Chronicles: Volume One

Dylan played songs for Lou Levy after John Hammond decided to bring him on to Columbia Records. The song that had caught Hammond’s interest was an original tune that was Dylan’s homage to Woody Guthrie.

Dylan first heard Guthrie in the summer of 1959, which he had spent in Minneapolis, Minnesota, after leaving his hometown of Duluth, Minnesota. Dylan had spent his adolescence “bid[ing] [his] time” (232). He “knew there was a bigger world out there” (232), but he wasn’t in a hurry to join it. In Duluth, Dylan had had a typical childhood of “small town stuff” (234): fishing, swimming, playing ice hockey, and shooting BB guns. He and his family went to the drive-in movie theater, saw the three-ring circus when it came through town, and watched the softball team. In Minneapolis, Dylan “felt liberated and gone” (234). He had arrived in the city with the address of a cousin’s fraternity house, where he slept in a small room upstairs.

In Minneapolis, he was “looking for the great city, looking for the speed, the sound of it” (235). His life revolved around folk music, “a reality of a more brilliant dimension” (236), but he struggled to find songs that were relevant to the modern world.