Robert Allen Zimmerman was born in Duluth, Minnesota, in 1941 and arrived in Greenwich Village in 1961 already calling himself Bob Dylan. Bringing It All Back Home (1965), Highway 61 Revisited (1965) and Blonde on Blonde (1966) brought literary ambition into popular — 'Like a Rolling Stone,' 'Mr. Tambourine Man,' 'Visions of Johanna.' His 1965 decision to perform with an electric band at the Newport Folk Festival broke the folk movement that had crowned him; he was booed; the protest songs were over. A 1966 motorcycle accident in Woodstock, and a six-month silence afterward, opened a long career across folk, rock, gospel, country and big-band American that has continued into his eighties. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016 — the first songwriter to receive it.
All Figures
Singer-Songwriter · Nobel Laureate in Literature
Bob Dylan
1,941 CE
The Minnesota-born folk-singer whose 1960s lyrics — and decision in 1965 to plug in an electric guitar — rewrote what a popular song could carry.
Lifetime
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