Greenwich Village is one of America’s great music capitals, an extraordinary distinction for an old neighborhood of tenements, townhouses, dive bars and a college campus.
So many musical titans of jazz, folk, pop and rock and roll got their start in the Village’s many small nightclubs and coffeehouses, working alongside artists, writers, actors and comedians to create an American cultural mecca unlike any other.
And it was here, on January 24, 1961, that a nineteen-year-old young man from Minnesota entered the fray — Robert Zimmerman, otherwise known as Bob Dylan.
The Village completely transformed the young folk singer into the voice of a generation, working out his transformation on the minuscule stages of the Gaslight, Cafe Wha? and Gerde’s Folk City.
But this show isn’t strictly about Dylan’s ascent to greatness, but the neighborhood — the people, the streets, the basements! — which cultivated artists like Dylan (and Billie Holiday and Nina Simone and Pete Seeger and Barbra Streisand and Joan Baez and so on.)
PLUS: Bob Moses and Jane Jacobs stop by for a hootenanny (and a protest)
LISTEN NOW: BOB DYLAN’S GREENWICH VILLAGE
FEATURED READING
David Browne / Talkin’ Greenwich Village
Bob Dylan / Chronicles
Stephen Petrus and Ronald D Cohen / Folk City: New York and the American Folk Music Revival
Suze Rotolo / A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties
Howard Sounes/ Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan
Sean Wilentz / Bob Dylan in America
FURTHER LISTENING
Music featured on this show:
“Talkin’ New York” by Bob Dylan (from his first album for Columbia Records)
Dylan Thomas reciting “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” from Dylan Thomas Reading A Child’s Christmas in Wales & Five Poems
“Strange Fruit” by Billie Holiday (Commodore)
“Little Girl Blue” by Nina Simone (Bethlehem/Verve)
“A Sleepin’ Bee” by Barbra Streisand (Columbia Records)
“Goodnight Irene” by the Weavers (Decca Records)
“This Land Is Your Land” by Woody Guthrie
“Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues” by Bob Dylan
“Blowin’ In The Wind” by Bob Dylan
“Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” by Bob Dylan
“Only A Pawn In Their Game” by Bob Dylan
“The Times They Are A-Changin’” by Bob Dylan
Izzy Young discussing the early years of Bob Dylan (courtesy The Local)
Dylan’s infamous Newport Folk Festival performance, 1965