Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan arrived in New York in 1961 as a young folk singer devoted to Woody Guthrie, and within two years was writing songs that defined his generation. In 2016 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The folk years

Dylan moved to New York City in January 1961 and visited his hero Woody Guthrie in a New Jersey hospital. Playing the Greenwich Village clubs, he was heard by producer John Hammond, who signed him to Columbia Records; his debut album, Bob Dylan, came out on 19 March 1962. The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963) was his breakthrough, and Joan Baez did much to bring his early songs to a wide audience.

On 25 July 1965 he headlined the Newport Folk Festival with an electric set, his first since high school. After a motorcycle crash in 1966 he stopped touring for years.

Honours

Dylan has sold more than 125 million records and won ten Grammy Awards and an Academy Award. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012, and in 2016 the Nobel Prize in Literature "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition".

Songs to know

• "Blowin' in the Wind"
• "The Times They Are a-Changin'"
• "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall"
• "Girl from the North Country"
• "Mr. Tambourine Man" and "Like a Rolling Stone"

Selected albums

See also: Pete Seeger · Tom Paxton, his Greenwich Village contemporary