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Bob Dylan is a singer, song writer, author and poet who has been a leader in U.S. popular music for more than four decades. He is most noted for his unique style of protest songs, which he developed early in his career and which criticize injustices in American society. Dylan was born in 1941 in Duluth, Minnesota to Abe and Beatty Zimmerman, who gave him the name was Robert Allen Zimmerman. A favorite activity during his relatively uneventful childhood was listening to popular music on the radio, and in high school he performed in several garage rock bands. After he began classes at the University of Minnesota in 1959, he started introducing himself as Bob Dylan for reasons that he has never fully explained. Dylan quit college after just one year and went to Greenwich Village in New York City to pursue his music career. Gaining exposure in 1961 in The New York Times led to a contract by with Columbia Records, for whom he recorded his first album, called simply Bob Dylan, in 1962. Much of Dylan's best known work is from that turbulent decade, when he became an informal recorder of and figurehead for the anti-war and civil rights movements in the U.S. Songs, such as The Times They Are a-Changin' and Blowin' in the Wind, became virtual anthems of those movements. Dylan has retained much of his popularity, and four decades later his 2001 album Love and Theft reached the top five on the charts in both the U.S. and the UK. His most recent album, Modern Times, which was released in 2006, became his first album in thirty years to enter the number one position in the Billboard albums charts in the U.S., and it made him the oldest still-living chart topper in history at the age of 65. Created November 2, 2006. |