Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan, born Robert Allen Zimmerman on May 24, 1941, at St. Mary's Hospital in Duluth, Minnesota, is an American singer-songwriter and Broadway composer and book writer. He later legally changed his name to Robert Dylan. His paternal grandparents, Anna Kirghiz and Zigman Zimmerman, emigrated from Odessa in the Russian Empire to the United States following the 1905 pogroms against Jews, while his maternal grandparents, Florence and Ben Stone, were Lithuanian Jews who arrived in the US in 1902. Dylan's father, Abram Zimmerman, contracted polio when Dylan was six, prompting the family to relocate from Duluth to Hibbing, Minnesota, his mother Beatrice's hometown, where his father and paternal uncles operated a furniture and appliance store.

During his childhood in Hibbing, Dylan listened to the Grand Ole Opry radio show and was drawn to the music of Hank Williams, later writing that Williams's voice went through him "like an electric rod." He was similarly struck by the delivery of Johnnie Ray and, as a teenager, picked up rock and roll from radio stations broadcasting out of Shreveport and Little Rock. While attending Hibbing High School, Dylan formed several bands, including the Golden Chords, which performed covers of Little Richard and Elvis Presley. On January 31, 1959, he attended a Buddy Holly concert at the Duluth Armory, four days before Holly's fatal plane crash. In his Nobel Prize lecture, Dylan described Holly as "the archetype." That same year, his high school yearbook listed his ambition as joining Little Richard, and he performed twice with Bobby Vee under the name Elston Gunnn, playing piano.

Dylan enrolled at the University of Minnesota in September 1959, living at the Sigma Alpha Mu fraternity house and performing at the Ten O'Clock Scholar coffeehouse near campus. He became involved in the Dinkytown folk music circuit, and his interest shifted from rock and roll toward American folk music. It was during this period that he began introducing himself as Bob Dylan. In his memoir, he wrote that he considered the surname Dillon before encountering the poems of Dylan Thomas and choosing that spelling instead. He dropped out of college in May 1960 and traveled to New York City in January 1961, where he performed at clubs throughout Greenwich Village and visited his musical idol Woody Guthrie at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in New Jersey. He credited Guthrie, Robert Johnson's blues, and the structural forms of Hank Williams's country songs as early influences on his songwriting.

In September 1961, New York Times critic Robert Shelton published an enthusiastic review of Dylan's performance at Gerde's Folk City, and that same month Dylan played harmonica on folk singer Carolyn Hester's third album, bringing him to the attention of producer John Hammond, who signed him to Columbia Records. His debut album, Bob Dylan, released March 19, 1962, featured traditional folk, blues, and gospel material alongside two original compositions, "Talkin' New York" and "Song to Woody," selling approximately 5,000 copies in its first year. His follow-up, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, released in 1963, included "Girl from the North Country" and "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall," both of which adapted older folk songs. "Blowin' in the Wind" in 1963 and "The Times They Are a-Changin'" in 1964 became anthems for the civil rights and antiwar movements.

In 1965 and 1966, Dylan generated significant controversy by adopting electrically amplified rock instrumentation on Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde. His six-minute single "Like a Rolling Stone," released in 1965, expanded the commercial and creative boundaries of popular music. Following a motorcycle crash in 1966, Dylan stopped touring for seven years. During that period, he recorded extensively with members of the Band, work that eventually produced the album The Basement Tapes in 1975. He also explored country music and rural themes on John Wesley Harding in 1967, Nashville Skyline in 1969, and New Morning in 1970. Blood on the Tracks in 1975 and Time Out of Mind in 1997 earned him widespread critical acclaim, with the latter winning the Grammy Award for Album of the Year. Dylan has toured continuously since the late 1980s on what became known as the Never Ending Tour, and he continues to release music.

Since 1994, Dylan has published ten books of paintings and drawings, with his visual work exhibited in major art galleries. His life has been the subject of several films, including the 2024 biopic A Complete Unknown. His accolades include an Academy Award, ten Grammy Awards, Kennedy Center Honors in 1997, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012, a Pulitzer Prize special citation in 2008, and the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition. He has been inducted into both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame. With an estimated 125 million records sold worldwide, he ranks among the best-selling musicians in history.

Dylan's Broadway credits as composer and book writer include The Times They Are a-Changin' and Girl From The North Country, both of which draw on his catalog of songs.