Difference between revisions of "Bob Dylan"

Revision as of 03:35, April 2, 2007

Bob Dylan (birth name Robert Zimmerman), is one of the towering figures of American music, and has made contributions to many musical genres, including Rock, Country, and R&B. He has also, though some may have forgotten it, made enormous contributions to Christian music and Gospel, particularly through two of his albums, Slow Train Coming, and Saved, released after his public declaration of his Christianity in the late 1970s. Even though he soon ceased recording songs that were explicitly Christian, he continued to perform the songs from those albums, and for some time dedicated the song "In the Garden" to Jesus Christ when he performed it publically. By the mid-1980's, however, his vision of Christian faith darkened somewhat, such that by 1997 he was writing songs like Not Dark Yet in which he sings, "Don't even hear a murmur of a prayer/It's not dark yet, but it's getting there."

Robert Zimmerman was born on May 24, 1941 in Duluth, Minnesota, and grew up in Hibbing. His father owned an appliance store, and Zimmerman grew up listening to the radio, where he got his first musical education. After playing in some short-lived high school bands, he left to attend the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. It was there that he took a deep interest in folk music, listening to the recordings of artists such as Odetta and Woody Guthrie. In 1961, he dropped out of college and headed to New York City, where he became a part of the burgeoning folk music scene in Greenwich Village. Sharing the stage with a wide variety of folk acts, among them Dave von Ronk and Tiny Tim, he eventually landed a contract with Columbia Records, for whom his still records today. He most recent album, Modern Times (2006), reached #1 on the pop music charts; at age 65, he is the oldest artist to have attained that mark.

Over a long and variegated career, Dylan has collaborated with numerous other artists, including Joan Baez, Johnny Cash, and Tom Petty. In 2004, he published the first volume of Chronicles, his planned autobiography. Since 2005, he has had a weekly radio show on XM Radio; among the themes of each week, he recently chose "The Bible," playing songs by the Reverend J.M. Gates, Kitty Wells, and the Reverend Gary Davis.

References

• "Is Dylan Still Christian", by Bill Parr, gives much more detail on Dylan's faith