Harry Freedman

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Bob Dylan

A fascinating insight into Bob Dylan's musical and spiritual development during the 1960s.

Bob Dylan arrived in New York one winter morning in 1961, his protest songs and freewheelin' spirit would go on to capture the heart and minds of the countercultural movement. But like thousands of sensitive, teenage Jewish boys before him, Dylan was concealing his origins.

In Chronicles, the first and only published volume of Bob Dylan's autobiography, you learn that he came from a small town. You might deduce that his real surname was Zimmerman. However, you would not know that he was Jewish. To many of Dylan's biographers, his early denial of his Jewish roots is hard to understand but for Harry Freedman it is the key to grasping how this complete unknown burst onto the scene and reinvented not only himself, but popular music. It is this instinct for escape and reinvention that has defined Dylan's long career - and it all began in 1961 when he got on a bus and left his family in Minnesota and headed for the bright lights of New York City.

Harry Freedman traces the heady creativity of the 1960s and the folk revival movement spearheaded by Bob Dylan, right up until the moment in 1966 when Dylan stepped out onto the stage and went electric - exploring how his musical decisions and genius for reinvention were inevitably intertwined with his Jewishness.