The Dawn of Bob Dylan
Friday, April 29, 1961, was a big day for Bob Dylan. Dressed in his signature ragtag work clothes, and bearing a wide grin that only accentuated his soft, baby-faced features, the 20-year-old college-dropout-turned-troubadour sauntered into Studio A at the Columbia Records building, at Seventh Avenue and 52nd Street in Manhattan. He was going to cut his first album.
It wasn’t even a solo album. He had been invited to play backup harmonica for Carolyn Hester, a Texas-born folksinger who was laying down a collection of traditional songs. Hester didn’t need backup vocals, or even a backup guitarist. She could sing better than Dylan, and she had already enlisted the talents of Bill Langhorne, a guitarist with far superior skills to Dylan’s. She just needed a harmonica player.
Still, it was a banner day for him. As Hester later remembered it, he “bounced” into Studio A with a folded copy of The New York Times under his arm, fresh from a long patrol of the Greenwich Village streets, where he told anyone who cared to know that he had made the papers. On page 31 the Times carried a piece by the music critic Robert Shelton trumpeting the talents of “Bob Dylan: A Distinctive Folk-Song Stylist.” Shelton heralded the Minnesota-born musician as “a bright new face in folk music” and a “cross between a choir boy and a beatnik.” With his “cherubic look and a mop of tousled hair he partly covers with a Huck Finn black corduroy cap,” Dylan seemed “both comedian and tragedian.” The up-and-comer’s voice was “anything but pretty,” but his work was full of “searing intensity.” The review was, by and large, as favorable a one as possible.
That day Dylan played harmonica on three of Hester’s tracks—“I’ll Fly Away,” a popular Baptist hymn dating from the late 1920s, “Swing and Turn Jubilee,” an Appalachian dance song, and “Come Back, Baby,” an old blues standard. Watching and waiting was John Hammond, Columbia Records’ legendary producer, the discoverer of such talents as Lionel Hampton, Aretha Franklin, and Bruce Springsteen. At the moment Hammond was smarting at his failure to sign Joan Baez, the top grosser of the burgeoning folk revival movement. Hammond liked what he heard. Dylan later told friends that Columbia signed him solely on the basis of Shelton’s Times review, but in fact it’s likely it took one more audition to seal his first solo record deal.
Later that year Dylan returned to Studio A to cut 18 tracks of his own. There wasn’t much that was particularly original in the album, called simply Bob Dylan. Most of the songs he chose were run-of-the-mill folk fare, the sorts of standards that artists like Hester, Baez, and Judy Collins had been singing for some time. There was “Man of Constant Sorrow,” which Peter, Paul and Mary included in their debut album (which was released around the same time as Dylan’s), “Pretty Peggy-O,” which Simon and Garfunkel popularized in their more successful 1964 album, Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M.; and “House of the Rising Sun,” a song of unclear origin that Baez had included in her 1960 debut and that Odetta and the Weavers, among others, had been singing for years.
Of the few original compositions on Dylan’s album, the standout was “Song to Woody,” an homage to the legendary songwriter and folk artist Woody Guthrie, who was then losing a long and terrible struggle with Huntington’s disease. Its opening lines—“I’m out here a thousand miles from my home, Walkin’ a road other men have gone down. I’m seein’ your world of people and things, Your paupers and peasants and princes and kings”—anticipated the simple but poignant lyricism for which Dylan would soon be famous. “I steal from everybody,” he later boasted. “Why, I’m the biggest song stealer there ever was.” In “Song to Woody,” he did exactly that, incorporating Guthrie’s lines directly into his own composition (“Here’s to the hearts and the hands of the men, That come with the dust and are gone with the wind”). But the style worked, and Guthrie himself was impressed by his young admirer. “That boy’s got a voice,” he famously said of Dylan. “Maybe he won’t make it with his writing, but he can sing it.” People still marvel at the observation.
Dylan’s solo debut fell something short of success. In its first year it sold only 5,000 copies, and it was soon consigned to the cut-out racks. One of the few places to find it was at Zimmerman Electric and Furniture, in Hibbing, Minnesota, the small town where Dylan, né Robert Zimmerman, had grown up.
It was fitting that Dylan was patterning himself after Guthrie. The older man, a wanderer and storyteller, had spun so many tales about himself that it was scarcely clear who he really was or where he was from. This was emblematic of the folk revival. It gestured at authenticity, but it was never authentic. Perhaps no folk song ever was. As Pete Seeger, the movement’s unofficial godfather, frequently observed, folk music was in a constant state of reinvention. So, by extension, were the artists who performed it. Guthrie’s most famous protégé, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, was really Elliot Adnopoz, a Jew from Brooklyn. After years of mastering Guthrie’s sound, style, and gait, Elliot successfully transformed himself from the son of a middle-class doctor to a ramblin’, gamblin’ troubadour. “He sounds more like me than I do,” Guthrie once observed.
Dylan took these lessons to heart. In the months after his album was released, he began writing his own songs, sometimes borrowing lyrics and melodies from older folk tunes. He fashioned a new image as a brooding, world-weary social commentator. And it paid off. His second record, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, which came out in 1963, was a runaway success. With original pieces like “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Masters of War,” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright,” he secured his position as the most sought-after composer of his time. He had learned to exude authenticity while possessing little of it.
“Mr. Dylan is vague about his antecedents and birthplace,” Robert Shelton observed in his 1961 article, “but it matters less about where he has been than where he is going, and that would seem to be straight up.”
Bob Dylan’s first solo album, Bob Dylan, was released on March 19, 1962, 45 years ago today.