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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.
May 24, 2021
Nate Todd
Today is Bob Dylan’s 80th birthday. The iconic singer-songwriter was born on May 24, 1941 in Duluth, Minnesota. Widely considered the greatest songwriter of the popular music era, he certainly was the mold for the modern singer-songwriter, that of a young intrepid troubadour out to change the world, which Bob did.
Although Dylan defined a generation who openly questioned the rules and mores of the one that proceeded it, even revolutionaries must grow up. In 1966, after releasing three of the greatest rock ‘n’ roll albums of all time, embarking on a tour that was largely unappreciated by fans who were sometimes outright hostile and finally suffering a motorcycle accident, Dylan withdrew from touring to take stock in what was really important to him.
When I Show My Masterpiece? The First-Ever Retrospective of Bob Dylan’s Visual Art Is Coming to the U.S. This Fall
“Retrospectrum” is set to open at Florida s Frost Art Museum in November.
Bob Dylan,
Sunset, Monument Valley (2019). Photo: Yu Jieyu/AP. Courtesy of the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum.
This fall, a major retrospective of Bob Dylan’s art will make its U.S. debut in Miami. “Retrospectrum,” as the exhibition is called, is set to open at Florida International University’s Frost Art Museum on November 30 just in time for Miami Art Week. A multi-day symposium on Dylan’s cultural legacy will kick off the occasion.