Bob Dylan
American singer-songwriter (born 1941) · United States · Musicians
Bob Dylan is read about 12,113 times a day, in 146 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 15 October 2026
The middle day of the days counted, so one week of news cannot move it. The line under it is the last 390 days, one point a day.
Something wrong?He took folk music - a form built for protest songs and three chords - and wired it with the voltage of Rimbaud and Whitman, then plugged it in and made half his audience boo. The songwriter who gave the '60s its anthems spent the next fifty years refusing to be that guy.
A life in dates
Rough and Rowdy WaysAlbum2016Nobel Prize in LiteratureAward
Fallen AngelsAlbum, 20162015
Shadows in the NightAlbum2012Presidential Medal of FreedomAward2009National Medal of ArtsAward
Christmas in the HeartAlbum, 20092008Pulitzer Prize Special Citations and AwardsAward2007Grammy Award for Best Americana AlbumAwardGrammy Award for Best Solo Rock Vocal PerformanceAward2001Academy Award for Best Original SongAward
“Love and Theft”Album, 20011998Grammy Award for Album of the YearAwardGrammy Award for Best Male Rock Vocal PerformanceAward1997Kennedy Center HonorsAward
Time Out of MindAlbum, 19971992Good as I Been to YouAlbum1991Grammy Lifetime Achievement AwardAward1990Grammy Award for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with VocalAward1989
Oh MercyAlbum1986Knocked Out LoadedAlbum1985
Empire BurlesqueAlbum1981
Shot of LoveAlbum1980Grammy Award for Best Male Rock Vocal PerformanceAward1979
Slow Train ComingAlbum1978
Street‐LegalAlbum1975
The Basement TapesAlbum1973Grammy Award for Album of the YearAward1966“Colleges are like old-age homes; except for the fact that more people die in colleges.”In their wordsFebruary 1966Playboy Interview (February 1966)1965“a poem is a naked person . . . some people say that I am a poet”In their wordsLiner notes, Bringing It All Back Home (1965)“He's a pinboy. He also wears suspenders. He's a real person. You know him, but not by that name... I saw him come into the room one night and he looked like a camel.”In their wordsWhen asked about the meaning of the song "Ballad of a Thin Man" during a 1965 interview.“I accept chaos. I am not sure whether it accepts me.”In their wordsNovember 1965As quoted in "Cosmo Listens to Records" by Nat Hentoff, in Cosmopolitan (November 1965)1963“Anything I can sing, I call a song. Anything I can't sing, I call a poem.”In their wordsLiner notes, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963)“Because Dickens and Dostoyevsky and Woody Guthrie were telling their stories much better than I ever could, I decided to stick to my own mind.”In their words9 December 1963"Only Human Driftin' And Learnin'" by Sidney Fields, New York Mirror (9 December 1963)1941Born24 May 1941Also in Deutsch
Photos 12
The Bob Dylan Childhood Home in Hibbing, Minnesota
Bob Dylan, 1963 promo photo by Don Hunstein for The Times They Are a-Changin' in a recording studio
Joan Baez and Dylan during the civil rights "March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom", August 28, 1963
Bob Dylan performing in 1963
Dylan in 1965
The album cover of Highway 61 Revisited, an iconic image of Dylan
The cinéma vérité documentary Dont Look Back (1967) follows Dylan on his 1965 tour of England. An early music video for "Subterranean Homesick Blues" was used as the film's opening segment.In their own words 10
, Colleges are like old-age homes; except for the fact that more people die in colleges.
a poem is a naked person . . . some people say that I am a poet
He's a pinboy. He also wears suspenders. He's a real person. You know him, but not by that name... I saw him come into the room one night and he looked like a camel.
Listen
SpotifyOn YouTube
1.7M subscribersAlbums 24
SNShadows in the Night
TETempest
TLTogether Through Life
DGDown in the Groove
EBEmpire Burlesque
TTThe Basement TapesAwards
Family
Parents
Bob DylanPartners
Children
Is this everyone?
Only relatives with a profile here are drawn, so a family can be larger than this. A line here can also be wrong.
Correct this familyAbout this person
Born Robert Zimmerman in Minnesota, he arrived in New York in 1961 chasing Woody Guthrie's ghost and cut his first album of traditional folk the next year. The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963) and the anthems that followed - "Blowin' in the Wind", "The Times They Are a-Changin'" - made him the voice of civil rights and antiwar movements he never asked to represent. Then in 1965 he went electric, releasing Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and the six-minute "Like a Rolling Stone", which cracked open what a pop song could be and do. A motorcycle crash in 1966 pulled him off the road for seven years; he emerged chasing country sounds on John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline, then cycled through decades of reinvention - Blood on the Tracks in 1975, a Grammy for Time Out of Mind in 1997, and a touring schedule since the late '80s that never stops. In 2016 they gave him the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first songwriter to get it.
Fame.am measures public visibility signals. It does not measure human value, talent, morality, or credibility.