THE ARTS | Reshaping ideas, expressing identity
29 July 2008
Profile: Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan advanced urban folk music into the world of rock
(The following is excerpted from the U.S. Department of State publication, American Popular Music.)
Beginning in the early 1950s a genre of popular music called “urban folk” began to appear on the pop charts. Artists like the Weavers and their leader Pete Seeger, and, a few years later, the Kingston Trio, and Peter, Paul, and Mary mated political protest themes and an urban intellectual sensibility to a musical style inspired by rural folk music. Urban folk continued to flourish during the early days of rock ’n’ roll and into the 1960s. But by 1967 electric instruments and drums had joined Peter, Paul, and Mary’s acoustic guitars, and the well-known folk group was in the pop Top 10 singing “I Dig Rock ’n’ Roll Music”! The individual responsible for this shift was the man who had written their biggest acoustic hit, “Blowin’ in the Wind.” He was also the man who, virtually single-handedly, dragged urban folk music into the modern era of rock. His name was Bob Dylan.
Dylan (born Robert Zimmerman) first established himself as an acoustic singer-songwriter in New York City’s urban folk scene. The early 1960s was a period of explosive growth for acoustic urban folk music. The baby boomers were reaching college age, demonstrating increasing cultural and Bob Dylan political interests and awareness, and they represented an expanding audience for traditionally based folk music and for newly composed “broadsides” on the issues of the day (such as the Cold War with the Soviet Union, the testing and stockpiling of nuclear arms, and racial bigotry).
Dylan’s contemporaries included gifted performers such as Joan Baez and Judy Collins, and talented songwriters such as Tom Paxton and Phil Ochs. But Dylan stood out early for the remarkable quality of his original songs, which reflected a strong gift for poetic imagery and metaphor and a searing intensity of feeling, sometimes moderated by a quirky sense of irony, and for his rough-hewn performance style, combining aggressive vocal, guitar, and harmonica and demonstrating affinities to rural models in blues and earlier country music.
In addition to writing impressive topical songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind,” Dylan distinguished himself as a composer of more intimate but highly original songs about human relationships. The year 1965 was pivotal in Dylan’s career; he moved from being the most distinctive songwriter among American urban folk artists to being an epochal influence on the entirety of American popular culture.
Early in 1965 Dylan released his fifth album, Bringing It All Back Home, in which acoustic numbers shared space with songs using electric guitar and drums. The album featured several songs that carried Dylan’s flair for intense and unusual poetic imagery into the realm of the surreal. One such song, “Mr. Tambourine Man,” was covered by the fledgling California rock group the Byrds; their version of “Mr. Tambourine Man” soared to Number One in June 1965, thus becoming the first landmark folk-rock hit. The lesson was not lost on Dylan, who returned to the recording studio early in the summer with a rock band to cut his own breakthrough single, “Like a Rolling Stone.” This six-minute, epic pop single certified that a sea change was taking place in American popular culture.
By the mid-1960s changes within rock ’n’ roll were in the wind. But Dylan’s electric style and other manifestations of folk rock had the effect of an enormous injection of growth hormones into the pop music scene. Suddenly, it was all right for rock ’n’ roll to be as “adult” as its baby boomer audience was now becoming, and rock ’n’ roll abruptly grew up into rock. Pop records on serious subjects, with political and poetical lyrics, sprang up everywhere; before long, this impulse carried over into the making of ambitious concept albums. The later 1960s flowered into a period of intense and remarkable innovation and creativity in pop music.
Despite the popularity of “Like a Rolling Stone” and a few singles that followed, Dylan never really established himself as primarily a “singles artist.” Rather, he was the first important representative of another pop phenomenon: the rock musician whose career was sustained essentially by albums. Although his influence was at its peak in the 1960s, Dylan has continued to be a widely admired and closely followed artist into the new century. Never content to be pigeonholed or to fall into a predictable role as elder statesman for any movement or musical style, Dylan has over the course of his career produced a distinctive, heterogeneous, and erratic output of albums that represent a singular testament to the spirit of pop music invention. Among these albums may be found examples of country rock (Nashville Skyline, 1969), what would later be termed Christian rock (Slow Train Coming, 1979), and even latter-day forays back into traditional acoustic folk material (Good as I Been to You, 1992) – along with many examples of the folk-rock approach that initially sealed his place in the pantheon of American music. No Direction Home (2005), an Emmy-award documentary directed by Martin Scorsese, chronicles the evolution of Dylan’s career, one that remains productive, with Dylan still touring and recording tirelessly, and challenging his audiences to guess what his next move might be.
[This article is excerpted from American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP3 by Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman, published by Oxford University Press, copyright (2003, 2007), and offered in an abridged edition by the Bureau of International Information Programs.]
