Dylan, Bob (1941–)

American singer and songwriter, musician, and poet, Bob Dylan is best known for his political protest songs from the 1960s. An icon of the American social unrest that characterized the decade, he incorporated politics, social commentary, philosophy, and literature in his lyrics and produced songs that still enjoy considerable popularity today. Although his more recent work has often received critical acclaim, his subsequent achievements have not attained the wide popularity of his work in the 1960s and 1970s, a time in the United States characterized by social upheaval and turmoil.

Born Robert Allen Zimmerman in Hibbing, Minnesota, to a middle-class Jewish family, Dylan had a fairly uneventful childhood. He exhibited an early interest in music and was particularly intrigued by the emerging genre of rock ‘n’ roll. Dylan came of age at a time when authority, including parental authority, was being questioned and conventional values were considered suspect. A new era was beginning, and Dylan was there to not only help usher it in but also to shape its direction.

After high school graduation, Dylan enrolled at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, where he rarely attended class but often performed folk songs written by others at coffeehouses. It was during this period that he began introducing himself as Bob Dylan or Dillon. He has never explained exactly the source for the pseudonym, sometimes alluding to an uncle and sometimes acknowledging a reference to the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas.

Dylan dropped out of college at the end of his freshman year. In 1961 at the age of 19, he traveled to New York City, finding refuge in Greenwich Village and again playing in coffeehouses. At the time, Greenwich Village was a community known for its support of personal and artistic freedom, and coffee-houses were the venues for aspiring young singers, musicians, poets, and actors.

Dylan was an ardent admirer of Woody Guthrie, the famous country-folk singer who wrote “This Land Is Your Land.”Guthrie, hailed by the political left as a true folk poet, had an undeniable influence on Dylan's early music and persona. Indeed, the young Dylan styled himself in appearance, mannerisms, and music after the famed folk singer and owes much of his earlier musical style to Guthrie. Part of the early Dylan mystique arose from people's knowledge that, having learned that Guthrie was dying in a New Jersey hospital, Dylan visited the incapacitated singer and reportedly sang for him.

After playing the coffeehouse circuit in Greenwich Village, Dylan gained some public recognition after a review in the New York Times by critic Robert Shelton. John Hammond, a legendary music business figure, signed him to Columbia Records. Dylan's first album debuted in 1961. It contained only two original songs and was destined to mediocre sales and publicity. Despite the undistinguished start, the company approved a second album, The Freewheelin'Bob Dylan. Consisting almost entirely of original compositions, this album included two of the most memorable songs of the 1960s, “Blowing in the Wind”and “A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall.”Dylan attracted growing attention from the folk community with the release of this album.

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