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Bob Dylan · S1 E2
The Iron Range
Mining country. Long winters, small-town certainty, and a teenager who listens to Hank Williams, Little Richard, and Muddy Waters on late-night radio
In Hibbing, Minnesota, the ground shakes every afternoon at three when the mining company detonates dynamite in the open pit. Bobby Zimmerman feels the blast through the floorboards of his father's store and thinks: there has to be more than this.
Bob Dylan, Blowin' in the Wind. The question song that made a 21-year-old the voice of a generation. For a kid who spent years listening to the radio in a mining town, this is what happens when all those questions finally get an answer: more questions.
Blowin' in the Wind -- Bob Dylan
Written in ten minutes at a table in the Fat Black Pussycat cafe in Greenwich Village, April 1962. Dylan borrowed the melody structure from a spiritual called 'No More Auction Block,' a song about the end of slavery. Peter, Paul and Mary's cover reached number two on the Billboard charts, but Dylan's original on The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan is the version that still sounds like a genuine question rather than a performance. Each verse asks three questions and never answers a single one.
TAP TO REVEAL: What made Hibbing High School's auditorium extraordinary?
The Radio Dial
Late at night, Bobby spins the dial past the local stations and picks up signals from hundreds of miles away. Blues from Chicago, country from the Louisiana Hayride in Shreveport, early rock and roll from stations that only come through after midnight. Hibbing is isolated, but the radio makes it a crossroads of every sound in America.
“I couldn't have got started without hearing Hank Williams first. He was like a guide to another world.”
— Bob Dylan, quoted in No Direction Home, directed by Martin Scorsese, 2005
North Country Blues -- Bob Dylan
From The Times They Are a-Changin' (1964). A stark folk ballad about an iron mining town that watches its industry collapse and its people leave. Dylan is singing about towns exactly like Hibbing. Most fans have never heard this track, but it is one of the most personal songs he ever wrote about the world he came from.
Bobby's Radio Education
Bobby has the music in his ears and a hunger that Hibbing cannot satisfy. Next: a band called The Golden Chords plugs in at the Hibbing High talent show, and the principal reaches for the power switch.
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