Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan (born Robert Zimmerman, 1941) is the most important songwriter in the era of recorded music. He grew up in Duluth and Hibbing, Minnesota, in a middle-class Jewish family. At the University of Minnesota, he began playing folk music at parties and coffeehouses; he also became enamored of the songwriter and activist Woody Guthrie. In early 1961, Dylan relocated to New York City, playing clubs in Greenwich Village at the peak of the folk music revival. Like his idol Guthrie, he began writing his own songs, some of which became generational anthems. By 1964, Dylan was transitioning from this “finger-pointin’” phase while expanding the vocabulary and subject matter of popular songwriting. He infused traditional song structures with literary allusion and techniques associated with symbolist poetry. Meanwhile, Dylan famously “went electric” in 1965, recording and performing with full bands in a style that many folk music purists found offensively commercial. Following a motorcycle accident in 1966, Dylan became somewhat reclusive, playing in public only occasionally. With members of what would become known as The Band, he recorded dozens of new songs in 1967, ostensibly as demos for other artists. These homemade “Basement Tapes” formed the basis of the first widely circulated rock bootleg album. Dylan continued releasing official albums, notably the austere John Wesley Harding (1967), but he did not tour again until 1974. In 1975, at the height of the confessional singer-songwriter movement, he released the compelling Blood on the Tracks, consisting mainly of emotionally charged lost-love songs. That same year, he launched the carnivalesque “Rolling Thunder Revue” tour with Joan Baez and a large ensemble of folk and rock musicians. From 1979 to 1981, Dylan committed himself to recording and performing music with evangelical Christian messages, alienating many followers much as he had done by going electric. While he remained active throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Dylan’s critical and commercial disappointments outnumbered his successes. Then, in 1997, the album Time Out of Mind ushered in a new phase, as he meshed blues, country, swing, rockabilly, and traditional balladry with lyrics reflecting a darkening worldview; his critically acclaimed 21st-century albums have sustained a long resurgence of popularity. Meanwhile, he has toured constantly since the late 1980s, performing around 100 shows a year. He published a memoir, Chronicles, Volume One, in 2004, and a book of tributes to some of his favorite recordings, The Philosophy of Modern Song, in 2022. In 2016, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.