Bob Dylan (born Robert Allen Zimmerman, May 24, 1941 in Duluth, Minnesota) is an American singer-songwriter, author, poet, and painter, who has been a major figure in popular music for five decades. Much of Dylan's most celebrated work dates from the 1960s, when he became an informal chronicler and a reluctant figurehead of American unrest. A number of his songs, such as "Blowin' in the Wind" and "The Times They Are a-Changin'", became anthems of the civil rights movements. His most recent studio album, Modern Times, released on August 29, 2006, entered the U.S. album chart at number one, and that same year was named Album of the Year by Rolling Stone magazine.
 
Dylan's early lyrics incorporated politics, social commentary, philosophy, Historical and literary influences, defying existing pop music conventions and appealing widely to the counterculture. While expanding and personalizing musical styles, he has shown steadfast devotion to many traditions of American song, from folk, blues and country to gospel, rock and roll and rockabilly to English, Scottish and Irish folk music, and even jazz and swing.
 
Dylan performs with the guitar, piano and harmonica. Backed by a changing line-up of musicians, he has toured steadily since the late 1980s on what has been dubbed the "Never Ending Tour." Although his accomplishments as performer and recording artist have been central to his career, his songwriting is generally regarded as his greatest contribution.

During his career, Dylan has won many awards for his songwriting, performing, and recording. His records have earned Grammy, Golden Globe, and Academy Awards, and he has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame and Songwriters Hall of Fame. In 1999, Dylan was included in the Time 100: The Most Important People of the Century, and in 2004, he was ranked number two in Rolling Stone magazine's list of "Greatest Artists of All Time."  In January 1990, Dylan was made a Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres by French Minister of Culture Jack Lang; in 2000, he was awarded the Polar Music Prize by the Royal Swedish Academy of Music; and in 2007, Dylan was awarded the Prince of Asturias Award in Arts in Spain by the Fundación Príncipe de Asturias. He has been nominated several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

In 2008, Dylan was awarded a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation for his "profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power. Previous recipients of this award include Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane.
 
Robert Allen Zimmerman (Hebrew name Shabtai Zisel ben Avraham) was born on May 24, 1941, in Duluth, Minnesota, and raised there and in Hibbing, Minnesota, on the Mesabi Iron Range west of Lake Superior. Research by Dylan’s biographers has shown that his paternal grandparents, Zigman and Anna Zimmerman, emigrated from Odessa in the Russian Empire (now Ukraine) to the United States after the antisemitic pogroms of 1905. Dylan himself wrote in his 2004 autobiography, Chronicles, Vol. 1 (2004), that his paternal grandmother's maiden name was Kyrgyz and her family originated from Istanbul, although she grew up in the Kazman district of Kars in Eastern Turkey. He also wrote that his paternal grandfather was from Trabzon on the Black Sea coast of Turkey. His mother’s grandparents, Benjamin and Lybba Edelstein, were Lithuanian Jews who arrived in America in 1902.
 
His parents, Abram Zimmerman and Beatrice "Beatty" Stone, were part of the area's small but close-knit Jewish community. Zimmerman lived in Duluth until age seven. When his father was stricken with polio, the family returned to nearby Hibbing, where Zimmerman spent the rest of his childhood. Abram was recalled by one of Bob's childhood friends as strict and unwelcoming, whereas his mother was remembered as warm and friendly.
 
Zimmerman spent much of his youth listening to the radio — first to the powerful blues and country stations broadcasting from Shreveport, Louisiana and, later, to early rock and roll. He formed several bands in high school: the first, The Shadow Blasters, was short-lived; but his next band, The Golden Chords, lasted longer playing covers of popular songs. Their performance of Danny and the Juniors' "Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay" at their high school talent show was so loud that the principal cut the microphone off.  In his 1959 school yearbook, Robert Zimmerman listed as his ambition "To join Little Richard.”  The same year, using the name Elston Gunn, he performed two dates with Bobby Vee, playing piano and providing handclaps.

Zimmerman enrolled at the University of Minnesota in September 1959, moving to Minneapolis. His early focus on rock and roll gave way to an interest in American folk music, typically performed with an acoustic guitar. He has recalled, "The first thing that turned me onto folk singing was Odetta. I heard a record of hers in a record store. Right then and there, I went out and traded my electric guitar and amplifier for an acoustical guitar, a flat-top Gibson.  In the sleeve notes to his album Biograph, Dylan explained the attraction folk music exerted: "The thing about rock'n'roll is that for me anyway it wasn't enough...There were great catch-phrases and driving pulse rhythms...but the songs weren't serious or didn't reflect life in a realistic way. 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 soon began to perform at the 10 O'clock Scholar, a coffee house a few blocks from campus, and became actively involved in the local Dinkytown folk music circuit, fraternizing with local folk enthusiasts and occasionally "borrowing" many of their albums.

During his Dinkytown days, Zimmerman began introducing himself as "Bob Dylan." In his autobiography, Chronicles (2004), he wrote, "What I was going to do as soon as I left home was just call myself Robert Allen.... It sounded like a Scottish king and I liked it." However, in reading Down Beat magazine, he discovered there was a saxophonist named David Allyn. Dylan adds, "I'd seen some poems by Dylan Thomas. Dylan and Allyn sounded similar. Robert Dylan. Robert Allyn. The letter D came on stronger.

His March 1965 album Bringing It All Back Home was yet another stylistic leap.  The album featured his first recordings made with electric instruments. The first single, "Subterranean Homesick Blues", owed much to Chuck Berry's "Too Much Monkey Business" and was provided with an early music video courtesy of D. A. Pennebaker's cinéma vérité presentation of Dylan's 1965 tour of England, Dont Look Back.  Its free association lyrics both harked back to the manic energy of Beat poetry and were a forerunner of rap and hip-hop. In 1969, the militant Weatherman group took their name from a line in "Subterranean Homesick Blues." ("You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.")

That summer Dylan made history by performing his first electric set (since his high school days) with a pickup group drawn mostly from the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, featuring Mike Bloomfield (guitar), Sam Lay (drums) and Jerome Arnold (bass), plus Al Kooper (organ) and Barry Goldberg (piano), while headlining at the Newport Folk Festival (see The electric Dylan controversy). Dylan had appeared at Newport twice before, in 1963 and 1964, but in 1965 two wildly divergent accounts of the crowd's response emerged. The settled fact is that Dylan, met with a mix of cheering and booing, left the stage after only three songs. As one version of the legend has it, the boos were from the outraged folk fans whom Dylan had alienated by appearing, unexpectedly, with an electric guitar. An alternative account claims audience members were merely upset by poor sound quality and a surprisingly short set. Whatever sparked the crowd's disfavor, Dylan soon reemerged and sang two much better received solo acoustic numbers, "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" and "Mr. Tambourine Man." His choice of the former has often been described as a carefully selected death knell for the kind of consciously sociopolitical, purely acoustic music that the cat-callers were demanding of him, with "New Folk" in the role of "Baby Blue."

In July 1965, Dylan released the single "Like a Rolling Stone", which peaked at #2 in the U.S. and at #4 in the UK charts. At over six minutes in length, this song has been widely credited with altering attitudes about what a pop single could convey. Bruce Springsteen said that on first hearing this single, “that snare shot sounded like somebody’d kicked open the door to your mind… I knew that I was listening to the toughest voice that I had ever heard.  In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine listed it at number one on its list of the 500 greatest songs of all time.  Its signature sound — with a full, jangling band and an organ riff — also characterized his next album, Highway 61 Revisited, titled after the road that led from Dylan's native Minnesota to the musical hotbed of New Orleans. The songs passed stylistically through the birthplace of blues, the Mississippi Delta, and referenced a number of blues songs, including Mississippi Fred McDowell's "61 Highway". The songs were in the same vein as the hit single, with surreal litanies of the grotesque flavored by Mike Bloomfield's blues guitar, a rhythm section, and Dylan's obvious enjoyment of the sessions. The closing song, "Desolation Row", is an apocalyptic vision with references to many figures of Western culture.

Dylan started 1973 by contributing his own composition, "Wallflower", to Doug Sahm's Doug Sahm and Band album released on Atlantic Records, as well as sharing lead vocal and playing guitar on the track. Dylan's own version of the song would later be released on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3. Dylan also signed with David Geffen's new Asylum label when his contract with Columbia Records expired in 1973, and he recorded Planet Waves with The Band while rehearsing for a major tour. The album included two versions of "Forever Young". Christopher Ricks has connected the chorus of this song with John Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn,  ("For ever panting, and for ever young"), and Dylan has recalled writing the song for one of his own children: “I wrote it thinking about one of my boys and not wanting to be too sentimental”.  It has remained one of the most frequently performed of his songs;  one critic describing it as "something hymnal and heartfelt that spoke of the father in Dylan."  Columbia Records simultaneously released Dylan, a haphazard collection of studio outtakes (almost exclusively cover songs), which was widely interpreted as a churlish response to Dylan's signing with a rival record label. In January 1974 Dylan and The Band embarked on their high-profile, coast-to-coast Bob Dylan and The Band 1974 Tour of North America; promoter Bill Graham claimed he received more ticket purchase requests than for any prior tour by any artist. A live double album of the tour, Before the Flood which included Dylan with The Band, was released on Asylum Records. Later in the mid 70s Before the Flood was released by Columbia records.

In November 1976 Dylan appeared at The Band's "farewell" concert, along with other guests including Joni Mitchell, Muddy Waters, Van Morrison and Neil Young. Martin Scorsese's acclaimed cinematic chronicle of this show, The Last Waltz, was released in 1978 and included about half of Dylan's set. In this year Dylan also wrote and duetted on the song "Sign Language" for Eric Clapton's No Reason To Cry album - no other versions of the song apart from the one which appears on this album have ever been released. In 1977 he also contributed backing vocals to Leonard Cohen's Phil Spector-produced album Death of a Ladies' Man.

Dylan's 1978 album Street Legal was lyrically one of his more complex and cohesive;  it suffered, however, from a poor sound mix (attributed to his studio recording practices), submerging much of its instrumentation in the sonic equivalent of cotton wadding until its remastered CD release nearly a quarter century later.

In the fall of 1980 Dylan briefly resumed touring, restoring several of his most popular 1960s songs to his repertoire, for a series of concerts billed as "A Musical Retrospective." Shot of Love, recorded the next spring, featured Dylan's first secular compositions in more than two years, mixed with explicitly Christian songs. The haunting "Every Grain of Sand" reminded some critics of William Blake’s verses.

In the 1980s the quality of Dylan's recorded work varied, from the well-regarded Infidels in 1983 to the panned Down in the Groove in 1988. Critics such as Michael Gray condemned Dylan's 1980s albums both for showing an extraordinary carelessness in the studio and for failing to release his best songs.

Dylan contributed vocals to USA for Africa's famine relief fundraising single "We Are the World". On July 13, 1985, he climaxed at the Live Aid concert at JFK Stadium, Philadelphia. Backed by Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood, Dylan performed a ragged version of "Hollis Brown", his ballad of rural poverty, and then said to a worldwide audience exceeding one billion people: "I hope that some of the money ... maybe they can just take a little bit of it, maybe ... one or two million, maybe ... and use it to pay the mortgages on some of the farms and, the farmers here, owe to the banks." His remarks were widely criticised as inappropriate, but they did inspire Willie Nelson to organise a series of events, Farm Aid, to benefit debt-ridden American farmers.

In July 1986 Dylan released Knocked Out Loaded, an album which consisted of three cover songs (by Little Junior Parker, Kris Kristofferson and the traditional gospel hymn "Precious Memories"), three collaborations with other songwriters (Tom Petty, Sam Shepard and Carole Bayer Sager), and two solo compositions by Dylan himself. The album received mainly negative reviews; Rolling Stone called it "a depressing affair", and it was the first Dylan album since Freewheelin' (1963) to fail to make the Top 50. Since then, some critics have called the eleven minute epic that Dylan co-wrote with Sam Shepard, 'Brownsville Girl', a work of genius,  and some websites have even tried to claim that the entire album has been vastly underrated.

Dylan was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in January 1988. Bruce Springsteen made the induction speech, declaring: "Bob freed your mind the way Elvis freed your body. He showed us that just because music was innately physical did not mean that it was anti-intellectual." Later that spring, Dylan joined Roy Orbison, Jeff Lynne, Tom Petty, and George Harrison to create a lighthearted, well-selling album as the Traveling Wilburys. Despite Orbison's death in December 1988, the remaining four recorded a second album in May 1990, which they released with the unexpected title Traveling Wilburys Vol. 3. Among Wilburys songs is the well known "Handle with Care".

Dylan's 1990s began with Under the Red Sky (1990), an about-face from the serious Oh Mercy. The album was dedicated to "Gabby Goo Goo", and contained several apparently simple songs, including "Under the Red Sky" and "Wiggle Wiggle". The "Gabby Goo Goo" dedication was later explained as a nickname for Dylan's four-year-old daughter.  Sidemen on the album included George Harrison, Slash from Guns N' Roses, David Crosby, Bruce Hornsby, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and Elton John. Despite the stellar line-up, the record received bad reviews and sold poorly. Dylan would not make another studio album of new songs for seven years.

In 1991 Bob Dylan was inducted into the Minnesota Music Hall of Fame and in 1993 Dylan performed a brief tour with Santana.
 
In December 1997 U.S. President Bill Clinton presented Dylan with a Kennedy Center Honor in the East Room of the White House, paying this tribute: "He probably had more impact on people of my generation than any other creative artist. His voice and lyrics haven't always been easy on the ear, but throughout his career Bob Dylan has never aimed to please. He's disturbed the peace and discomforted the powerful.

In 1998 Dylan appeared on Ralph Stanley's album Clinch Mountain Country, duetting with the bluegrass legend on "The Lonesome River.".  Between June and September, 1999, Dylan toured with Paul Simon. They performed a couple of songs together at each show, including "I Walk the Line" and "Blue Moon Of Kentucky". (Simon & Garfunkel had recorded "The Times They Are a-Changin'" on their debut album, Wednesday Morning, 3AM, and Dylan had covered "The Boxer" on his Self Portrait album.) Dylan ended the nineties by returning to the big screen after a break of ten years in the role of Alfred the Chaffeur alongside Ben Gazzara and Karen Black in Robert Clapsaddle's Paradise Cove.

In 2000 his song "Things Have Changed", penned for the film Wonder Boys, won a Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song and an Academy Award for Best Song. For reasons unknown, the Oscar (by some reports a facsimile) tours with him, presiding over shows perched atop an amplifier.

"Love and Theft" was released on September 11, 2001. Dylan produced the album himself under the pseudonym Jack Frost, and its distinctive sound owes much to the accompanists. The album was critically well-received and nominated for several Grammy awards. Critics noted that at this late stage in his career, Dylan was deliberately widening his musical palette. The styles referenced in this album included rockabilly, Western swing, jazz, and even lounge ballads.  Love and Theft generated controversy when some similarities between the lyrics of the album to Japanese writer Junichi Saga's book Confessions of a Yakuza were pointed out. It is unclear if Dylan intentionally lifted any material. Dylan's publicist had no comment.

On June 23, 2004, Dylan was awarded an honorary degree by the University of St. Andrews, conferring on him the title 'Doctor of Music'. Professor Neil Corcoran, an authority on Dylan and the awarder of the degree, called Dylan "an extension of our consciousness and part of our growing up" in his ceremonial address.

In February 2006, Dylan recorded tracks in New York City that were to result in the album Modern Times, released on August 29, 2006. In a well-publicized interview to promote the album, Dylan criticised the quality of modern sound recordings and claimed that his new songs "probably sounded ten times better in the studio when we recorded 'em." Despite some coarsening of Dylan’s voice (The Guardian critic characterised his singing on the album as “a catarrhal death rattle”)  most reviewers gave the album high marks and many described it as the final installment of a successful trilogy, embracing Time Out of Mind and Love and Theft.   Among the tracks most frequently singled out for praise were "Workingman's Blues #2" (the title was a nod to Merle Haggard's song of that name), and the final song “Ain’t Talkin’”, a nine minute talking blues in which Dylan appeared to be walking “through all-enveloping darkness, before finally disappearing into the murk”.  Modern Times made news by entering the U.S. charts at #1, making it Dylan's first album to reach that position since 1976's Desire, 30 years prior.

Nominated for three Grammy Awards, Modern Times won Best Contemporary Folk/Americana Album and Bob Dylan also won Best Solo Rock Vocal Performance for "Someday Baby." Modern Times was ranked as the Album of the Year, 2006, by Rolling Stone magazine, and by Uncut in the UK.  On the same day that Modern Times was released the iTunes Music Store released Bob Dylan: The Collection, a digital box set containing all of his studio and live albums (773 tracks in total), along with 42 rare & unreleased tracks and a 100 page booklet. To promote the digital box set and the new album (on iTunes), Apple released a 30 second TV spot featuring Dylan, in full country & western regalia, lip-synching to "Someday Baby" against a striking white background.

On October 1, 2007, Columbia Records released a triple CD retrospective album entitled Dylan, anthologising his entire career.  As part of the marketing campaign for this album, using the Dylan 07 logo, British record producer Mark Ronson was asked to produce a re-mix of "Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I'll Go Mine)", originally released on Blonde on Blonde in 1966. This was the first time Dylan had sanctioned a re-mix of one of his classic recordings.  Ronson's re-mix was released as a maxi-single in October but not included in the Dylan triple album.

In February 2008, Dylan released a personal selection of music in the 'Artist's Choice' series on the Starbucks Entertainment record label. The sixteen tracks included such well-known artists as Billie Holiday and Flaco Jimenez, old Dylan favourites including the Stanley Brothers and Junior Wells, and lesser known performers such as Pee Wee Crayton and Ethiopian singer Gétatchéw Kassa.  Dylan also contributed liner notes on the historical significance of each artist.

Also released in February 2008 by Ace Records was a double CD, Theme Time Radio Hour With Your Host Bob Dylan. The record contained fifty songs that had been featured on Dylan's radio show, ranging from Billie Holiday and George Jones, through Aretha Franklin to The Clash and the White Stripes. Released with Dylan's blessing, the tracks were selected by the producer of Dylan's radio show, Eddie Gorodetsky, and by Roger Armstrong from Ace Records.

In April 2008, Dylan was awarded a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation for his "profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power.  Previous recipients of this award include Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane.

In the same month, Simon & Schuster confirmed that Dylan is working on the next volume of his planned three part autobiography, the follow up to Chronicles: Volume One. It may be released by the end of 2008.

In July 2008, CBS announced the release on October 7 of the long-rumored Volume 8 of Dylan's Bootleg Series, entitled Tell Tale Signs: Rare And Unreleased 1989-2006. The album will be released in a two CD set and a three CD version; it will contain live performances and outtakes from studio albums Oh Mercy, World Gone Wrong, Time Out of Mind, Modern Times and a track from an album that Dylan had started to record with David Bromberg in 1992, but which had never been finished or released. Other tracks on the set will include 'Cross the Green Mountain' from the movie Gods and Generals and Dylan's duet with Ralph Stanley, 'The Lonesome River'. CBS have announced the price of the two CD set will be $18.99, while the three CD version will cost $129.99. This has led to criticism of the 'rip-off pricing' of the extra CD from Michael Gray and other Dylan critics.

Dylan is currently curating a project to set some of Hank Williams's "lost" lyrics to music, similar to the one undertaken by Billy Bragg and Wilco with Woody Guthrie's unaccompanied lyrics on "Mermaid Avenue". Dylan is overseeing contributions by Jack White, Willie Nelson, Lucinda Williams, Alan Jackson and Norah Jones, who will put the lyrics to music.  The project started when Dylan acquired the lyrics that were in Wiliams's briefcase on the night he died.

Dylan has played roughly 100 dates a year for the entirety of the 1990s and the 2000s, a heavier schedule than most performers who started out in the 1960s.  The "Never Ending Tour" continues, anchored by longtime bassist Tony Garnier and filled out with talented musicians better known to their peers than to their audiences. To the dismay of some fans, Dylan refuses to be a nostalgia act; his reworked arrangements, evolving bands and experimental vocal approaches keep the music unpredictable night after night. Some fans have complained that, as Dylan's vocal range has diminished, he has resorted to a technique they have labelled "upsinging." One critic described the technique as Dylan's "dismantling melodies by delivering phrases in a monotone and ending them an octave higher.

For a two and a half year period, between 2003 and 2006, Dylan ceased playing guitar, and stuck to the keyboard during concerts. Various rumors circulated as to why Dylan gave up guitar during this period, none very reliable. According to David Gates, a Newsweek reporter who interviewed Dylan in 2004, ". . . basically it has to do with his guitar not giving him quite the fullness of sound he was wanting at the bottom. He's thought of hiring a keyboard player so he doesn't have to do it himself, but hasn't been able to figure out who. Most keyboard players, he says, like to be soloists, and he wants a very basic sound.  Dylan's touring band has two guitarists along with a multi-instrumentalist who plays steel guitar, mandolin, banjo and fiddle. From 2002 to 2005, Dylan's keyboard had a piano sound. In 2006, this was changed to an organ sound. At the start of his Spring 2007 tour in Europe, Dylan played the first half of the set on electric guitar and switched to keyboard for the second half.  The 2008 installment of Dylan's "Never Ending Tour" has seen Dylan performing in Mexico, and South America in February and March. The next swing of his tour began in Eastern U.S. and Canada, going on to perform in Russia and Europe in May, June and July. August and September see Dylan booked to play a string of American concerts, beginning in Philadelphia and ending in Santa Barbara.

Dylan married Sara Lownds on November 22, 1965; their first child, Jesse Byron Dylan, was born on January 6, 1966. Bob and Sara Dylan had four children: Jesse Byron, Anna Lea, Samuel Isaac Abraham, and Jakob Luke (born December 9, 1969). Dylan also adopted Sara's daughter from a prior marriage, Maria Lownds (later Dylan), (born October 21, 1961 now married to musician Peter Himmelman). In the 1990s his son Jakob Dylan became well known as the lead singer of the band The Wallflowers. Jesse Dylan is a film director and a successful businessman. Bob and Sara Dylan were divorced on June 29, 1977.

In June 1986, Dylan married his longtime backup singer Carolyn Dennis (often professionally known as Carol Dennis).  Their daughter, Desiree Gabrielle Dennis-Dylan, was born on January 31, 1986. The couple divorced in October 1992. Their marriage and child remained a closely guarded secret until the publication of Howard Sounes' Dylan biography, Down the Highway: The Life Of Bob Dylan in 2001.