He spent the summer of 1960 in Denver, where he met bluesman Jesse Fuller, the inspiration behind the songwriter's signature harmonica rack and guitar. Already inspired by Hank Williams and Woody Guthrie, Dylan began listening to blues while at college, and the genre wove its way into his music. While at college, he began performing folk songs at coffee houses under the name Bob Dylan, taking his last name from the poet Dylan Thomas. Following his graduation in 1959, he began studying art at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. As a child he learned how to play guitar and harmonica, forming a rock & roll band called the Golden Chords when he was in high school. Born in Duluth, Minnesota, Bob Dylan (born Robert Allen Zimmerman, May 24, 1941) was raised in Hibbing, Minnesota, from the age of six. Even when his sales declined in the '80s and '90s, Dylan's presence rarely lagged, and his commercial revival in the 2000s proved his staying power.įor a figure of such substantial influence, Dylan came from humble beginnings. Dylan's influence on folk music was equally powerful, and he marks a pivotal turning point in its 20th century evolution, signifying when the genre moved away from traditional songs and toward personal songwriting. Dylan's force was evident enough during his height of popularity in the 1960s - the Beatles' shift toward introspective songwriting in the mid-'60s never would have happened without him - but his influence echoed throughout several subsequent generations, as many of his songs became popular standards and his best albums became undisputed classics of the rock & roll canon. And that's just the tip of his achievements. As a musician, he sparked several genres of pop music, including electrified folk-rock and country-rock. As a vocalist, he broke down the notion that a singer must have a conventionally good voice in order to perform, thereby redefining the vocalist's role in popular music.

As a songwriter, he pioneered several different schools of pop songwriting, from confessional singer/songwriter to winding, hallucinatory, stream-of-consciousness narratives. Bob Dylan's influence on popular music is incalculable.

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