of the civil rights era, and his friendship with Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. placed him at the centre of the decade's most important political conversations. Then, characteristically, he turned his back on it: plugging in an electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, alienating his folk audience, and making Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde — records that expanded what pop music could contain. The move caused a furore, but history vindicated him completely.
Did You Know?
Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016 — the first musician ever to receive it — "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition." He famously did not respond to the Nobel Committee for weeks after the announcement, and sent a pre-recorded speech to the prize ceremony rather than attending in person, citing prior commitments.
Nobel Laureate and Endless Touring
Dylan's artistic restlessness produced reinvention across every decade: country albums, gospel albums, Americana, even a trilogy of Frank Sinatra standards. His Never Ending Tour, which began in 1988, has included over 3,000 concerts on every continent except Antarctica. The Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016 — awarded for "having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition" — acknowledged what many had argued for years: that his lyrics constitute poetry of the highest order. Songs like "Blowin' in the Wind," "The Times They Are a-Changin'," "Like a Rolling Stone," and "Mr. Tambourine Man" have entered the cultural bloodstream so deeply that their origins are sometimes forgotten, which is the fate only the greatest works achieve. His memoir Chronicles: Volume One (2004) is available on Amazon for anyone who wants to understand the making of a legend in his own words.