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Eighty years ago, on May 24, 1941, Bob Dylan was born as Robert Allen Zimmerman to a middle-class Jewish family in Duluth, Minnesota. His parents, Abram & Beatrice, trace their roots from Ukraine, Lithuania and Kars in Northeast Turkey. When Dylan was six, his father contracted polio. The family moved to Beatrice's town in Hibbing. Dylan spent his childhood and teenage years there.
The family had a radio. A rich spectrum of white country music, Mississippi Delta blues, and black church music were silently tuning young Bob's ears. Bob learned the basics of the guitar, piano, and the harmonica. By the mid-1950s, rock n' roll was born. Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley and others soon became icons, but it was Little Richard who caught Dylan's imagination. At 18, Dylan wrote in his high school yearbook that his ambition was to join Little Richard.