
Robert Allen Zimmerman was born on May 24, 1941, in Duluth, Minnesota, and raised in Hibbing, Minnesota. His paternal grandparents, Zigman and Anna Zimmerman, emigrated from Odessa, in the Ukraine, to the United States in 1905. His maternal grandparents, Benjamin and Lybba Edelstein, were Lithuanian Jews who arrived in the United States in 1902.
Bob Dylan is an American singer-songwriter, musician, poet, film director and painter. He has been a major and profoundly influential figure in popular music and culture for five decades. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s when he was an informal chronicler and a seemingly reluctant figurehead of social unrest. A number of his early songs such as “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They Are a-Changin’” became anthems for the US civil rights and anti-war movements. Leaving his initial base in the culture of folk music behind, Dylan proceeded to revolutionize perceptions of the limits of popular music in 1965 with the six-minute single “Like a Rolling Stone.”