Overview

Book 1 traces Bob Dylan's Minnesota roots, from his childhood in Hibbing to his artistic reinvention in the Twin Cities. Bob Dylan was born in Duluth, Minnesota, in 1941. In 1946, his father contracted polio, and the following year Dylan's family moved to the North Country town of Hibbing, located atop one of the world's largest deposits of iron ore. The mines around Hibbing fueled America's industrial growth at the turn of the century. It was here that in his teenage years Dylan's passion for music emerged. Dylan attended Hibbing High from second grade through his high school graduation in spring of 1959. The crowning feature of the high school is its 1,800-seat auditorium, with a 1922 Steinway grand piano, made famous by a young Bob Dylan. In 1958, Dylan played with his band, The Golden Chords, performing their own brand of rock 'n' roll in front of the entire assembled class body at the school. On January 31, 1959, Dylan attended a performance by Buddy Holly at the Hibbing Armory, an experience he found so electrifying that he included it as part of his Nobel Prize lecture. A stone's throw from campus, in the hip, student-oriented neighborhood known as Dinkytown, the 10 O'Clock Scholar coffeehouse was a gathering place for young students attending the University of Minnesota. It was on stage at the Scholar where Bobby Zimmerman first introduced himself as Bob Dylan. Woody Guthrie's life and music has been a lasting inspiration throughout Dylan's long career. In this early period of his life, while Dylan was immersing himself in folk-music records, he was also reinventing himself according to the model of Guthrie's hard-travelin' persona. This was a pivotal moment for the budding musician between becoming Bob Dylan and striking out east to New York to find Guthrie.

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"Mark Davidson is the Curator of the Bob Dylan Archive and Senior Director of Archives and Exhibitions for the Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie Centers in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He holds a PhD in musicology from the University of California-Santa Cruz with an emphasis on folk music collecting, and an MSIS in archiving and library science from the University of Texas at Austin. He has written widely on music and archives, including his dissertation, ""Recording the Nation: Folk Music and the Government in Roosevelt's New Deal, 1936-1941,"" and the essay ""Blood in the Stacks: On the Nature of Archives in the Twenty-First Century,"" published in The World of Bob Dylan (2021). Parker Fishel is an archivist who served as co-curator of the inaugural exhibitions at the Bob Dylan Center. His company, Americana Music Productions, provides consulting, research, and production work for artists and estates, record labels, and other entities looking to preserve archives and share the important stories found in them. His selected credits include Ann Arbor Blues Festival 1969 (Third Man Records), the Chelsea Hotel-inspired Chelsea Doors box set (Vinyl Me, Please), and several volumes of Bob Dylan's GRAMMY Award-winning Bootleg Series (Sony/Legacy). Fishel is also a board member of the Hot Club Foundation and a co-founder of the nonprofit improvised music archive Crossing Tones. Greil Marcus is the author of numerous books about music and culture, including The Old Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes (1997), which was originally titled Invisible Republic (now the author doesn't know what to call it), and Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs (2022). He was born in San Francisco, lives in Oakland with his wife, Jenny, and can just see a bit of the bridge that was turned purple when Prince died from their apartment in Minneapolis. Lee Ranaldo, musician, visual artist, and writer, co-founded Sonic Youth (1981-2011), played in Glenn Branca's early ensembles and symphonies (1980-84), and has been active both in New York and internationally for forty years as a composer, performer, collaborator, and producer. He has also exhibited visual art and has published several books of journals, poetry, and writings on music. Ranaldo's thirty-year performance partnership with Leah Singer, currently Contre Jour performances, have been large-scale, multi-projection sound+light events with suspended electric guitar phenomena that challenge the usual performer/audience relationship. He lives and works in New York City. Sean Wilentz is the George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History at Princeton University and the author of, among many books, Bob Dylan in America (2010)."

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