Bob Dylan was born Robert Allen Zimmerman (his Hebrew name is Shabtai Zisl ben Avraham) in St. Mary’s Hospital on May 24, 1941, in Duluth, Minnesota. Dylan’s paternal grandparents, Anna Kirghiz and Zigman Zimmerman, emigrated from Odessa in the Russian Empire (now Odesa, Ukraine) to the United States, following the 1905 pogroms against Jews. His maternal grandparents, Florence and Ben Stone, were Lithuanian Jews who had arrived in the United States in 1902. Dylan wrote that his paternal grandmother’s family was originally from the Kağızman District of Kars Province in northeastern Turkey.

Dylan’s father Abram Zimmerman and his mother Beatrice “Beatty” Stone were part of a small, close-knit Jewish community. They lived in Duluth until Dylan was six, when his father contracted polio and the family returned to his mother’s hometown of Hibbing, where they lived for the rest of Dylan’s childhood, and his father and paternal uncles ran a furniture and appliance store.

Considered one of the greatest songwriters of all time, Dylan has been a major figure in popular culture over his 60-year career. With an estimated figure of more than 125 million records sold worldwide, he is one of the best-selling musicians of all-time. Dylan added increasingly sophisticated lyrical techniques to the folk music of the early 1960s, infusing it “with the intellectualism of classic literature and poetry”. His lyrics incorporated political, social and philosophical influences, defying pop music conventions and appealing to the burgeoning counterculture.

In the early 1950s Dylan listened to the Grand Ole Opry radio show and heard the songs of Hank Williams. He later wrote: “The sound of his voice went through me like an electric rod.” Dylan was also impressed by the delivery of Johnnie Ray: “He was the first singer whose voice and style, I guess, I fell in love with… I loved his style, wanted to dress like him too.” As a teenager, Dylan heard rock and roll on radio stations broadcasting from Shreveport and Little Rock.