He spent the summer of 1960 in Denver, where he met bluesman Jesse Fuller, the inspiration behind the songwriter's signature harmonica rack and guitar. Already inspired by Hank Williams and Woody Guthrie, Dylan began listening to blues while at college, and the genre wove its way into his music. While at college, he began performing folk songs at coffee houses under the name Bob Dylan, taking his last name from the poet Dylan Thomas. Following his graduation in 1959, he began studying art at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. As a child he learned how to play guitar and harmonica, forming a rock & roll band called the Golden Chords when he was in high school. Born in Duluth, Minnesota, Bob Dylan (born Robert Allen Zimmerman, May 24, 1941) was raised in Hibbing, Minnesota, from the age of six. By the end of the 1990s, Dylan established himself as a road warrior-his ceaseless concerts were unofficially dubbed 'the Never-Ending Tour'-and righted his recording career, developing a raucous, robust blend of roadhouse blues, rockabilly, torch songs, and folk showcased on the Grammy-winning albums Love and Theft and Modern Times, as well as his acclaimed 2020 record Rough and Rowdy Ways.įor a figure of such substantial influence, Dylan came from humble beginnings. Although he subsequently stepped away from the zeitgeist, his restless, occasionally messy, work of the 1970s and the 1980s expanded his formidable songbook through a combination of classic albums (Blood on the Tracks) and intriguing detours (Empire Burlesque). Over the course of 18 months, he released Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, a trio of records that broadened the vocabulary of rock & roll, placing Dylan at the cutting edge of popular culture.

His flair for impressionistic, stream-of-conscious lyrics marked a shift within folk music, an evolution Dylan also introduced to rock & roll when he picked up an electric guitar in 1965. Dylan emerged from the Greenwich Village folk scene in the early 1960s, earning a reputation as a perceptive, powerful songwriter, equally capable of penning a protest anthem or a romantic love song. One of the greatest figures of the twentieth century, Bob Dylan helped shape the sound and form of popular music in the rock & roll era.

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