It’s the birthday of Bob Dylan, born Robert Zimmerman in 1941. He was born in Duluth, Minnesota, and grew up in nearby Hibbing, just off the road that ran all the way up from New Orleans and lent its name to his sixth album, 1965’s Highway 61 Revisited.

He moved down to Minneapolis and studied art at the University of Minnesota, and though he’d started out his musical career with a rock ‘n’ roll band, he soon converted to folk, playing gigs at a coffeehouse, the 10 O’clock Scholar, in the Dinkytown neighborhood north of campus. Rock was catchy, but it wasn’t deep enough to satisfy him, and he later said: “I knew that when I got into folk music, it was more of a serious type of thing. The songs are filled with more despair, more sadness, more triumph, more faith in the supernatural, much deeper feelings.”

He left for New York and became the darling of Greenwich Village’s folk community.

(Source: mygang)