Bob Dylan Biography

Bob Dylan (born Robert Allen Zimmerman, May 24, 1941) is an American singer-songwriter, author, musician, and poet who has been a major figure in popular music for five decades. Much of Dylan's most recognized work dates from the 1960s, when he became an informal chronicler and a reluctant figurehead of American unrest. A number of his songs, such as "Blowin' in the Wind", "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" and "The Times They Are a-Changin'", became anthems of the anti-war and civil rights movements. His most recent studio album, Modern Times, released on August 29, 2006, entered the U.S. album charts at #1, making him, at age 65, the oldest living person to top those charts.

Dylan's early lyrics incorporated politics, social commentary, philosophy and literary influences, defying existing pop music conventions and appealing widely to the counterculture of the time. While expanding and personalizing musical styles, he has shown steadfast devotion to many traditions of American song, from folk and country/blues to rock and roll and rockabilly, to English, Scottish and Irish folk music, even jazz, swing, Broadway, hard rock and gospel.

Dylan performs with the guitar, keyboard and harmonica. Backed by a changing lineup of musicians, he has toured steadily since the late 1980s on what has been dubbed the "Never Ending Tour". He has also performed alongside other major artists, such as The Band, Tom Petty, Joan Baez, George Harrison, The Grateful Dead, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Paul Simon, Eric Clapton, Patti Smith, Emmylou Harris, Bruce Springsteen, U2, The Rolling Stones, Joni Mitchell, Jack White, Merle Haggard, Neil Young, Van Morrison, Ringo Starr and Stevie Nicks. Although his accomplishments as performer and recording artist have been central to his career, his songwriting is generally regarded as his greatest contribution.

His recordings have earned him Grammy, Golden Globe and Academy Awards, and he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame and Songwriters Hall of Fame. Dylan was listed as one of TIME Magazine's 100 most influential people of the 20th century. In 2004, Bob Dylan was ranked #2 in Rolling Stone Magazine's 100 Greatest Artists of All Time, second to The Beatles. In January 1990, Dylan was made a Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres by French Minister of Culture Jack Lang; in 2000, he was awarded the Polar Music Prize by the Royal Swedish Academy of Music; and in 2007 Dylan was awarded the Prince of Asturias Award in Arts. He has also been nominated several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Life and career

Origins and musical beginnings

Robert Allen Zimmerman (Jewish name: Shabtai Zisel ben Avraham) was born on May 24, 1941, in Duluth, Minnesota, and raised there and in Hibbing, Minnesota, on the Mesabi Iron Range northwest of Lake Superior. Research by Dylan’s biographers has shown that his paternal grandparents, Zigman and Anna Zimmerman, emigrated from Odessa in Ukraine to the United States after the antisemitic pogroms of 1905. His mother’s grandparents, Benjamin and Lybba Edelstein, were Lithuanian Jews who arrived in America in 1902. (In his 2004 autobiography, Chronicles, Dylan wrote that his paternal grandmother's maiden name was Kyrgyz and her family originated from Istanbul, although she grew up in the Kağızman district of Kars in Eastern Turkey. He also wrote that his paternal grandfather was from Trabzon on the Black Sea coast of Turkey.)

His parents, Abraham Zimmerman and Beatrice "Beatty" Stone were part of the area's small but close-knit Jewish community. Zimmerman lived in Duluth until age seven. When his father was stricken with polio, the family returned to nearby Hibbing, where Zimmerman spent the rest of his childhood. Abraham was recalled by one of Bob's childhood friends as strict and unwelcoming, whereas his mother was remembered as warm and friendly.

Zimmerman spent much of his youth listening to the radio — first to the powerful blues and country stations broadcasting from Shreveport and, later, to early rock and roll. He formed several bands in high school. The first, The Shadow Blasters, was short-lived. The next band, The Golden Chords, lasted longer and played covers: their performance of Danny and the Juniors' "Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay" at their high school talent show was so loud that the principal cut the microphone off. In his 1959 school year book, Robert Zimmerman listed his ambition as "To join Little Richard." The same year, he performed two dates under the name of Elston Gunn with Bobby Vee, playing piano and providing handclaps. Zimmerman enrolled at the University of Minnesota in September 1959 and moved to Minneapolis. His early focus on rock and roll gave way to an interest in American folk music, typically performed with an acoustic guitar. He has recalled, "The first thing that turned me onto folk singing was Odetta. I heard a record of hers in a record store. Right then and there, I went out and traded my electric guitar and amplifier for an acoustical guitar, a flat-top Gibson". He may have taken guitar lessons with Marvin Karlins at the University of Minnesota. He soon began to perform at the 10 O'clock Scholar, a coffee house a few blocks from campus, and became actively involved in the local Dinkytown folk music circuit, fraternizing with local folk enthusiasts and occasionally "borrowing" many of their albums.

During his Dinkytown days, Zimmerman began introducing himself as "Bob Dylan". In his autobiography, Chronicles (2004), he wrote: "What I was going to do as soon as I left home was just call myself Robert Allen.... It sounded like a Scottish king and I liked it." However, by reading Downbeat magazine, he discovered that there was already a saxophonist called David Allyn. Around the same time, he became acquainted with the poetry of Dylan Thomas. Robert Zimmerman felt he had to choose between Robert Allyn and Robert Dylan: "I couldn't decide — the letter D came on stronger" he explained. He decided on "Bob" because there were several Bobbies in popular music at the time.

Relocation to New York and record deal

Dylan quit college at the end of his freshman year. He stayed in Minneapolis, working the folk circuit there with temporary journeys in Denver, Colorado; Madison, Wisconsin; and Chicago, Illinois. In January 1961, he headed for New York City to perform and to visit his ailing musical idol Woody Guthrie in a New Jersey hospital. Guthrie had been a revelation to Dylan and was the biggest influence on his early performances. Dylan would later say of Guthrie's work, "You could listen to his songs and actually learn how to live." In the hospital room, Dylan also met Woody's old road-buddy Ramblin' Jack Elliott visiting Guthrie the day after returning from his trip to Europe. He and Elliott became friends, and much of Guthrie's repertoire was actually channeled through Elliott. Dylan paid tribute to Elliott in Chronicles (2004).

From April to September of 1961 he played at various clubs around Greenwich Village. Dylan gained some public recognition after a positive review in The New York Times by critic Robert Shelton for a show he played at Gerde's Folk City in September. Also in September he played harmonica on a few tracks on folk singer Carolyn Hester's first album for Columbia Records, which producer John Hammond was working on. This brought full awareness to John Hammond of Bob Dylan's talents, so he signed Dylan to Columbia Records that October. His performances, like those on his first Columbia album Bob Dylan (1962), consisted of familiar folk, blues and gospel material combined with two of his own songs. As Dylan continued to record for Columbia, he recorded more than a dozen songs for Broadside Magazine, a folk music magazine and record label, under the pseudonym Blind Boy Grunt. In August 1962, he went to the Supreme Court building in New York and changed his name to Robert Dylan.

By the time Dylan's next record, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, was released in 1963, he had begun to make his name as both a singer and a songwriter. Many of the songs on this album were labelled protest songs, inspired partly by Guthrie and influenced by Pete Seeger's passion for topical songs. "Oxford Town," for example, was a sardonic account of James Meredith's ordeal as the first black student to risk enrollment at the University of Mississippi.

His most famous song of the time, "Blowin' in the Wind", partially derived its melody from the traditional slave song "No More Auction Block", while its lyrics questioned the social and political status quo. The song was widely recorded and became an international hit for Peter, Paul and Mary, setting a precedent for other artists. While Dylan's topical songs solidified his early reputation, Freewheelin' also included a mixture of love songs and jokey, surreal talking blues. Humor was a large part of Dylan's persona, and the range of material on the album impressed many listeners, including The Beatles. George Harrison said, "We just played it, just wore it out. The content of the song lyrics and just the attitude — it was incredibly original and wonderful."

The Freewheelin' song "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall", built melodically from a loose adaptation of the stanza tune of the folk ballad "Lord Randall", with its veiled references to nuclear apocalypse, gained even more resonance as the Cuban missile crisis developed only a few weeks after Dylan began performing it. Like "Blowin' in the Wind", "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" marked an important new direction in modern songwriting, blending a stream-of-consciousness, imagist lyrical attack with traditional folk progressions.

Soon after the release of Freewheelin, Dylan emerged as a dominant figure of the so-called "new folk movement" headquartered in Greenwich Village. As an interpreter of traditional songs, Dylan's singing voice was untrained and had an unusual edge to it. Robert Shelton described Dylan's vocal style as "a rusty voice suggesting Guthrie's old performances, etched in gravel like Dave Van Ronk's" Many of his most famous early songs first reached the public through versions by other performers who were more immediately palatable. Joan Baez became Dylan's advocate, as well as his lover. Baez jumpstarted Dylan's performance career by inviting him onstage during her concerts, and recorded several of his early songs; she was influential in bringing Dylan to national and international prominence.

Others who recorded and had hits with Dylan's songs in the mid 1960s included The Byrds, Sonny and Cher, The Hollies, Peter, Paul and Mary, Manfred Mann, and The Turtles. Most attempted to impart more of a pop feel and rhythm to the songs where Dylan and Baez performed them mostly as sparse folk pieces keying rhythmically off the vocals. These covers became so ubiquitous that CBS started to promote him with the tag "Nobody Sings Dylan Like Dylan".