![]() ![]() ![]() But his outlook was changed forever when an uncle gave him a batch of records by the legendary Louisiana blues singer, Lead Belly. Later, poetry vied for his attention with early rock n’ roll and the films of James Dean. In preparation for his Bar-Mitzvah in 1954, he took Bible lessons from an old Brooklyn rabbi. At school he showed a strong aptitude for poetry. For another, he’s a Jew who got the blues…ĭylan was born Robert Allen Zimmerman in Minnesota, in 1941. Just as he attacked government and the military, so, it was widely assumed, he was anti-religion, too.īut the truth was more complicated than that.įor one thing, Bob Dylan is a Jew. Their colours and cadences, their textures and timbres, run right through his vast canon of song.Īs he hit superstardom in the Sixties, this biblical strain in Dylan’s output was often eclipsed by his image as the poet of the counter-culture: the bard of youthful rebellion. Throughout his long career, he has taken the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments as a key poetic and philosophical reference-point. Still, I like to think that it’s more relevant to my love of Dylan that I do theology for a living…įrom the outset, Dylan’s work has displayed a rich biblical consciousness. But I am a bloke, I am middle-aged, I am called David, and I do often insist that Dylan is one of the few true geniuses in popular music. ![]() Well, by contrast I love the Stones, the Beatles and Shakespeare. And the only people in world history who are any good are Graham Greene, Quentin Tarrantino, Tony Hancock and – you guessed it – Bob Dylan. So in David’s view the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Kingsley Amis, Evelyn Waugh and – yes – William Shakespeare are ‘talentless’ or ‘overrated’. David loves nothing better than to slay sacred cows and assert rigid critical preferences. The narrator, Katie, is married to a jaded, middle-aged cultural snob called David. In Nick Hornby’s novel How to Be Good, there’s a cute take on Bob Dylan. This text is from a talk originally delivered at the London Institute of Contemporary Christianity in 2007 The Jew Who Got the Blues: Bob Dylan and ‘Blind Willie McTell’ ![]()
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