A Brief Look at Bob Dylan’s Career – His Music and Songs

In 1960, Robert Zimmerman, a college dropout from Hibbing, Minnesota, hitchhiked to

New York City using the stage name Bob Dylan, he began performing sets of folk music in

Greenwich Village coffeehouses. In 1962, he released his first album, a self-titled collection of folk standards interspersed with only a few original songs. It offered only a glimpse of the brilliance to come from Dylan. By the end of the decade, he had become a musical icon whose career had already taken several unpredictable turns.

Dylan’s second and third albums, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and The Times They Are A-Changin’ established him as a popular folk singer. Dylan’s social conscience is evident throughout these two albums, most notably in his war-protest songs “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Masters of War.” Dylan also included songs about more specific injustices – “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” a song about the murder of an African-American maid by a wealthy tobacco farmer and “The Ballad of Hollis Brown” about a poor man who kills his family and himself. Dylan was not one to shy away from controversy – Hattie Carroll’s murder was committed the same year the song was released. The killer, William Zanzinger, is specifically named in the song, and has since called Dylan “a scum of the earth.”

Although Dylan would continue to write protest songs throughout his career – “The Death of Emmett Till” and “Hurricane” are good examples – his next album, Another Side of Bob Dylan, defied all expectations. A deeply personal and introspective album, Another Side showed the path Dylan would take with his lyrics for most of his career. Dylan shocked his fans musically as well. In 1965, when he appeared at the Newport Folk Festival, Dylan walked on stage with an electric band. He was booed offstage after only three songs, but he soon went on a tour of

Europe
with his new electric backing band, the Hawks. At one famous show, one particularly obnoxious concertgoer called Dylan “Judas.” Dylan responded over the boos of the crowd, calling the man a liar and turning to his band and commanding them to “play f___ing loud.”

Dylan’s turn to electric music proved a success, as Bringing It All Back Home, his first album that featured electric guitars, sold over a million copies. His next two albums, Highway 61 Revisited and the landmark Blonde On Blonde continued Dylan’s embrace of rock and pop music, but this phase of his career was abruptly cut short by a motorcycle accident in 1966. His next release, 1967’s John Wesley Harding leaned toward country music. Dylan’s final album in the 1960s, Nashville Skyline, was a bona fide country album, recorded in

Nashville
with a band of country musicians.

The 1970s began for Dylan with dismal album sales and continual invasion of his privacy by a man named A.J. Weberman, who called himself a Dylanologist, and tried to prove his theory that Dylan had begun using heroin by rummaging through Dylan’s garbage. Weberman’s behavior would eventually lead to physical confrontation with the Dylan family, first with Bob’s wife Sara, and then with the singer himself, who apparently used a bicycle to chase Weberman down. Despite many of his fans seeing him as washed up, Dylan made a triumphant return in 1975 with the Grammy-winning Blood on the Tracks, but this time success was short-lived. Dylan embraced Christianity, and soon began refusing to play any of his secular songs.

By 1982 Dylan had returned to his Jewish roots and his old music. He offered brief hints of his former brilliance with his albums Infidels and Oh Mercy, but Dylan’s most recent comeback did not come until 1997, when he won a Grammy for the Album of the Year, Time Out of Mind. That same year, Dylan was hospitalized and said to be near death. He recovered, and in 2001 released another new album, Love and Theft.

Although his career now spans five decades, Dylan’s music is still constantly finding new fans. Despite several lapses in popularity, he has demonstrated remarkable longevity and is likely to continue to produce music for years to come.