Biography of Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan: Who Is He?
 
Bob Dylan, a folk-rock singer-songwriter who later became famous in American popular music, received his first recording contract in 1961. With new studio albums like Together Through Life (2009), Tempest (2012), Shadows in the Night (2015), and Fallen Angels, Dylan has continued to perform live and create new music (2016). The renowned singer-songwriter has won Grammy, Academy, Golden Globe, Presidential Medal of Freedom, and Nobel Prize for Literature prizes, among other honors.
 
Early Years
 
Robert Allen Zimmerman was born to parents Abram and Beatrice Zimmerman on May 24, 1941, in Duluth, Minnesota. He was raised in the town of Hibbing, where he attended Hibbing High School and where his younger brother, David, also attended.
 
Young Dylan started his own bands, including the Golden Chords and a group he fronted under the name Elston Gunn, inspired by early rock icons like Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Little Richard (whom he used to play piano renditions of at high school dances). He started singing folk and country songs at neighborhood coffee shops while he was a student at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and adopted the stage name “Bob Dillon.” (Contrary to a common misconception, the pseudonym was not inspired by Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, whom he later vowed to despise; rather, it was inspired by the protagonist of the well-known Western television series Gunsmoke.)
 
Folk Music
 
Dylan left college in 1960 and relocated to New York, where his hero, the renowned folk singer Woody Guthrie, was being treated in a hospital for a rare hereditary neurological system disorder. He frequently visited Guthrie in the hospital, established himself as a regular at Greenwich Village’s folk clubs and coffeehouses, met a variety of other musicians, and started penning songs at an amazing rate, including “Song to Woody,” an ode to his ailing hero.
 
After reading a glowing review of one of his performances in The New York Times, he got a recording contract with Columbia Records in the fall of 1961, at which point he officially changed his last name to Dylan. Bob Dylan, which was released in early 1962, had only two original songs but several traditional folk songs and blues song covers that gave Dylan’s gravelly singing style a chance to shine.
 
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan’s 1963 release signaled Dylan’s breakthrough as one of the most innovative and poetic voices in the annals of American popular music. Two of the most enduring folk songs from the 1960s were featured on the album: “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and “Blowin’ in the Wind,” which went on to become major hits for the folk group Peter, Paul, and Mary. After becoming connected with one of the movement’s well-known icons, Joan Baez, in 1963, Dylan’s image as the definitive songwriter of the 1960s protest movement gained further traction with his subsequent album, The Times They Are A-Changin’.
 
Although their relationship only lasted two years, it had a hugely positive impact on both of their musical careers since Dylan penned some of Baez’s most well-known songs and she used her concerts to introduce him to a large audience. Dylan was performing 200 shows a year by 1964, but he had become weary of being “the” folk singer-songwriter of the protest movement. Another Aspect of Bob Dylan, which was released in 1964, was a considerably more intimate and contemplative collection of songs than Dylan’s earlier works.
 
Personal Life
 
Along with Baez, Dylan had a romantic relationship with gospel legend Mavis Staples at one point and desired to wed her, but they never went down the aisle. Jesse, Anna, Samuel, and Jakob were the four children Dylan and Lowndes had together before divorcing in 1977. Jakob later rose to prominence as the main singer of the well-known rock band the Wallflowers. Maria Lowndes, Lowndes’s daughter from a previous union, was also adopted by Dylan.
 
Dylan has experimented with his abilities as a visual artist when he is not creating music. In addition to having paintings on the covers of his albums Self Portrait (1970) and Planet Waves (1974), he has also exhibited his work all over the world and released various books of his paintings and sketches.
 
Religion and Travel
 
With his longtime support group, the Band, Dylan embarked on his first extensive tour since his injury in 1974. The tour was a sell-out across the country. Planet Waves, an album he made with the Band, debuted at No. 1 in the charts. Following these hits, he released the well-known albums Blood on the Tracks (1975) and Desire (1976), both of which peaked at No. 1. Desire featured the Bob Dylan song “Hurricane,” which was inspired by boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, who was at the time receiving a life sentence in jail following what many believed to be an incorrect triple homicide conviction in 1967. Dylan was one of several well-known public people that promoted Carter’s cause, resulting in a retrial in 1976 where he was once more found guilty.
 
After a traumatic divorce from his wife, Sara Lowndes, for which Dylan wrote the song “Sara” on Desire, he once more reinvented himself, announcing in 1979 that he had become a born-again Christian. Dylan won his first Grammy Award for the commercially successful evangelistic Slow Train Coming. But Dylan’s subsequent tour and CDs were less popular, and his musical inclinations toward religion gradually became less obvious. He was admitted to the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1982.
 
Personal Life
 
Along with Baez, Dylan had a romantic relationship with gospel legend Mavis Staples at one point and desired to wed her, but they never went down the aisle. Jesse, Anna, Samuel, and Jakob were the four children Dylan and Lowndes had together before divorcing in 1977. Jakob later rose to prominence as the main singer of the well-known rock band the Wallflowers. Maria Lowndes, Lowndes’s daughter from a previous union, was also adopted by Dylan.
 
Dylan has experimented with his abilities as a visual artist when he is not creating music. In addition to having paintings on the covers of his albums Self Portrait (1970) and Planet Waves (1974), he has also exhibited his work all over the world and released various books of his paintings and sketches.
 
Work and honors later
 
Modern Times, Dylan’s studio album, was released in 2006. It was released in stores in late August, and the following month it topped the album charts. The CD, which blended blues, country, and folk music, received accolades for its vibrant sound and images. The album has a cheeky, knowing quality, according to some critics. The first ten years of the twenty-first century saw Dylan continue to tour and release new music, including the studio album Together Over Life in April 2009.
 
The Witmark Demos, a bootleg album, and Bob Dylan: The Original Mono Recordings, a new boxed set, were both issued by him in 2010. At the National Gallery of Denmark, he also displayed 40 of his original paintings as part of a solo exhibition. Bob Dylan in Concert – Brandeis University 1963 was the artist’s fourth live album to be released in 2011, then in September 2012, he released Tempest, his fifth studio album. 2015 saw the release of Shadows in the Night, a cover album of American standards.
 
Dylan’s 37th studio album, Fallen Angels, his 37th studio album overall, was released a year later and includes further Great American Songbook classics. With his three-disc studio album Triplicate, released in 2017, he continued to honor the classics. It contains 30 American oldies, including “Stormy Weather,” “As Time Goes By,” and “The Best Is Yet To Come.”
 
In addition to Grammy, Academy, and Golden Globe awards, President Barack Obama also presented Dylan with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012. The renowned singer-songwriter was also awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature on October 13, 2016, marking the first time a musician had achieved the distinction. He was praised by the Swedish Academy “for having established new lyrical expressions within the great American song heritage” and became the first American to receive the award since novelist Toni Morrison in 1993.
 
With the publication of the boxed set Trouble No More — The Bootleg Series Vol. 13 / 1979–1981, Dylan was once again in the news in November 2017. Around same time, it was revealed that his former recording studio in Greenwich Village, Manhattan, would be converted into a luxury residential complex with lofts going for a minimum of $12,500 per month. The door to his room at the renowned Chelsea Hotel was soon auctioned off for $100,000.
 
The six-track EP Universal Love: Wedding Songs Re imagined, which was released in 2018 and has iconic wedding songs from various eras updated with same-sex pronouns, included Dylan as one of the artists. Dylan rewrote later songs like “My Girl” and “And Then He Kissed Me” with a pronoun twist, as well as the 1929 standard “She’s Funny That Way” as “He’s Funny That Way.”
 
The renowned composer also introduced Heaven’s Door Spirits, a whiskey line, in that same year. The Heaven Hill Distillery sued for alleged trademark violation in August.
 
With Travelin’ Thru, 1967-1969: The Bootleg Series Vol. 15 by Bob Dylan (Featuring Johnny Cash), another collection of unheard music was released in November 2019. In addition to songs from Dylan’s 1969 collaborations with Cash, the three-CD set featured outtakes from the 1967 John Wesley Harding and 1969 Nashville Skyline recording sessions as well as songs from his 1970 session with bluegrass legend Earl Scruggs.
 
Dylan surprised his followers by releasing “Murder Most Foul,” a 17-minute ballad commemorating John F. Kennedy’s murder, in March 2020. In a short statement, he offered few specifics about the song, saying only that it had been “recorded a long back.”