Bob Dylan

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture by Bryan Garman

The most influential musician to emerge out of the social unrest of the early 1960s, Bob Dylan dramatically expanded the aesthetic and political boundaries of popular song. Recognized almost immediately as the voice of his generation, Dylan began his brilliant career by performing blues, folk ballads, and his own topical compositions, many of which addressed issues of racial injustice and protested against the threat of nuclear war. By 1965 he transformed himself into a rock star, the first of many metamorphoses he would undergo over the next three decades. Mercurial, iconoclastic, and enigmatic, Dylan variously presented himself as a poet, gospel singer, bluesman, country musician, and minstrel, recording more than thirty albums that would make him one of the major popular artists of the twentieth century.

"Dylan has invented himself. He's made himself up from scratch," wrote playwright Sam Shepard. The point, Shepard suggested, "isn't to figure [Dylan] out but to take him in," to use him "as a means to adventure." Dylan began his extraordinary odyssey as Robert Zimmerman, the son of Jewish merchants from Hibbing, Minnesota, where he enjoyed a comfortable middle-class life. Although he was bar mitzvahed, Dylan listened to prophets who were unfamiliar to his parents. Little Richard, Elvis Presley, and Hank Williams inspired the young guitar player, while the rebels James Dean and Marlon Brando shaped the attitude he carried to the University of Minnesota in 1959.

His days as a student were numbered. Having received an assortment of Huddie "Leadbelly" Leadbetter's recordings for graduation gifts, Dylan was more interested in music than his studies and promptly matriculated to Dinkytown, a hip section of Minneapolis renowned for its folk scene. It was here that he obtained a copy of Woody Guthrie's autobiography, Bound for Glory (1943), a book that inspired him to learn the Dust Bowl balladeer's compositions and to perform them in local coffeehouses. By 1960, this nineteen-year-old changed his name and adopted Guthrie's nomadic ways, embarking on a cross-country trip that ended in New York City early in 1961.

Dylan immersed himself in the bohemian culture of Greenwich Village, where leftists old and new were participating in the folk music revival. Pete Seeger, Ramblin' Jack Elliot, Ralph Rinzler, and scores of other young people enamored with folk music attended jam sessions in Washington Square Park and gathered regularly to pay homage to Guthrie, the movement's patron saint. Hospitalized with Huntington's chorea, Guthrie made weekend visits to the East Orange, New Jersey, home of Bob and Sidsell Gleason, where Dylan temporarily resided. The two men established a warm relationship. Disease had nearly destroyed Guthrie's creative and communicative abilities, but he managed to express his enthusiasm for his admirer. When Dylan debuted at Gerde's Folk City in April, 1961, he donned one of his mentor's old suits for the occasion.

A self-described "Woody Guthrie juke box," Dylan recalled that he was "completely taken over by his spirit," a claim to which his self-titled album (1962), attests. Released soon after he was signed to Columbia Records by John Hammond, this collection of folk standards and two originals established Dylan's credentials as an authentic traditional artist, and as a nasal-voiced, road-weary traveler who had hoboed for most of his young life. The album included the poignant "Song to Woody," a ballad written to the tune of Guthrie's "1913 Massacre" that musically, stylistically, and lyrically declared Dylan's intent to carry his hero's mantle. Cover versions of songs by bluesmen Blind Lemon Jefferson and Bukka White placed Dylan firmly in the folk tradition as did a 1961 press interview, during which he claimed to have played with Jefferson and the Texas songster Mance Lipscomb.

Bored with the predictability and sheltered nature of his middle-class life, Dylan fabricated a past full of hard traveling and hard living. If, like his fellow baby boomers, his life was smothered by relative affluence and haunted by the specter of nuclear war, his ersatz travels were filled with adventure and possibility. But if Dylan responded to his generation's ennui and malaise, he also began to absorb and shape its politics. "Whether he liked it or not, Dylan sang for us," wrote the former president of Students for a Democratic Society, Todd Gitlin. "We followed his career as if he were singing our song; we got in the habit of asking where he was taking us next."

The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963) was born out of his emerging political consciousness. Perhaps the most stinging indictment of the United States government ever released by the commercial recording industry, "Masters of War" condemned the men who produce weapons of mass destruction and warned them that even the most benevolent God would not absolve their transgressions. The politics of Freewheelin' did not stop here. "Oxford Town" mocked segregation at the University of Mississippi; "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" imagined a stark and terrifying post-nuclear landscape; and "Blowin' in the Wind," which became a hit for Peter, Paul and Mary, was a simple, though poetic, call for racial harmony. After becoming the star of the 1963 Newport Folk Festival, Dylan actively supported a number of political causes, performing at a voter registration rally in Mississippi and at the March on Washington that summer. Meanwhile, the title track for his third album, The Times They Are A-Changin' (1964), furnished the anthem for a generation dedicated to transforming the social order.