Michael Gray
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
The American singer-songwriter and musician Bob Dylan is one of the most important recording artists on the planet.
A cultural icon, his work has had a profound influence on popular music since the 1960s.
First gaining fame as a folk singer with songs that addressed the subjects of the Cold War and the Civil Rights Movement, he later revolutionized rock music.
But Dylan is an artist of contradictions, a magnetic performer who remains fiercely private, one of the wealthiest musicians of his generation who dresses like a vagabond, a womanizer who has penned some of the world's most tender love songs.
But how did a suburban boy from Minnesota become one of the world's most famous artists?
Why does he inspire such fierce devotion and myth-making?
And, after six decades of songwriting and performing, how can we begin to characterize his legacy?
From the Noiser Podcast Network, this is a short history of Bob Dylan.
On May 24, 1941, the boy who will one day become Bob Dylan is born Robert Allen Zimmerman in the city of Duluth in northern Minnesota.
His is a middle-class Jewish family, and he is close to his grandparents, who fled pogroms in modern-day Ukraine to settle here.
He is nearly five when he is joined by a younger brother, but shortly afterwards his father is struck by polio, leaving him bedridden and unemployed.
Michael Gray is the pioneer of Dylan Studies and the author of the first critical study of Bob Dylan's work, Song and Dance Man, The Art of Bob Dylan.
Once his father is strong enough, he starts to run a hardware store, while Bob begins to learn the piano and guitar.
On the family radio, he listens to the crooning of Bing Crosby and Hank Williams, and at night, tunes in to the raw blues of Howlin' Wolf.
Through the 1950s, Bob becomes increasingly obsessed with music.
He is born at exactly the right moment to absorb the explosive arrival of rock and roll.
Hearing Elvis Presley, he later says, feels like busting out of jail.