60 years of Bob Dylan's debut album: first steps of the man who revolutionized popular music

At the beginning of his career, Bob Dylan, unlike John Lennon and Paul McCartney, was not so confident in the quality of his compositions. In their first session for EMI, The Beatles convinced George Martin to release as a single one of his own songs, “Love Me Do”, instead of the one proposed by the producer (“How do you do it”, whose record can be heard in the first volume of Anthology), and on their first LP they managed to get eight of the fourteen tracks are original. On the other hand, in his debut for Columbia, Dylan recorded only two songs of his own. The rest were versions of the classic folk, country and blues repertoire that played every night in Greenwich Village, the epicenter of New York's bohemian culture. It was only a year before the young singer-songwriter revolutionized popular music and influenced half the world, including the famous Liverpool quartet, with his second album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963), but the seed was planted there, on his self-titled album, released on March 19, 1962.

Dylan kept the mystery of his origins from the beginning. He always made up a new story about his past. However, it was not until his arrival in New York that his trade as a troubadour began to take shape. He had lived his childhood in Minnesota, where he was attracted to rock and roll (which he would approach again in 1965 after electrifying his sound at the Newport festival), but later became interested in American folk, centuries-old songs that were mostly of unknown origin that had been passed down from generation to generation. Some had been sung by slaves, others by peasants, cowboys or railroad workers, while many were spirituals sung by African-American congregations during Sunday religious services.

At the beginning of the 20th century, with the advent of recording devices, musicologists such as John Lomax and his son Alan set about touring the country to fix hundreds of these songs on phonograms. Thus, they not only prevented them from falling into oblivion, but also gave them national reach: it was no longer the popular music of one region, but of the entire United States. This led to a revival of folk during the 1940s and 1950s, where many of these works began to be edited in simple and compiled ones — such as the classic Anthology of American Folk Music, curated by anthropologist and filmmaker Harry Smith and which Dylan studied to exhaustion — and a new generation of artists began to reinterpret them, putting their own mark on them. Many, such as Lead Belly, Pete Seeger and the Carter Family, continued the old folk tradition of taking what already existed as a starting point and writing new songs. Woody Guthrie was also part of this new litter and with a guitar that had the legend “This machine kills fascists” he wrote some of the most important protest compositions of the 20th century, such as “This land is your land”, which eventually acquired a nationalist connotation.

In his memoir, Chronicles Volume I (Malpaso, 2004), Dylan recalls that the first time he heard it, “it was like a revelation.” “It was as if the earth opened up at my feet. [...] Guthrie grasped the essence of things like no one else. It was so poetic, hard and rhythmic at the same time... It transmitted a great intensity, and its voice was like a stiletto. It had nothing to do with the rest of the singers I had listened to, nor did their songs. [...] It was as if the record player had grabbed me and threw me against the wall.”

The musician became his idol and his greatest influence, so he wanted to absorb everything from him. In the winter of 1961, when he was less than twenty years old, he traveled to New York with two objectives. The first was to enter the city's folk scene, one of the most active in the country. Bob had an exceptional ability to build relationships with the right people. He made a name for himself in Greenwich Village by playing in different cafes and approached new and veteran artists to take from them what seemed best to him, techniques for playing and singing, songs, records, lyrics or melodies, whatever served to stand out from the rest. In fact, for the version of “House of the Risin' Sun” that he included in his debut, he took the arrangement of a friend of his interpreter named Dave Van Ronk, who got angry with Dylan for having recorded it before him. To differentiate himself from his colleagues, he spent a lot of time researching, reading and searching for songs like an archivist in places like the New York Public Library and the Folklore Center, but also in Alan Lomax's loft, where he spent hours listening to his record collection. There he met his secretary, Carla Rotolo, who introduced him to his younger sister, Suze, who was his first great love.

His other goal was to meet Woody Guthrie, who was hospitalized at the psychiatric hospital in Greystone Park, New Jersey. He suffered from a strange neurological disease called Huntington's chorea, which causes a slow psychological and mental degeneration. Bob visited him often, brought him cigarettes and played his songs, which he could no longer play. With him he found the inspiration for his first major composition, “Song to Woody”, dedicated to his musical hero. Until then he had written light and satirical material, especially blues recited such as “Talkin' Hava Nagila Blues” or “Talkin' Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues”. From that initial period, where he began to try himself as a composer, comes the other original song he included in Bob Dylan, “Talkin' New York”, where he recounts with humor, but also with intelligent prose, what his first days in Manhattan were like.

“I'm not really sure when it occurred to me to start writing my own songs. I would never have thought of anything comparable to the folk lyrics that I already sang to express my impressions of the world,” says Dylan in Chronicles. “Song to Woody” was the first time that the musician managed to approach the kind of writing he aspired to, at the height of the composers of yesteryear, who, according to him, developed the songs with “chilling precision” in their verses. Following the traditional technique of using pre-existing melodies, he borrowed that of Goothrie's “1913 Massacre”, as well as some lines from the rest of his work, which he used wisely enough to design the prototype song that would make him so momentous later, from “Blowin' in the wind” to the more recent “Murder most foul”, from their 2020 album Rough and Rawdy Days. The ode to the creator of “This land is your land” had an antecedent, “Song to Bonnie”, written a short time before and dedicated to his girlfriend Bonnie Beecher, but in that instance Bob's pen was still not so sharp and the lyrics were full of common places.

The prestigious producer and record executive John Hammond, who in the past had discovered figures such as Billie Holiday, Benny Goodman and Aretha Franklin, what attracted him to the young artist was precisely that he knew how to compose, something that was not so common in folk artists of the 1960s, who seemed more like collectors than musicians, trying to differentiate themselves from each other more by the oddities they added to their repertoire than by the elaboration of their own material. Bob knew that whether he liked it or not, his musical proposal was different. Hammond also noticed it and that is why he proposed to record for Columbia, the largest label in the United States. She met him during a rehearsal in the apartment of folk artist Carolyn Hester. The producer was going to be in charge of her debut album and she had summoned Dylan to play the harmonica. During the evening, however, he also sang and played guitar. At the end, John asked him if he had ever recorded for anyone. The answer was negative, since his first experience was going to be with Hester.

After that first meeting, “it was as if a tidal wave had turned my world upside down”, recalls the musician in his memoirs. As a help of fate, a New York Times journalist named Robert Shelton wrote a review of a show he gave at Gerde's Folk City days later. He wasn't even the lead artist that night but the folk and bluegrass group The Greenbriar Boys, who were left in history because of their participation in Joan Baez's first album. The chronicler highlighted his talent as a composer and performer and even justified his not so “pleasant” voice by explaining that, in reality, the singer was “consciously trying to recover the rude beauty of the southern rural worker who reflects on melodies sitting on his porch”. The article was so flattering that it was included in the back cover of Bob Dylan to appeal to folk consumers who had not yet heard of it. After reading it, it was impossible not to be curious about that 20-year-old who from the stage always generated some feeling, either of admiration or repulsion.

When Dylan went to the studio to participate in Hester's LP, John Hammond flipped through the review and, at the end of the session, offered him a contract with Columbia at that time. All folk labels had rejected it, but the producer had seen its potential and was giving him the opportunity to enter the big leagues. He signed it immediately, without hesitation for a second. It was the typical agreement stipulated for new artists, something routine for the industry, but a huge step for any artist.

Bob Dylan was recorded in just two three-hour sessions, on November 20 and 22, 1961. The troubadour played seventeen songs, of which thirteen were left on the album and three were released in the first volume of his famous Bootleg Series, in 1991. One of them, “Man on the street”, is another original that he recorded in those two days, but which he decided to discard, possibly because he didn't live up to the other two. There is one that remains unpublished, “Ramblin' Blues”, the only composition by Woody Guthrie that he recorded at that time. However, he also decided to leave it outside. It is that for his record debut, instead of selecting the best from his live repertoire, the author of “Like a Rolling Stone” chose to dig a little deeper and look for songs that, according to biographer Clinton Heylin, would distinguish him from his contemporaries. Many saw it as a copy of Guthrie, so he tried to avoid versioning it. Instead, he opted for songs such as “You're no good”, which he learned from West Coast man orchestra Jesse Fuller, “Fixin' to Die” by blues singer Bukka White and the traditional spiritual “Gospel Plow”.

About those sessions, Dylan explained: “There was a violent and angry emotion running through me. I just played the guitar and the harmonica and sang those songs and that was it. Mr. Hammond asked me if I wanted to sing any of them again and I said no. I couldn't see myself sing the same song twice in a row. It was terrible.” In fact, at least five of the album's thirteen tracks were recorded in one shot. Despite having been recorded in such a short time, the producer admitted that the work was not so simple: “Bobby uttered every p, whistled every s and steadily moved away from the microphone. It was frustrating that he refused to learn from his mistakes. I've never worked with someone so undisciplined before.” Anyway, he achieved the goal of capturing it raw, as it was presented to the world. “He is neither a great harmonicist nor an exempt guitarist, nor is he a good singer. He's just original,” Hammond told Pop Chronicles in 1968, highlighting the album's organic sound.

When it finally hit the market, Bob Dylan went absolutely unnoticed. Billboard mentioned it in a pickup in the “Special Merits” section, where in a small paragraph he highlighted the musician as “one of the most interesting and disciplined young people to have appeared on the pop-folk scene in a long time” and closes by saying that, “when he finds his own style, he could gain a lot of followers.” The album sold only five thousand copies in its first year and if it did not generate losses, it was because the recording cost, according to Hammond, only $402.

In the four months that passed between the recording and the release of the album, Bob had already regretted the final result. In Behind the shades (Faber and Faber, 2011) Heylin attributes it to having recorded songs that he was not familiar with. “When Dylan describes the songs to Hammond as 'some things I wrote, others I discovered, and others that I stolen', there is a lack of concern implicit in the selection he made.”

At Columbia they believed that the producer had lost his sense of smell and nicknamed the musician “Hammond's whim”. However, he knew that Bob Dylan had not yet done his best. A month after the release of the album he took him to the studio again, but to record an album where his own material predominated. The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan came out in 1963 and became an absolute classic, with hymns such as “A hard rain's a-gonna fall”, “Masters of war”, “Don't think twice, it's all right” and, above all, one of his most important compositions, “Blowin' in the wind”. John Hammond had not been mistaken, he was just waiting for the natural maturation of an artist who had barely come of age.

Between Bob Dylan's debut album and the first single from The Beatles, there are seven months and an ocean of difference. Both became strong performing each other's songs and then encouraged themselves to compose their own. The Minnesota-born musician, however, took a little longer to enter confidence and, unlike his British colleagues, his first work was quite shy and he himself let it be encapsulated in time. Only “Song to Woody” endured, and rightly so important in his training as a composer that from time to time he performs it again live. Thanks to her, she gained the confidence she needed to develop her writing with a unique style that would earn her, half a century later, nothing less than a Nobel Prize.

As a faithful follower of the folk tradition, Dylan always recognized his influences, both musical and literary. He recently announced that on November 8 he will publish a new book , the first since Chronicles, Volume I of 2004, entitled The Philosophy of Modern Song, through the publishing house Simon & Schuster. This is a collection of more than sixty essays where the musician analyzes the art of composition through the work of others, from Elvis Costello to Nina Simone and Hank Williams. After more than 60 years of writing songs, the musician uses the work of others — which he resorted to on numerous occasions — to unravel the secrets of an art he knows perfectly and in which a rhyme, or even a syllable, can change everything. A lot happened in his career to get to this point, but it all started in 1962 with Bob Dylan, an album that deserved to have enjoyed more significance and that shows the greatest composer of the 20th century breaking the shell.

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