Themes of Bob Dylan's Music
Uploaded by terrylough on Apr 30, 2000
Bob Dylan was recognized by his poetry and song writing. He usually wrote songs about protesting and religious themes. Although the theme of Bob Dylan’s work is depressing, it is necessary to consider how the events in his life affected his music. Also Bob Dylan had other musicians that influenced him in his early years.
Bob Dylan was born in Duluth Minnesota on the date of May 24th 1941. By the time he was ten years old he was writing poems and had taught himself to play guitar. He later changed his name from Robert Allen Zimmerman to the famous name Bob Dylan. In 1962 Bob visited his big early influence Woodie Guthrie in the hospital. Finally Bob Dylan got to meet him and become friends with his lost idol who was slowly dying of Huntington’s disease in Morristown, New Jersey, Dylan had written him a song called song to Woody. A famous quote from this song is “Bout a funny old world that’s coming along. Seems sick and it’s hungry, it’s tired and it’s torn, it looks like it’s dying and it’s hardly been born.”
After he graduated high school in the early 1959 Dylan found himself playing folk music. This is also the time he began to write his legendary folk songs. In the 1960s Bob Dylan had turned the themes of his music to protest what many people consider the wrongs of society. In his songs he writes about the “luckless, the abandoned and’ forsaken,” as he put it in “chimes of Freedom.” He condemned the Ku Klux Klan in “The Death of Emmett Till” and the John Birchites in “Talking’ John Birch Paranoid Blues.” In Masters of War”he damned the war makers. And in Blowing’ in the wind, “he created probably his most famous song, though Dylan once stated that he wrote that song just for his friends. In fact, this anti racist, antiwar anthem is, in its deepest sense, a subtitle plea for awareness. (“How many times must a man look up/ Before he can see the sky? / Yes ‘n’ how many ears must one man have/ before he can hear people cry?”) Dylan had the characteristics of a biblical prophet, but also he had a sense of humor and irony (“Talking Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues”). One soon started to notice that he was a beginning to write songs that saw the world as consisting...