Bob Dylan

A tribute to the legend of our time...

He has been described as the voice of a generation, but he has been much more. His songs beat to the pulse of our country. His tears of rage are tempered with the truest patriotism and vigilance, his acid humor with a disarming sweetness. His music is always drenched in the colors of hope. He has been an unlikely pop icon, a shy superstar and reluctant rebel, the sincerest social activist and the most distinctive of poets.

He was born Robert Allen Zimmerman in Duluth and grew up in the mining town of Hibbing, Minnesota. His family owned a hardware store. He formed a high school band called the Golden Chords, then struck out solo during his freshman year as he began to sing in coffee houses around the University of Minnesota. He changed his name as a tribute to his favorite poet, Dylan Thomas, and headed for Greenwich Village, New York, where the folk-rock revolution awaited just his sort of natural genius.

He has been controversial, iconoclastic, charismatic, and impossible to ignore, perhaps the most influential figure in American popular music in our time. His songs have become so inextricably woven into American culture that it is sometimes difficult to remember that anthems such as "Blowin’ In The Wind" and "The Times They Are A-changing" are not folk songs, that one inimitable poet from the heartland created them out of his own confrontation with turbulent times.

-Kennedy Center