The artist who had an influence on ‘every move’ Bob Dylan made

Bob Dylan says songwriter Woody Guthrie influenced “every move” he made in his early years.

The legendary songwriter confirmed Guthrie, the wordsmith behind songs This Land is Your Land and On the Trail of the Buffalo, heavily influenced Dylan, who met the folk legend several times in the 1960s. Dylan writes he was “head over heels” for covering the works Guthrie had released and was performing them everywhere, including “house parties, in the coffee houses, street singing”. Guthrie’s influence on Dylan may be well known, but the songwriter shares in Chronicles just how big an impact it had left. Not only did it inform his songwriting but everything around it, from the food he ate to how he decided to dress.

Dylan wrote: “Woody made each word count. He painted with words. That along with his stylised type singing, the way he phrased, the dusty cowpoke deadpan but amazingly serious and melodic sense of delivery, was like a buzzsaw in my brain and I tried to emulate it any way I could.” He went on to defend the songs, which many, he says, found to be dated.

“I felt they were totally in the moment, current and even forecasting things to come,” he wrote. “I felt anything but like the young punk folksinger who had just begun out of nowhere six months previously. It felt more like I had instantly risen up from a noncommissioned volunteer to an honourable knight – stripes and gold stars.

“Woody’s songs were having that big an effect on me, an influence on every move I made, what I ate and how I dressed, who I wanted to know, who I didn’t. In the late ’50s and early ’60s, teenage rebellion was beginning to make a noise, but that scene hadn’t appealed to me, not in a wholehearted way.”

What made Bob Dylan so influential in the 1960s?
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Members of the public have since credited Dylan and, by extension, the impact Guthrie’s work had on him, for informing a new wave of focus in pop music. One user posting to the r/BobDylan subreddit wrote: “Before Dylan, every musical act was basically just a performer and they would perform songs that other people wrote for them.

“Dylan was the first mainstream artist to write their own songs, perform them, and his songs were more than just pop songs. Some people felt like his music reflected the times he was living in and he did it in a very meaningful way that inspired lots of other artists to try and do the same thing. Dylan shifted the lyrical focus from pop to poetry.”

Another added Dylan was “the first” to be a commercially viable musician on the back of his own songs. They wrote: “He was kind of the first though to be very commercially viable, sing his own original songs, and be taken seriously as an ‘artist’ and not a pop star. That’s kinda big and it shifts the culture. Before Dylan, the model pop star was Sinatra. After Dylan, it was Dylan.”