Bobby Zimmerman leads his band the Golden Chords at a 1958 concert at the Hibbing Memorial Building Little Theater in his Iron Range hometown. Zimmerman would go on to change his name to Dylan, becoming the greatest songwriter of all time according to Rolling Stone.
Last week, Rolling Stone magazine named Hibbing’s own Bob Dylan the greatest songwriter of all time.
Dylan’s vision of American popular music was transformative. No one set the bar higher, or had greater impact. “You want to write songs that are bigger than life,” he wrote in his memoir, Chronicles. “You want to say something about strange things that have happened to you, strange things you have seen.” Dylan himself saw no difference between modern times and the storied past – reading about the Civil War helped him understand the Sixties –which allowed him to rewire folk ballads passed down through generations into songs that both electrified the current moment and became lasting standards.
Dylan has long been celebrated as possibly the most influential musician of the 20th Century, at least as often for his songwriting as his performances. Rolling Stone‘s designation solidifies the music magazine’s lifelong affinity for the folk rock troubadour from 7th Avenue East.
The list is not without controversy. First, not everyone views Rolling Stone as the authority on music anymore, owing to the fact that it’s a magazine which are apparently these things made out of paper or something like that. Secondly, the list has garnered some criticism for its dogged devotion to baby boomers, eschewing younger artists who have influenced the development of popular music just as much.
Even if you let younger critics draw up a new list, Dylan would likely have remained at the top. Young people today continue to draw on his music for inspiration; it’s evident in many of the bands I work with through my radio show. Bob Dylan might be a long time gone from Hibbing, but his footprints on the last 50 years of music start here.
Bob was also nominated as “top songwriter” at the ‘Ty-o-mees’, once the “newspaper of choice” throughout the greater Duluth-Superior area.