Bobby Zimmerman, Hibbing, and the Name He Left Behind

Robert Allen Zimmerman was born in Duluth, Minnesota, on May twenty-fourth, nineteen forty-one. His family moved to Hibbing, up on the Iron Range, when he was six. Hibbing is a mining town: open-pit iron ore, the Hull-Rust-Mahoning Mine, which at three miles long and about five hundred thirty five feet deep is one of the largest open-pit mines in the world. The town was literally moved two miles south between nineteen nineteen and nineteen forty-one to give the mining company access to the ore underneath the original townsite. They relocated the houses, the church, the hotel.

The Zimmermans were Jewish, one of a small number of Jewish families on the Iron Range. Bobby Zimmerman played in rock-and-roll bands in high school, listened obsessively to the radio, and signed his nineteen fifty-nine senior yearbook with his name and his ambition: to join Little Richard.

He left Hibbing for Minneapolis at eighteen, enrolled briefly at the University of Minnesota, played the Dinkytown coffeehouses, and within a year was on a Greyhound bus to New York City. He changed his name to Bob Dylan, taking it from the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, and over the following decade constructed a persona so complete and so mythologized that the question of where he came from became almost unanswerable. He told different interviewers different origin stories. He claimed relatives in New Mexico. He was vague about family.

The Iron Range, the frozen winters, the distance from everywhere, the Jewish immigrant family's complicated relationship to a working-class Protestant town: all of it is audible in the music if you know to listen for it. Dylan never really left Hibbing. He just stopped acknowledging that he was still there.