Background

Bob Dylan was born Robert Allen Zimmerman on May 24, 1941, in Duluth, Minnesota to the family of an electric-appliance shop owner Abram Zimmerman and Beatrice "Beatty" Stone. Dylan's paternal grandparents, Zigman and Anna Zimmerman emigrated from Odessa in the Russian Empire (now Ukraine) to the United States following the anti-Semitic outrages of 1905. His maternal grandparents, Ben and Florence Stone, were Lithuanian Jews who arrived in the United States in 1902. In his autobiography, Dylan wrote that his paternal grandmother's maiden name was Kirghiz and her family originated from the Kağızman district of Kars Province in northeastern Turkey.

From the age of six, Bob Dylan and his younger brother David were raised in the northern mining town of Hibbing, Minnesota, on the Mesabi Range west of Lake Superior. By the time he was ten, Dylan began to get piano lessons and he was beginning to listen to the country, blues, and (a little later) the rock 'n' roll. His earliest musical influences, Hank Williams, Muddy Waters, Jimmy Reed, Howlin' Wolf, and John Lee Hooker, were brought to him via the airwaves of a Shreveport, Louisiana, radio station. In his teens, Dylan's father bought him an electric guitar and he started a series of rock 'n' roll cover bands with friends from school and summer camp called The Jokers, The Shadow Blasters, and, lastly, The Golden Chords. As well as a group he fronted under the pseudonym, Elston Gunn. Between the ages of 10 and 18, Dylan ran away from home seven times.

Education

Bob Dylan graduated from Hibbing High School in 1959. The same year he enrolled at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, where he began performing folk and country songs at local cafés, taking the name "Bob Dillon" (Despite a popular myth to the contrary, the pseudonym was not inspired by Welsh poet Dylan Thomas - who he later professed to dislike - but by the main character from the popular Western television series Gunsmoke.) and began creating his own mythological background, which made him out to be everything from an Indian to a hobo to Bobby Vee. He gave concerts at such popular Minneapolis night clubs as Ten O’Clock Scholar cafe and St. Paul’s Purple Onion Pizza Parlor. Dylan soon became more involved with his musical career than with his studies, so he dropped out of school in 1960 and headed straight for New York City.

Career

In 1960, Dylan dropped out of college and moved to New York, where his idol, the legendary folk singer Woody Guthrie, was hospitalized with a rare hereditary disease of the nervous system. Guthrie encouraged Dylan to write and perform his own songs, and one of Dylan's most popular early tunes was titled “Song to Woody.” Dylan worked to imitate Guthrie's style. He visited with Guthrie regularly in his hospital room; became a regular in the folk clubs and coffeehouses of Greenwich Village; met a host of other musicians; and began writing songs at an astonishing pace, including "Song to Woody," a tribute to his ailing hero.

In the fall of 1961, after one of Dylan's performances received a rave review in The New York Times, he signed a recording contract with Columbia Records, at which point he legally changed his surname to Dylan. Released early in 1962, Bob Dylan contained only two original songs but showcased Dylan's gravel-voiced singing style in a number of traditional folk songs and covers of blues songs.

The 1963 release of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan marked Dylan's emergence as one of the most original and poetic voices in the history of American popular music. The album included two of the most memorable 1960s folk songs, "Blowin' in the Wind" (which later became a huge hit for the folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary) and "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall." His next album, The Times They Are A-Changin', firmly established Dylan as the definitive songwriter of the '60s protest movement, a reputation that only increased after he became involved with one of the movement's established icons, Joan Baez, in 1963.

While his romantic relationship with Baez lasted only two years, it benefited both performers immensely in terms of their music careers - Dylan wrote some of Baez's best-known material, and Baez introduced him to thousands of fans through her concerts. By 1964 Dylan was playing 200 concerts annually but had become tired of his role as "the" folk singer-songwriter of the protest movement. Another Side of Bob Dylan, recorded in 1964, was a much more personal, introspective collection of songs, far less politically charged than Dylan's previous efforts.

In 1965, Dylan scandalized many of his folkie fans by recording the half-acoustic, half-electric album Bringing It All Back Home, backed by a nine-piece band. On July 25, 1965, he was famously booed at the Newport Folk Festival when he performed electrically for the first time. The albums that followed, Highway 61 Revisited (1965) - which included the seminal rock song "Like a Rolling Stone" - and the two-record set Blonde on Blonde (1966) represented Dylan at his most innovative. With his unmistakable voice and unforgettable lyrics, Dylan brought the worlds of music and literature together as no one else had.

Over the course of the next three decades, Dylan continued to reinvent himself. Following a near-fatal motorcycle accident in July 1966, Dylan spent almost a year recovering in seclusion. His next two albums, John Wesley Harding (1967) - including "All Along the Watchtower," later recorded by guitar great Jimi Hendrix - and the unabashedly country-ish Nashville Skyline (1969) were far more mellow than his earlier works. Critics blasted the two-record set Self-Portrait (1970) and Tarantula, a long-awaited collection of writings Dylan published in 1971. In 1973, Dylan appeared in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, a feature film directed by Sam Peckinpah. He also wrote the film's soundtrack, which became a hit and included the now-classic song, "Knockin' on Heaven's Door."

In 1974, Dylan began his first full-scale tour since his accident, embarking on a sold-out nationwide tour with his longtime backup band, the Band. An album he recorded with the Band, Planet Waves, became his first No. 1 album ever. He followed these successes with the celebrated 1975 album Blood on the Tracks and Desire (1976), each of which hit No. 1 as well.

After a painful split with his wife, Sara Lowndes - the song "Sara" on Desire was Dylan's plaintive but unsuccessful attempt to win Lowndes back - Dylan again reinvented himself, declaring in 1979 that he was a born-again Christian. The evangelical Slow Train Coming was a commercial hit and won Dylan his first Grammy Award. The tour and albums that followed were less successful, however, and Dylan's religious leanings soon became less overt in his music. In 1982, he was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

Beginning in the 1980s, Dylan began touring full time, sometimes with fellow legends Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and the Grateful Dead. Notable albums during this period included Infidels (1983); the five-disc retrospective Biograph (1985); Knocked Out Loaded (1986); and Oh Mercy (1989), which became his best-received album in years. He recorded two albums with the all-star band the Traveling Wilburys, also featuring George Harrison, Roy Orbison, Tom Petty, and Jeff Lynne. In 1994, Dylan returned to his folk roots, winning the Grammy Award for Best Traditional Folk Album for World Gone Wrong.

Dylan's 1997 album Time Out of Mind reestablished this one-time folk icon as one of rock's preeminent wise men, winning three Grammy Awards. He continued his vigorous touring schedule, including a memorable performance in 1997 for Pope John Paul II in which he played "Knockin' on Heaven's Door," and a 1999 tour with Paul Simon. In 2000, he recorded the single "Things Have Changed" for the soundtrack of the film Wonder Boys, starring Michael Douglas. The song won Dylan a Golden Globe and an Academy Award for Best Original Song.

Dylan then took time out from his music to tell the story of his life. The singer released Chronicles: Volume One, the first in a three-book memoir series, in the fall of 2004. Dylan gave his first full interview in 20 years for a documentary released in 2005. Entitled No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, the film was directed by Martin Scorsese.

In 2006, Dylan released the studio album Modern Times. After hitting stores in late August, it reached the top of the album charts the next month. A mixture of blues, country, and folk, the album was praised for its rich sound and imagery. Several critics also remarked the album had a playful, knowing quality. Showing no signs of slowing down, Dylan continued to tour throughout the first decade of the 21st century and released the studio album Together Through Life in April 2009. In 2010, he released a bootleg album called The Witmark Demos, followed by a new boxed set entitled Bob Dylan: The Original Mono Recordings. In addition, he exhibited 40 of his original paintings for a solo show at the National Gallery of Denmark. In 2011, the artist released yet another live album, Bob Dylan in Concert - Brandeis University 1963, and in September 2012, he delivered his newest studio album, Tempest. Shadows in the Night, a cover album of American standards, followed in 2015.

A year later, Dylan released Fallen Angels, his 37th studio album, which features more classic songs from the Great American Songbook. In 2017, he continued to celebrate the classics with his three-disc studio album Triplicate, which features 30 American standards, including “Stormy Weather," “As Time Goes By” and “The Best Is Yet To Come.”

Dylan was back in the news in November 2017 with the release of the boxed set Trouble No More - The Bootleg Series Vol. 13 / 1979-1981. Around that time it was announced that his old recording studio in Manhattan's Greenwich Village was being reopened as a luxury apartment building, with lofts available for a minimum of $12,500 per month. Not long afterward, the door to his room at the famed Chelsea Hotel was sold at an auction for $100,000.

In 2018, Dylan was one of the artists featured on the six-track EP Universal Love: Wedding Songs Reimagined, a collection of classics from various eras revised with same-sex pronouns. Dylan recorded the 1929 standard "She's Funny That Way" as "He's Funny That Way," while later hits like "My Girl" and "And Then He Kissed Me" also received fresh takes with a pronoun twist.

That year Dylan also launched a whiskey brand called Heaven’s Door Spirits. In August, the Heaven Hill Distillery filed a lawsuit over claims of trademark infringement.

September 2019 brought the announcement that the artist planned to release another cache of little-heard material with Bob Dylan (Featuring Johnny Cash) - Travelin’ Thru, 1967-1969: The Bootleg Series Vol. 15. Along with songs from Dylan's 1969 collaborations with Cash, the three-CD set reportedly included tracks from his 1970 session with bluegrass great Earl Scruggs and outtakes from the 1967 John Wesley Harding and 1969 Nashville Skyline recording sessions.

Achievements

• 

  Bob Dylan was one of the most important figures in contemporary music during the 1960s, comparable in impact to Elvis Presley in the 1950s. Bob Dylan was the first and most significant singer-songwriter to emerge from the folk music scene, inspiring a whole generation of folk (and later rock) artists to explore the vast potential of song-writing in matters socially conscious, personal, spiritual, philosophical and intellectual. Rolling Stone has ranked Dylan at number one in its 2015 list of the 100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time, and listed "Like A Rolling Stone" as the "Greatest Song of all Time" in their 2011 list. In 2008, it was estimated that Dylan had sold about 120 million albums worldwide.
  
  In 1989, when Dylan was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Bruce Springsteen spoke at the ceremony, declaring that "Bob freed the mind the way Elvis freed the body. He invented a new way a pop singer could sound, broke through the limitations of what a recording artist could achieve and changed the face of rock and roll forever." In 1997, Dylan became the first rock star ever to receive Kennedy Center Honors, considered the nation's highest award for artistic excellence.
  
  Throughout his career, Dylan has received awards such as doctor honoris causa by Princeton University, various Grammy and the lifetime achievement award in recognition of his artistic career. Commander of the order of French arts and letters.
  
  In 2001, Dylan would win an Oscar for the best original song and a Golden Globe for things have changed, a theme included in the soundtrack of the movie the wonder boys, directed by Curtis Hanson. In 2006, he received two new Grammy awards for modern times, a disc released that same year and awarded as the best contemporary folk album. In addition, he would receive recognition as the best rock soloist for his work on his song “someday baby.”
  
  In June 2007, the musician was awarded the Prince of Asturias Award for the arts, and a year later received an honorary recognition of the Pulitzer Prize for his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by his lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power. In May 2012, he received the presidential medal of freedom from President Barack Obama. November 2013 was the year when Bob Dylan would receive the award of the Legion of Honor from the French minister of education Aurélie Filippetti. In February 2015, Dylan accepted the MusiCares person of the year award from the national academy of recording arts sciences, in recognition of his artistic and philanthropic contributions to society.
  
  On October 13, 2016, the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel prize for literature for creating a new poetic expression within the great tradition of American song. The New York Times newspaper reported that Dylan, at 75, is the first musician to win is the award. A year later, in 2017, the secretary of the Swedish Academy, Sara Danius announced that the academy had met with Bob Dylan in a private ceremony in Stockholm, taking advantage of the presence of the singer to give two concerts in the city, during which the academy congratulated him for the award, and Bob Dylan received his medal and diploma: “twelve members of the academy were present. now the name of Bob Dylan is inscribed as the first musician in history to receive the” Nobel prize for literature.”

Works

More photos

• book

  • Tarantula

    (Music legend Bob Dylan's only work of fiction - a combina...)

    1971
  • The Lyrics: 1961-2012

    (A beautiful, comprehensive volume of Dylan’s lyrics, from...)

    2016
  • The Nobel Lecture

    (Published for the first time in a beautiful collectible e...)

    2017
  • Bob Dylan: Face Value

    (English summary: In addition to his unique abilities as a...)

    2014
  • Revisionist Art

    (In Revisionist Art, Bob Dylan offers silkscreened covers ...)

    2013
  • Chronicles: Volume One

    (The celebrated first memoir from arguably the most influe...)

    2004
  • Lyrics: 1962-2002

    (Dylan is a musical and political icon. From his early day...)

    2004
  • Saved 1980
  • Writings and Drawings 1973
  • Bob Dylan: Lyrics, 1962-1985 1985
  • The Lyrics: Since 1962 2014
  • Drawn Blank 1994
  • The Drawn Blank Series 2008
  • The Brazil Series 2010
  • Bob Dylan - the Asia Series 2011

• music

  • Bob Dylan 1962
  • The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan 1963
  • The Times They Are a Changin 1964
  • Another Side Of Bob Dylan 1964
  • Bringing It All Back Home 1965
  • Highway 61 Revisited 1965
  • Blonde On Blonde 1966
  • John Wesley Harding 1967
  • Nashville Skyline 1969
  • Self-Portrait 1970
  • New Morning 1970
  • Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid 1973
  • Dylan 1973
  • Planet Waves 1974
  • Blood on the Tracks 1975
  • The Basement Tapes 1975
  • Desire 1976
  • Street-Legal 1978
  • Slow Train Coming 1979
  • Shot Of Love 1981
  • Infidels 1983
  • Empire Burlesque 1985
  • Knocked Out Loaded 1986
  • Down In The Groove 1988
  • Oh Mercy 1989
  • Under The Red Sky 1990
  • Good As I Been to You 1992
  • World Gone Wrong 1993
  • Time Out Of Mind 1997
  • Love And Theft 2001
  • Modern Times 2006
  • Together Through Life 2009
  • Christmas In The Heart 2009
  • Tempest 2012
  • Shadows in the Night 2015
  • Fallen Angels 2016
  • Triplicate 2017

Religion

Growing up in Hibbing, Minnesota, Dylan and his family were part of the area's small but close-knit Jewish community, and in May 1954 Dylan had his Bar Mitzvah. Although raised Jewish (being of fully Jewish heritage), he converted to a born-again version of Christianity in the late 1970s. He drifted away from Christianity later, though, returning to Judaism in the 1990s and 2000s by studying and attending services with an ultra-Orthodox Jewish sect, the Chabad Lubavitcher Chassids.

Although he avoids discussing religion now, Dylan said in a 1997 interview with Rolling Stone that he's no longer a follower of any organized religion.

Politics

Despite his reputation as a "protest singer," Bob Dylan was never very active politically and very rarely rallied for causes. Although he did some work in support of the civil rights movements and often fought individual injustices (most famously, that of Rubin 'Hurricane' Carter), many of his peers in the folk community found his apparent indifference to politics frustrating. His music was used and inspired anti-war movements, the civil rights movement, and a general critique of the power structures of the day. However, his perspective makes it hard to categorize him.

Views

Dylan's album Desire included the song "Hurricane," written by Dylan about the boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, then serving life in prison after what many felt was a wrongful conviction of triple homicide in 1967. Dylan was one of many prominent public figures who helped popularize Carter's cause, leading to a retrial in 1976, when he was again convicted.

In 2012 Dylan claimed to Rolling Stone magazine that he was a philosophical believer in transfiguration. He says he came to believe in it after reading "Hell's Angel" by Sonny Barger, former president of the notorious Hell's Angels motorcycle gang, which included a passage about Bobby Zimmerman, a Hell's Angel "president" who is erroneously reported to have died in a biking accident in 1965, coincidentally the same year Dylan was at the zenith of his fame (actually it was 1961 that the biker Zimmerman died, around the time that Dylan started getting noticed in Greenwich Village). Coincidentally, Dylan's birth name was also Robert Zimmerman, the last name also shared by the book's co-authors, Kent Zimmerman and Keith Zimmerman.

Quotations: "There's no black and white, left and right to me anymore; there's only up and down and down is very close to the ground."

"I don't call myself a poet because I don't like the word."

"Chaos is a friend of mine."

"I think of a hero as someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom."

"I think a poet is anybody who wouldn't call himself a poet."

"We may not be able to defeat these swine, but we don't have to join them."

"You can't be wise and in love at the same time."

"The people in my songs are all me."

"Don't ask me nothin' about nothin'. I just might tell you the truth."

Membership

Bob Dylan is a member of the Academy of Arts Berlin, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

• 

  Academy of Arts Berlin , Germany

• 

  American Academy of Arts and Sciences , United States

• 

  American Academy of Arts and Letters , United States

Personality

As much as the public and critics adore Dylan, they are also frustrated as attempts to gain insight are met with toying word games and sometimes downright humiliation.

Bob Dylan is known to introduce The Beatles to pot-smoking, during their first meeting in New York; each told the press later, "We just laughed all night.".

Bob Dylan is an avid metalworker. He put his iron-work sculptures on display in 2012-2013 in London.

Despite rumors that he hates rap music, Dylan cites several rappers as having "brilliant minds" and, in his "Chronicles" states that he is a big fan of several Old School rappers, particularly Public Enemy, who were one of his favorite artists of that era. Many see an early connection to rap in Dylan's music, particularly the song "Subterranean Homesick Blues". However, Dylan apparently dislikes the commercialism of much modern hip-hop and warned popular rappers that "sometimes less is more". When he hosted "Bob Dylan's Radio Theme Time Hour", during his "Mother's Day" hour in 2008, Dylan played "Momma Said Knock You Out" by LL Cool J and was heard to rap along with the first verse. LL Cool J himself was thrilled when he heard this.

Physical Characteristics: Dylan's physical image is characterized by an unorganized conk of hair, stovepipe legs, and facial scowl. His height is 5' 7½" or 1,71 meters.

Quotes from others about the person

• The Nobel Prize for Literature is yet another step towards immortality for Bob Dylan. The rebellious, reclusive, unpredictable artist/composer is exactly where the Nobel Prize for Literature needs to be. His gift with words is unsurpassable. Out of my repertoire spanning 60 years, no songs have been more moving and worthy in their depth, darkness, fury, mystery, beauty, and humor than Bob's. None has been more of a pleasure to sing. None will come again." - Joan Baez, former Dylan's love interest and an American folk singer, and songwriter, known for her distinctive vocal style as well as her outspoken political views
  
  "A voice like sand and glue." - David Bowie, English singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, record producer, arranger, painter, and actor
  
  "Dylan creates a mythic atmosphere out of the land around us. The land we walk on every day and never see until someone shows it to us." - Sam Shepard, American actor, playwright, author, screenwriter, and director
  
  "Bob Dylan took a lot of air out of the room when it came to songwriters. Everybody had a tough row to hoe distinguishing themselves once Bob invented our job." - Steve Earle, American rock, country, and folk singer-songwriter

Interests

• steampunk metalworking

• Politicians

  Barack Obama

• Writers

  Leo Tolstoy, Henry Miller, Anton Chekhov, Joseph Conrad

• Artists

  Mark Rothko

• Sport & Clubs

  baseball, boxing

• Music & Bands

  Hank Williams, Muddy Waters, Jimmy Reed, Howlin' Wolf, John Lee Hooker, Elvis Presley

Connections

Dylan married Sara Lownds, who had worked as a model and a secretary to Drew Associates, on November 22, 1965. The had four children Jesse Byron, Anna Lea, Samuel Isaac Abram, and Jakob Luke. Dylan also adopted Sara's daughter from a prior marriage, Maria Lownds (later Dylan). Bob and Sara Dylan were divorced on June 29, 1977. Dylan married his backup singer Carolyn Dennis (often professionally known as Carol Dennis) on June 4, 1986. Desiree Gabrielle Dennis-Dylan, their daughter, was born on January 31, 1986. The couple divorced in October 1992.

Father:

Abram Zimmerman

Mother:

Beatrice Stone

Daughter:

Desiree Gabrielle Dennis-Dylan

Daughter:

Anna Lea Dylan

Son:

Jakob Dylan

Son:

Jesse Byron Dylan

Son:

Samuel Isaac Abram Dylan

Daughter:

Maria Lownds-Dylan

ex-wife:

Sara Lownds

Wife:

Carolyn Dennis

Brother:

David Zimmerman

ex-girlfriend:

Joan Chandos Baez

It took 44 years, but Joan Baez finally got a public apology from Bob Dylan for the callous way he treated her when he broke up their 1960s love affair. And it happened, of all places, at Toronto's Yonge-Dundas Square. "I feel very bad about it," Dylan said. "I was sorry to see our relationship end."

The occasion, and the source of the confession, was the world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival of Joan Baez: How Sweet the Sound, a PBS documentary set for broadcast next month. It was followed by a free mini-concert performance by Baez herself.

The astonishingly candid film pulls back the curtain on a painful chapter of Baez's life that she had long avoided talking about: her split from Dylan in the spring of 1965, during a British tour where he treated her as excess baggage, refusing to allow her onstage with him.

Before that, the two had been inseparable as the king and queen of folk music, and one of the most talked-about young couples of the decade.

Friend:

Van Morrison

Acquaintance:

Andy Warhol

Dylan once visited artist and filmmaker Andy Warhol when he came to pick up actress/model Edie Sedgwick, whom he was dating at the time and found himself the subject of Warhol's movie camera. Dylan responded by picking up an original Warhol painting and taking it with him "for payment" for being filmed, which he used first as a dartboard, then traded for a sofa (he apologized to Warhol in a press interview years later for his attitude).

Acquaintance:

John Lennon

Acquaintance:

Paul McCartney

Acquaintance:

George Harrison

Acquaintance:

Ringo Starr

Acquaintance:

David Bowie

References

• Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited
  2003
• Bob Dylan: A Spiritual Life
  2017
• That Thin, Wild Mercury Sound: Dylan, Nashville, and the Making of Blonde on Blonde
  2018
• Bob Dylan's Poetics: How the Songs Work
  2019
• Bob Dylan: A Year and a Day
  2018
• Why Bob Dylan Matters
  2018
• Polyvocal Bob Dylan: Music, Performance, Literature
  2019
• Bob Dylan: All the Songs - the Story Behind Every Track
  2015