Bob Dylan
Best known for
Songwriter
Guitar
Lead Vocals
Bob Dylan is not a bluegrass artist, but few outside figures have touched the music more deeply — as a songwriter whose catalog became part of the bluegrass repertoire, as the catalyst of a celebrated run of Nashville sessions, and as a Greenwich Village folk-scene contemporary of the 1960s bluegrass revival.
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- Born Robert Allen Zimmerman on May 24, 1941 in Duluth, Minnesota, and raised in Hibbing.
- Emerged from the early-1960s Greenwich Village folk scene that overlapped with the bluegrass revival; his first major newspaper review came at Gerde's Folk City, where he opened for the Greenbriar Boys, and he absorbed traditional music through friendships with Mike Seeger, Ralph Rinzler, and the New Lost City Ramblers.
- Cut a landmark run of Nashville sessions from 1966 to 1970 with Charlie McCoy as de facto bandleader — Blonde on Blonde, John Wesley Harding, and the country-leaning Nashville Skyline (1969), which helped catalyze the country-rock crossover.
- Flatt & Scruggs's Nashville Airplane (1968) featured four bluegrass-style Dylan covers — "Like a Rolling Stone," "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight," "The Times They Are A-Changin'," and "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" — an early bridge between Dylan and the bluegrass world.
- Recorded with Earl Scruggs on May 17, 1970 for the PBS special Earl Scruggs: His Family and Friends, with Earl on banjo and sons Randy and Gary on guitars.
- Co-wrote "Wagon Wheel" with Old Crow Medicine Show's Ketch Secor, who built the song around the chorus of Dylan's 1973 "Rock Me, Mama" demo; the result became a modern jam-circle and bluegrass standard.
- His songs have entered the bluegrass canon — "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right," "Girl from the North Country," "Tomorrow Is a Long Time," "Boots of Spanish Leather," and many more — recorded by everyone from Flatt & Scruggs to the Punch Brothers.
- Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016, the first songwriter to win. Travelin' Thru, 1967–1969: The Bootleg Series Vol. 15 (2019) collected his Cash and Scruggs sessions, documenting his deepest country- and bluegrass-adjacent period.
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Bob DylanPlayed on recordings with Bob Dylan
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Ralph Stanley and FriendsPlayed on recording with Ralph Stanley and Friends
