Bob Dylan
Jewish Roots, American Soil
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected May 22, 2025
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
From the day that Bobby Zimmerman first turned on the radio in his parents' home in Hibbing, he'd had a pretty good idea that big things were happening. Covering the same turbulent years as the hit film starring Timothée Chalamet, this entertaining biography offers new insights into Bob Dylan's early career.
When Bob Dylan arrived in New York one winter morning in 1961 he was a complete unknown. His music and spirit would go on to capture the hearts and minds of a generation, but what no one knew then was that, like so many before him, Dylan was concealing his Jewish origins.
For Harry Freedman, Dylan's roots are the key to grasping how this young musician burst onto the scene and reinvented not only himself, but popular music. The instinct for escape and reinvention has defined Dylan's long career.
In this insightful biography that covers the same years as Complete Unknown starring Timothée Chalamet, Freedman traces the heady atmosphere of the 1960s and the folk-rock revolution spearheaded by Dylan. Right up until the moment in 1966 when Dylan stepped out onto the stage and went electric – exploring how his musical decisions, genius for reinvention and his Jewishness go inescapably hand in hand.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Biographer Freedman (Leonard Cohen) scrupulously dissects the historical and cultural influences that shaped Bob Dylan's music career. Born Robert Zimmerman to Jewish descendants of Eastern European immigrants, Dylan grew up in a small Midwestern mining town. He escaped at 18 for college in Minneapolis, where he honed his musical style at coffeehouses full of "dropouts, artists, beatniks." Freedman sees Dylan as profoundly influenced by the Beats, folk musician Woody Guthrie, and—despite an overt apathy to his Jewish roots, illustrated by his adoption of the name Bob Dylan at 19—his religious heritage, which informed the strong social consciousness expressed in songs like "Blowin' In the Wind." Though some of the author's other parallels are more tenuous—as when he suggests that 1964's "The Times They Are A-Changin' " illustrates how Dylan's "Jewish psyche had been moulded by ancestors preternaturally sensitive to impending change, to disasters, persecutions"—Freedman effectively situates Dylan in the cultural milieu of the '60s, showing how he helped make music a common social thread "that bound young people to their peers and distanced them from their elders." The result is a meticulous exploration of one of America's most influential musicians.
