(b Duluth, MN, 24 May 1941). American singer-songwriter. From a certain conception of popular music, predominant in the second half of the 20th century and centred on songs as a form of individual expression, he is the single most important figure. His influence has been pervasive not only immediately upon a flowering of singer-songwriters and much of rock music's basic premise, but also in many other musical genres and in languages other than American English. As popular music itself became pervasive in the culture of the period, so Dylan acquired central and even iconic importance.
From a Jewish middle-class background, his family moved from Duluth to Hibbing in 1947; Dylan dropped out of the University of Minnesota in 1959, changed his name (subsequently legally confirmed in 1962), and joined the folk scene in Greenwich Village, New York. A review by Robert Shelton in the New York Times (29 September 1961) was followed by a contract with the Columbia record label who subsequently released nearly all of his albums. Dylan's early recordings from Bob Dylan (1962) to Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964) corresponded with the then-prevailing folk style. His songs were congruent with the protest movement, and the most famous of them, Blowin' in the Wind (1962) and The times they are a-changin' (1963), were among its anthems, making his perceived eventual apostasy all the more bitter. In retrospect, Dylan's folk period (visiting Woody Guthrie, dressing, talking and sounding rural) seems an invention. In truth, his very first single, Mixed Up Confusion (1962) is a rockabilly thrash which looks beyond his acoustic albums, and the best of the early protest songs (The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll and Spanish Harlem Incident, both of 1964) are careful constructions in language, their attention to the materiality of the song-form as important as their authentic message. He seems, in retrospect, a young man needing to imitate local and current style, while honing the minutiae of the form.
Already Dylan was the most touching of love lyricists, with a sense of time passing impressive in someone so young, a facet seen in 1963 with Girl of the North Country and Boots of Spanish Leather, and in 1964 with One Too Many Mornings and Mama, you been on my mind. As a songwriter, Dylan covered ground quickly: finding his sources in folk-blues, he discovered many of the formal possibilities of song. Consequently he used minimal resources that remained constant throughout his recordings: his always-distinctive voice for words, guitar for chords (limited to the basic diatonic chords, making secondary sevenths and chromatic chords big events), and harmonica for formal breaks.
From Another Side of Bob Dylan to the recordings eventually issued in 1975 as The Basement Tapes, but recorded in 1967, is Dylan's heroic period, critically the most canonized, and his most decisive influence on rock's common practice. The defining steps for this were Another Side of Bob Dylan with its greater proportion of love songs, the song My Back Pages (1964) a commentary upon and refusal of his earlier work, and Bringing It All Back Home, which includes a rock-band backing, and with which he appeared in controversial concerts of the time. Musically this period is a rare case of Dylan's being influenced actively by pop music of the day, responding to such covers of his songs House of the Rising Sun by the British Beat group the Animals in 1964, and Mr. Tambourine Man by the American folk-rock group the Byrds in 1965. However, ‘that thin, that wild, mercury sound’ (Playboy, January 1978) which Dylan fostered, first with studio musicians and later with The Band, became its own rock music topos. This piano-based sound, with organ and room for searing solo guitar, eventually fed into Bruce Springsteen's E-Street Band, Graham Parker's Rumour, and Elvis Costello's Attractions. The important principle that Dylan established was to take this sound, however messy, and, against it, attend to the words. These in turn make most sense against the background of the Beat poetry of the day, mediated primarily through Allen Ginsberg: D.A. Pennebaker's film Don't Look Back (1967) has Ginsberg standing to the side as Dylan throws cards with keywords of the song Subterranean Homesick Blues.
Dylan, able to affect any amount of Beat poetry's prose-like surreal babble, and make sharp juxtapositions and cuts inherited from literary modernism, nevertheless preserves rhyme and is able to include consummatory cliché-choruses, thus maintaining an important difference between poetry and song. The idea of something as provocative, lengthy and literate as Like a Rolling Stone (1965) becoming mass material was a liberating moment for rock. This period had a great effect on the pop song and the pop group: consequently Dylan's influence can be found whenever a band is happy to thrash on simple chords, while one person works out words which are a carefully constructed statement. In that sense, the purest heirs to mid-1960s Dylan may be the garage bands in general as much as the American singer-songwriters who followed self-consciously in his wake. The Basement Tapes established Dylan's commitment to the fleeting nature of the present, his preference for song-in-performance, as opposed to song-as-published-document or to record-as-produced-sound. His Emersonian commitment to the present went beyond the song itself: he established the oblique interview for rock journalism, published doodles and a strange novel, and infiltrated sleeve notes with surreal prose. Live performance for Dylan was always a form of creative commentary upon an earlier song, and never a matter of accuracy or fidelity of imitation.
With John Wesley Harding (1968) and Nashville Skyline (1969), Dylan began a sustained exploration of the possibilities of the thematic content of song and of song-collection. A further series of albums eventually reached a second critical peak, with Blood on the Tracks (1974), Desire (1975) and Street Legal (1978). By this stage prolixity had become a key feature: Dylan's ability to spin out songs over five or more verses, with a consistent quality of rhyme had never been matched in rock music. Sound, and even quality of voice, changed with each of these albums; there is relatively little attention to the quality of production, and Dylan continued to seize the day, the visualized present, through the relation of albums to concert-as-theatre (the Rolling Thunder Revue) and the radical film Renaldo and Clara (1978). The range of songs at this time is impressive and perhaps unsurpassed: formally, they experiment with an unstable narrator (Jacques Levy acting as Dylan's guide in this); lyric is maintained, reaching a peak with Blood on the Tracks; in place of protest is an epic tone, with themes of justice (‘Idiot Wind’ on Blood on the Tracks, ‘Hurricane’ on Desire) and later redemption (Street Legal and those following); ‘Lily Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts’ from Blood on the Tracks is a virtuosic display of wit.
The four albums following Street Legal concerned religion, not a new theme for Dylan, but here with a new tone. The first two, Slow Train Coming and Saved, evoked the Revelation, Infidels evoked the Old Testament prophets. While Dylan's overall level of songwriting was still high, albums began to be handed over to producers in order to attend to the quality of sound, resulting in a polish and diversity that marks his albums through the 1980s. These included Slow Train Coming with producers Barry Beckett and Jerry Wexler, Infidels with Mark Knopfler, Empire Burlesque with Arthur Baker, Oh Mercy with Daniel Lanois, and, in 1990, Under the Red Sky with Don and David Was. With these the interest in the sound compensates for a general falling-off in the level of the songs, albeit with many exceptions (‘Jokerman’ and ‘Blind Willie McTell’ in 1983, ‘Dark Eyes’ in 1985, ‘Brownsville Girl’ in 1986, co-written with Sam Shephard, and ‘Most of the Time’ and ‘Series of Dreams’ in 1989). At this time Dylan also appeared with guest musicians, including a tour with the Grateful Dead and with the Traveling Wilburys. Dylan’s ‘pastness’ was reinforced by tribute albums, concert tributes, awards and burgeoning literature. All of this seemed difficult for Dylan, who reacted as best he knew by an affirming commitment to the fleeting present, shown through his constant touring. He took part in various recording sessions with Woody Guthrie (1987), Doc Pomus (1994) and Jimmie Rodgers (1997). He returned to the cover-version content of his very first album with Good as I Been to You (1992), and with World Gone Wrong (1993), which presents the poignant sound of Dylan aging. The critical acclaim accorded the album Time out of Mind in 1997, again produced by Lanois, prompted promise of further reissues; the same year, Dylan continued as ever to expand the reach of pop music, playing at Bologna to a contemplative Pope.
By pop music's standards, the literature on Dylan is enormous. From the start he attracted learned criticism, probably because of the prominence and interest of words, but also a peculiar degree of of fan attention, shown classically by A.J. Weberman, who studied Dylan's household rubbish. Dylan fanzines, of which there have been many, carry the air of an academic approach. He was awarded the honorary doctorate in Music from Princeton in 1970, elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988, and made a Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres in 1990.
Dylan's part in wider musical culture is difficult to assess, due to several factors: to the nature of songwriter as part-musician and part-poet, to the status of recording, and to the wider purpose of art in the period. His influence is enormous, if selective, taking in singer-songwriters internationally and rock music generally. Any songwriter, either solo or writing for a band, tended to feel the necessity of coming to terms with Dylan, as the pre-eminent singer-songwriter of his generation; as a genre, folk music was forced to decide between preservation of a mythical past and engagement in the present. Many important areas remained untouched, however: soul, funk and rap were largely unaffected, his influence on the poetry world was negligible, and his relation to the world of contemporary music non-existent. However, Dylan's presence reflects uncomfortably on the social condition of artistic Modernism. In his ability (especially during the 1960s) to reflect historical circumstance, in minutiae (as rhymer, love lyricist, defender of the frailty of live performance), and as user of language, it may be in art's broadest and most generous sense that Dylan's innovations have greatest significance.
Tarantula (London, 1971)
Writings and Drawings (London, 1973)
The Songs of Bob Dylan from 1966 through 1975 (New York, 1975)
Drawn Blank (New York, 1996)
Lyrics 1962–96 (New York, 1997)
D. Price: ‘Bibliography of Bob Dylan’, Popular Music and Society, iii (1974), 227–41
P. Humphries and J. Bauldie: Oh No! Not Another Bob Dylan Book (Brentwood, 1991)
C. Heylin: Bob Dylan: the Recording Sessions 1960–1994 (New York, 1995)
C. Heylin: Bob Dylan: a Life in Stolen Moments. Day by Day 1941–95 (London, 1996)
C. McGregor: Bob Dylan: a Retrospective (New York, 1972, 2/1996)
M. Gray and J. Bauldie, eds.: All Across the Telegraph (London, 1987)
E. Thomson and D. Gutman, eds.: A Dylan Companion (London, 1990)
J. Bauldie, ed.: Wanted Man: In Search of Bob Dylan (Harmondsworth, 1992)
S. and B. Ribakoke: Folk Rock: the Bob Dylan Story (New York, 1966)
D. Kramer: Bob Dylan (New York, 1967)
T. Thompson: Positively Main Street: an Unorthodox View of Bob Dylan (New York, 1970)
A. Rémond: Les Chemins de Bob Dylan (Paris, 1971)
A. Scaduto: Bob Dylan: an Intimate Biography (New York, 1971)
F. Ducray: Dylan (Paris, 1975)
S. Pickering: Bob Dylan Approximately: a Portrait of the Jewish Poet in Search of God (New York, 1975)
S. Shepard: Rolling Thunder Logbook (New York, 1978)
L. Sloman: On the Road with Bob Dylan: Rolling with the Thunder (New York, 1978)
J. Cott: Dylan (New York, 1984)
R. Shelton: No Direction Home (London, 1986)
B. Spitz: Dylan: a Biography (New York, 1988)
C. Heylin: Behind the Shades (Harmondsworth, 1991)
D. Engel: Just Like Bob Zimmerman's Blues: Dylan in Minnesota (London, 1997)
C.P. Lee: Like the Night: Bob Dylan and the Road to the Manchester Free Trade Hall (London, 1998)
D.A. DeTurk and A. Poulin: ‘I Will Show you Fear in a Handful of Songs’, The American Folk Scene (New York, 1967), 270–9
F. Davey: ‘Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan: Poetry and the Popular Song’, Alphabet, xvii (1969), 12–29
R.A. Rosenstone: “‘The Times They Are A-Changin”: the Music of Protest’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, no.382 (1969), 131–44
M. Gray: Song and Dance Man: the Art of Bob Dylan (London, 1972, 2/1981)
D. Monaghan: ‘Taking Bob Dylan Seriously: the Wasteland Tradition’, English Quarterly, vi (1973), 165–70
G. Moneiro: ‘Dylan in the Sixties’, South Atlantic Quarterly (1974), 160–72
L.A. Poague: ‘Dylan as Auteur: theoretical Notes, and an Analysis of “Love Minus Zero/No Limit”’, Journal of Popular Culture, viii (1974), 53–8
G.M. Campbell: ‘Bob Dylan and the Pastoral Apocalypse’, Journal of Popular Culture, vii (1975), 696–707
B. Fong-Torres: ‘Bob Dylan: Knockin' on Dylan's Door’, What's That Sound (New York, 1976), 148–68
N. Lindstrom: ‘Dylan: Song Returns to Poetry’, Texas Quarterly, xix/4 (1976), 131–6
J.L. Rodnitzky: Minstrels of the Dawn: the Folk Protest Singer as Cultural Hero (Chicago, 1976)
T.S. Johnson: ‘Desolation Row Revisited: Bob Dylan's Rock Poetry’, Southwest Review, lxii (1977), 135–47
R. Serge Denisoff and D. Fandray: ‘Hey, Hey, Woody Guthrie, I Wrote you a Song: the Political Side of Bob Dylan’, Popular Music and Society, v/5 (1977), 31–42
J. Wells: ‘Bent out of Shape from Society's Pliers: a Sociological Study of the Grotesque in the Songs of Bob Dylan’, Popular Music and Society, vi/1 (1978), 39–44
D. Hattenhauer: ‘Bob Dylan as Clown and Guru’, Journal of American Culture, ii (1979), 176–85
E. Thomson, ed.: Conclusions on the Wall: the Bob Dylan Bootleg Records (Paris, 1980)
D. Hattenhauer: ‘Bob Dylan as Hero: Rhetoric, History, Structuralism, and Psychoanalysis in Folklore as a Communicative Process’, Southern Folklore Quarterly, xlv (1981), 69–88
C. Sumner: ‘The Ballad of Dylan and Bob’, Southwest Review, lxvi/1 (1981), 41–54
F. Bloom: ‘Seeing Dylan Seeing’, Yale Review, lxxi (1982), 304–20
B. Bowden: Performed Literature (Bloomington, IN, 1982)
J. Herdman: Voice Without Restraint (Edinburgh, 1982)
M. Roos: ‘Fixin' to Die: the Death Theme in the Music of Bob Dylan’, Popular Music and Society, viii/3–4 (1982), 103–16
A. Gonzalez and J.J. Makay: ‘Rhetorical Ascription and the Gospel According to Dylan’, Quarterly Journal of Speech, lxix (1983), 1–14
W. Mellers: A Darker Shade of Pale (London, 1984)
D. Williams: Bob Dylan: the Man, the Music, the Message (Revell, NJ, 1985)
M. Roos and D. O'Meara: ‘Is Your Love in Vain: Dialetical Dilemmas in Bob Dylan's Recent Love Songs’, Popular Music, vii (1987), 35–50
A. Day: Jokerman: Reading the Lyrics of Bob Dylan (Oxford, 1988)
P. Williams: Performing Artist: the Music of Bob Dylan, i: 1960–73 (New York, 1990)
T. Riley: Dylan: a Commentary (London, 1992)
P. Williams: Performing Artist: the Music of Bob Dylan, ii: 1974–86 (New York, 1992)
P. Williams: Watching the River Flow; Observations on his Art-In-Progress 1966–1995 (New York, 1996)
G. Marcus: Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes (London, 1997)
C. Heylin: Dylan’s Daemon Lover (London, 1999)
DAI GRIFFITHS