I don’t know if she was sick, but it was an unexpected trip he had to make up to Hibbing and he wanted me to cut his hair. He came to my apartment and said, ‘It’s an emergency! I need your help! I gotta go home an’ see my mother!’ He was talking in the strangest Woody Guthrie-Oklahoma accent. The following fans’ accounts of seeing Bob Dylan live are taken from the This Day in Music book Bob Dylan – The Day I Was There. These songs were showcased on his second album, ‘The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan’.īetween April 1962 and April 1963 he claimed to have written more than 100 songs, being so prolific in this period that he said he was afraid to go to sleep at night, for fear he would miss a song. Over the course of 1962 Dylan began to write a large batch of original songs, many of which were political protest songs in the vein of his Greenwich Village contemporaries. They defied existing pop music convention, sometimes extended over many verses, appealing, along with the young Dylan’s persona, sometimes world-weary, sometimes mischievous, to the then-burgeoning alternative music scene, almost entirely folk-based.Ĭolumbia Records A&R man John Hammond sought out Dylan on the strength of a review, and signed the songwriter in late 1961, producing Dylan’s eponymous debut album, a collection of folk and blues standards that surprisingly boasted only two original songs.
Initially inspired by the songs of Hank Williams, Woody Guthrie and Robert Johnson, Dylan incorporated in his early song lyrics a variety of political, social and philosophical, as well as literary influences, while drawing on many traditional folk song forms and melodies, including highly topical and witty ‘talking blues’ tales. While at college, he began performing folk songs at coffeehouses under the name Bob Dylan, taking his last name from the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas.įinding his way to New York City in January of 1961, Dylan immediately made a substantial impression on the folk community. In his 1959 school yearbook, Robert Zimmerman listed as his ambition “To follow Little Richard“, with whom he was obsessed.įollowing his graduation in 1959, he began studying art at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. He formed several bands while he attended Hibbing High School, including The Shadow Blasters and The Golden Chords. He lived in Duluth until age six, when his father was stricken with polio and the family returned to his mother’s hometown, Hibbing, where Zimmerman spent the rest of his childhood.īob spent much of his youth listening to the radio – first to blues and country stations and later, to early rock and roll. Robert Zimmerman was born on 24th May 1941, in St. In the 20 years up to 2010, he performed 2,045 concerts, although he now made his shows so idiosyncratic that not more than half the audience could probably tell which particular Dylan classic he was performing at any given time. With his contemporaries, including McCartney, Jagger, Richards and Paul Simon, now also in their 70’s, the old troubadour is still working as hard as any of them. Dylan’s gift was to marry poetic lyrics with catchy tunes, and as a vocalist, he broke the notion that a singer must have a conventionally good voice in order to perform, redefining the vocalist’s role in popular music in the process.
His vast influence on music is matched only by Elvis Presley and The Beatles, (and even the Beatles’ shift toward introspective songwriting wouldn’t have happened without his towering influence).
The song has gone on to become a standard and has been covered by numerous bands and artists over the years, including The Byrds, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, The Everly Brothers, Neil Diamond, Melanie, The Isley Brothers, Duran Duran, Hoyt Axton and Isaac Hayes amongst others.
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“Lay Lady Lay” was originally written for the soundtrack of the movie Midnight Cowboy, but wasn’t submitted in time to be included in the finished film. On 13th Feb 1969, Bob Dylan recorded versions of “Lay, Lady, Lay”, at Columbia Recording Studios in Nashville, Tennessee.
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