Bob Dylan Was Born Here

On May twenty-fourth, nineteen forty-one, a boy named Robert Allen Zimmerman was born at St. Mary's Hospital in Duluth, Minnesota. His father, Abraham Zimmerman, managed a furniture and appliance store.

His mother, Beatrice Stone Zimmerman, raised him in a Jewish household in a city that was not exactly famous for producing troubadours. Robert Zimmerman spent only six years in Duluth before his family moved north to Hibbing, in the heart of the Iron Range, where he grew up to become the most significant American songwriter of the twentieth century. He took the name Bob Dylan as a young man, an homage, he would say, to the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, though he was characteristically ambiguous about whether the connection was really that clean.

He left Minnesota for New York City in nineteen sixty-one and arrived in Greenwich Village carrying a guitar, a harmonica rack, and an astonishing catalog of American folk music absorbed from recordings he had studied obsessively in Hibbing. What Duluth contributed to Dylan is hard to measure, but the city has not been shy about claiming him. A large bronze statue of Dylan stands downtown, unveiled in two thousand thirteen, depicting him with a guitar slung across his back and his face turned slightly upward.

The statue became immediately controversial among Dylan fans, as almost everything related to Dylan tends to become controversial among Dylan fans. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in two thousand sixteen, the first songwriter to receive it, the citation acknowledging his creation of new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition. He was born about six months before his country entered the Second World War, in a port city on the western edge of a great inland sea, and he went on to write songs that people in countries he had never visited knew by heart.

Duluth will take that.