Bob Dylan is an American composer, singer, poet writer, and social activist. 2016 literature Nobel Prize-awarded whose current net worth is $180 million.
Robert Allen Zimmerman was born in Duluth, Minnesota (USA) on May 4th, 1941, and grew up in the iron foothills of Mesabi, in Hibbing, west of Lake Superior. Zigman and Anna Zimmerman are his paternal grandparents, they both emigrated from Odessa, known today as Ukraine, to the United States. This because of an anti-Semitic pogrom in 1905. On the other hand, his maternal grandparents, Benjamin and Lybba Edelstein, were Lithuanian Jews who arrived in America in 1902.
His parents, Abram Zimmerman and Beatrice “Beatty” Stone, were part of a small Jewish community. Robert Zimmerman lived in Duluth until the age of six, when his father got polio, and his family returned to Hibbing, his mother’s hometown, where he spent the rest of his childhood.
Studies
Robert spent much of his youth listening to the radio, first with stations broadcasting blues and country from Shreveport, Louisiana, and later with rock and roll stations.
Zimmerman moved to Minneapolis in September 1959 to enroll in the University of Minnesota. During the time, his initial interest in rock and roll gave way to a closer approach to American folk.
Going to New York and contract with Columbia (1960-1962)
Zimmerman left the University of Minnesota in May 1960, at the end of his first year of career. In January 1961, he traveled to New York hoping to see Woody Guthrie, who was seriously ill from Huntington’s disease at the Greystone Park psychiatric hospital. Guthrie had been a revelation for Dylan and was his biggest influence on his first musical stage.
From February 1961, Dylan began playing in various clubs in Greenwich Village, where he played folk artists such as Dave Van Ronk, Fred Neil, Odetta, New Lost City Ramblers and The Clancy Brothers. In September, he began to gain some public recognition when Robert Shelton reviewed in The New York Times a concert of Gerde’s Folk City.
A month later, Hammond signed Dylan for Columbia Records. In March of 1962 Bob Dylan, his debut album with Columbia, composed of traditional material folk, blues and gospel with two own compositions, “Song to Woody” and “Talkin’ New York.”
Influence, importance and international recognition
Bob Dylan has been described as one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century from a musical and cultural point of view. He was included in the special Time 100: The Most Important People of the Century, where he was defined as “master poet, caustic social critic, and intrepid guiding spirit of the counterculture generation.” In 2004, he was ranked second in the list of best artists of all time in Rolling Stone magazine.
Nobel Prize in Literature
On October 13, 2016, the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize for Literature for “creating a new poetic expression within the great tradition of American song”.The New York Times reported that “Dylan, at age 75, is the first musician to win the award, and his election this Thursday is probably the most radical in the history of awards since 1901.”
