Bob Dylan, born Robert Zimmerman, has influenced American popular culture for over 60 years. Not just a "folk singer," he is an artist who throughout his lengthy career has explored the possibilities of lyric and melody, seldom failing to engage the depths not just of his own experience but of American culture as a whole. This early song challenges the American mystique of "rugged individualism." In 2016 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition."
