By Syndicated Content
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Bob Dylan celebrates his 80th birthday today.
The singer/songwriter born
Robert Zimmerman on May 24, 1941, in Duluth, Minnesota, and raised in nearby Hibbing, has gone on to change the landscape of the popular music with his poetic, lyrical and topical songs.
Early in his career, Dylan emerged as a leader of the folk music revival. Influenced greatly by
Woody Guthrie and traditional American roots music, as well as Beat Generation poets and authors, Dylan began writing enduring songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They Are a-Changin ” that were embraced by the antiwar and civil-rights movements.
Eighty years ago this Monday, Robert Zimmerman was born to a middle-class family in a small industrial town in Minnesota in the US . He changed his name, made up stories about being a guitar-toting vagabond and forever altered the course of popular music.
There are so many ways to pay homage to someone who is quite possibly the greatest artist ever, as I, like so many others, believe he is. Someone who has, in an unparalleled career spanning nearly 60 years, released 39 albums, inspired three generations of songwriters and won every conceivable award. I am going to take the personal route, not because my experiences are important but because I want to share the magic he has brought to my life.
I
Eighty years ago, on May 24, 1941, Bob Dylan was born as Robert Allen Zimmerman to a middle-class Jewish family in Duluth, Minnesota. His parents, Abram & Beatrice, trace their roots from Ukraine, Lithuania and Kars in Northeast Turkey. When Dylan was six, his father contracted polio. The family moved to Beatrice s town in Hibbing. Dylan spent his childhood and teenage years there.
The family had a radio. A rich spectrum of white country music, Mississippi Delta blues, and black church music were silently tuning young Bob s ears. Bob learned the basics of the guitar, piano, and the harmonica. By the mid-1950s, rock n roll was born. Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley and others soon became icons, but it was Little Richard who caught Dylan s imagination. At 18, Dylan wrote in his high school yearbook that his ambition was to join Little Richard.
Mick Jagger
Desolation Row (1965)
I was playing Bob Dylan records at my parentsâ house when he was still an acoustic folk singer, but he was already very important and his lyrics were on point. The delivery isnât just the words, itâs the accentuation and the moods and twists he puts on them. His greatness lies in the body of work. I was at a session for Blood on the Tracks [1975] and really enjoyed watching him record Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts, with this incredible depth of storyline, surrounded by all these boring people from the record company who he had sitting in the control room. I couldnât record like that.
Folk legend Bob Dylan turns 80 1 minute read
New York, May 24 (EFE). – American musician, singer-songwriter and poet Bob Dylan, an iconic cultural figure acclaimed as the living legend of folk rock, turned 80 on Monday.
Over an expansive career, he has released 39 albums and sold 125 million copies.
After eight years of silence, the artist released an album of unreleased songs in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, and it didn’t disappoint.
On the album Rough and Rowdy Ways, Dylan presents the 17-minute long song Murder Most Foul, an exploration of American history and culture that received top reviews.
A week before the album release, Dylan told the New York Times in his first major interview since 2017 that the songs “kind of write themselves and count on me to sing them.”