Hey everyone, check out Mark Johnson doin awesome musicmaking around the world. He is featured on the PBS show, Bill Moyers Journal, as you can see online here. His movie shows folks playing and singing and dancing to “Stand by Me” … he said he got the idea in the NYC subway when he saw two white-robed people singing in a language he didn’t know, but their song was so wonderful that everyone on the platform missed their ride to stay and listen…a peaceful stopping for a moment together.

Here are the links to Mark Johnson’s project: Playingforchange.com and Playingforchange.org.

OK that’s one gonna make you sing along!

Now check out this wonderful thing we found out about from a guy visiting El Morro (middle of Now-here) who met us at a sing-fest, and started telling about these wonderful computers for kids in 3rd world situations: www.laptop.org.

Thanks for spreading the word about these - Joan

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Home >> Legendary Mud Puds >> Visionary Artists >> Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan is an American singer-songwriter who has been a major figure in popular music for five decades. Much of Dylan’s most celebrated work dates from the 1960s, when he became an informal chronicler and a reluctant figurehead of American unrest, and a number of his songs became anthems of the civil rights movements.

Being Beneath the Dirt

Bob Dylan, born Robert Allen Zimmerman, grew up in a small, close-knit Jewish community in Minnesota. He spent much of his youth listening to the radio, first to blues and country stations and later to early rock and roll. He formed several bands in high school: the first, The Shadow Blasters, was short-lived; but his next band, The Golden Chords, lasted longer playing covers of popular songs.

Zimmerman enrolled at the University of Minnesota in 1959, and dropped out of at the end of his freshman year. While attending school, he began introducing himself as “Bob Dylan,” performing in a coffee house near the college campus. He then worked the local folk music circuit and made short visits to Denver, Colorado; Madison, Wisconsin; and Chicago, Illinois. In 1961, he moved to New York City, hoping to perform there and visit his musical idol Woody Guthrie.

Branching Out Roots for Balance

In New York, Dylan played at various clubs around Greenwich Village. Gaining public recognition his talents caught the attention of Columbia Records producer, John Hammond, who signed Dylan to record his self-titled first album, which consisted of familiar folk, blues and gospel material combined with two original compositions. After his album’s release in 1962, Dylan made two important career moves: he officially changed his name to Robert Dylan, and he signed a management contract with Albert Grossman.

The rough edge of Dylan’s singing was unsettling to some early listeners but an attraction to others. His voice was described as raw, seemingly untrained, and nasally. Perhaps because of this, many of his most famous early songs first reached the public through more immediately palatable versions by other performers, such as Joan Baez, who became Dylan’s advocate, as well as his lover. Other recording artists who had hits with Dylan’s songs in the early and mid-1960s included The Byrds, Sonny and Cher, The Hollies, Peter, Paul and Mary, Manfred Mann, and The Turtles.

Rising like a Surfacing Stem

By the time Dylan’s second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, was released in 1963, he had begun making a name for himself as both a singer and a lyricist. Many of the songs on this album were labeled protest songs, inspired partly by Guthrie and influenced by Pete Seeger’s passion for topical songs. “Oxford Town”, for example, was a sardonic account of James Meredith’s ordeal as the first black student to risk enrollment at the University of Mississippi. His most famous song of the time, “Blowin’ in the Wind,” questioned the social and political status quo, and “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” was veiled with references to nuclear apocalypse. These songs marked an important new direction in modern songwriting, blending a stream-of-consciousness, imagist lyrical attack with a traditional folk form.

In 1963, Dylan was prominent in the civil rights movement, singing at rallies including the March on Washington in August. Accordingly, Dylan’s third album, The Times They Are a-Changin’, reflected a more politicized and cynical Dylan. The songs often took as their subject matter contemporaneous, real life stories, while Freewheelin’ was more eclectic, including his characteristic topical songs along with a mixture of love songs and humorous, surreal talking blues. Another Side of Bob Dylan, recorded on a single June evening in 1964, had a lighter mood than its predecessor.

Reaching Fruition

In the latter half of 1964 and 1965, Dylan’s appearance and musical style changed rapidly, as he made his move from acoustic music to a rock backing. Dylan’s cultural synthesis is exemplified by his mid-’60s trilogy of albums: Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde. In the songs he created between late 1964 and the summer of 1966, Dylan created a body of work that remains unique, drawing on folk, blues, rock, country, R&B, beatnik poetry, and social commentary. His hit single, “Like a Rolling Stone,” peaked at #2 in the U.S. and at #4 in the UK charts.

In 1967, Dylan returned to Nashville. Back in the recording studio after a 19-month break, and recorded John Wesley Harding, a quiet, contemplative record of shorter songs, set in a landscape that drew on both the American West and the Bible. It included “All Along the Watchtower,” with lyrics derived from the Book of Isaiah (21:5–9). Dylan’s next release, Nashville Skyline (1969), was virtually a mainstream country record featuring instrumental backing by Nashville musicians, a mellow-voiced Dylan, a duet with Johnny Cash, and the hit single “Lay Lady Lay.”

Additional albums followed, with varying degrees of success, and the music and influence of Bob Dylan continued to evolve, devolve, impress and disappoint, depending on the audience. In recent times, 1997 saw the release of his highly acclaimed album, Time Out of Mind, which won Dylan his first “Album of the Year” Grammy. He and his touring band recorded and released “Love and Theft” in 2001, featuring an expanded musical palette that included rockabilly, swing, jazz, and even lounge ballads. Dylan 2006 album, Modern Times, entered the U.S. charts at number one, making it Dylan’s first album to reach that position since 1976’s Desire, 30 years prior.

Leaving a Legacy

While expanding and personalizing musical styles, he has explored many traditions of American song, from folk, blues and country to gospel, rock, jazz, and swing. Although his accomplishments as a performer and recording artist have been central to his career, his songwriting is generally regarded as his greatest contribution. Dylan’s early lyrics incorporated political, social, philosophical, and literary influences, defying existing pop music conventions and appealing widely to the counterculture. His later lyrics continue to dazzle, with a shining talent for vividness, potency, and originality.

Regarding his talent as a song writer, one legacy of Dylan’s verbal sophistication was the increasing attention paid by literary scholars to his lyrics. Dylan has been nominated several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and in 2008, he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation for his “profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power.” Initially modeling his style on the songs of Woody Guthrie, and lessons learnt from the blues of Robert Johnson, Dylan added increasingly sophisticated lyrical techniques to the folk music of the early 60s, infusing it “with the intellectualism of classic literature and poetry.”

Bob Dylan has been described as one of the most influential figures of the 20th century, musically and culturally. He was included in the Time 100: The Most Important People of the Century where he was called “master poet, caustic social critic and intrepid, guiding spirit of the counterculture generation.” In 2004, he was ranked number two in Rolling Stone magazine’s list of “Greatest Artists of All Time.” Dylan biographer Howard Sounes placed him in even more exalted company when he said, “There are giant figures in art who are sublimely good—Mozart, Picasso, Frank Lloyd Wright, Shakespeare, Dickens. Dylan ranks alongside these artists.”

Disclaimer: Mud Puds bios are derived from widely-accepted “truths,” as shared in the Public Domain. In the absence of first-hand accounts, information is presented as: “Factual, as far as we know.”

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