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Bob Dylan · S1 E1
Robert Zimmerman
Born May 24, 1941 in Duluth, Minnesota. A Jewish kid on the Iron Range who hears a radio signal from a distant world and decides that world is his
A radio crackles in a cold bedroom in Duluth, Minnesota, and six-year-old Bobby Zimmerman presses his ear against the speaker. Somewhere far away, a voice is singing something that sounds like it was meant only for him.
Bob Dylan, The Times They Are a-Changin'. The anthem of a generation, written by a kid who grew up in a frozen mining town where nothing ever seemed to change.
The Times They Are a-Changin' -- Bob Dylan
Released in January 1964 as the title track of Dylan's third album. He wrote it deliberately as a protest anthem, something with a broad enough message that anyone fighting for change could claim it. The melody draws from old Irish and Scottish ballads, and the language echoes the King James Bible. Each verse builds like a warning, addressed to writers, critics, senators, mothers, and fathers in turn. Dylan was 22 years old.
The Iron Range
Robert Allen Zimmerman is born on May 24, 1941, in Duluth, Minnesota, to Abe and Beatty Zimmerman. When Bobby is six, his father contracts polio and the family moves north to Hibbing, a mining town on the Iron Range. Long winters, iron ore dust in the air, and a silence so deep that a kid with a radio can hear the whole world.
“All I can do is be me, whoever that is.”
— Bob Dylan
TAP TO REVEAL: What happened to Bob Dylan's hometown?
Song to Woody -- Bob Dylan
From Bob Dylan (1962). One of only two original compositions on his debut album, written for Woody Guthrie, the folk singer whose autobiography rewired young Bobby Zimmerman's brain. This is Dylan telling you where the journey began: 'I'm out here a thousand miles from my home.'
What was Bob Dylan's birth name?
Bobby Zimmerman has heard every sound the radio can deliver, and now he wants to make sounds of his own. Next: a mining town with the most extravagant high school auditorium in America, and a teenager who discovers that rock and roll can shake the ground harder than dynamite.
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