Musician Bob Dylan set a precedent on Thursday when he was named the winner of the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature, marking the first time in the award’s history that it was given to someone known primarily for his music.
Dylan won the Nobel “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition," the Swedish Academy announced. Dylan, 75, is one of the most influential musicians in the world, impacting both music and culture since the early 1960s.
Though Dylan has been on the music scene for more than 50 years, there are still some things about him that people may not know. Here are five things that even peripheral music lovers should know about the voice of a generation:
- Dylan was born Robert Allen Zimmerman on May 24, 1941, in Duluth, Minnesota, and grew up as part of a close-knit Jewish community. There is a pervasive myth that, when he legally changed his name in the summer of 1962, it was in tribute to poet Dylan Thomas, but Dylan refuted that claim in a 1978 Playboy interview. "It's a common thing to change your name. It isn't that incredible," Dylan said in the interview. "Many people do it. People change their town, change their country. New appearance, new mannerisms. Some people have many names. I wouldn't pick a name unless I thought I was that person. Sometimes you are held back by your name. Sometimes there are advantages to having a certain name. Names are labels so we can refer to one another. But deep inside us we don't have a name. We have no name. I just chose that name and it stuck."
- Dylan took a seven-year hiatus from the music world, beginning after a motorcycle crash in July 1966. According to the Washington Post, Dylan was riding his motorcycle in Woodstock, New York, when he hit an oil slick and the back wheel locked up. Dylan, who reportedly suffered a broken vertebrae and a concussion, has said that the crash gave him a chance to withdraw from the exhausting tour schedule he'd been on prior to the accident. It also gave the world "The Basement Tapes," a two-album set released in 1975 but recorded while he was recovering from his injuries.
- Winning the Nobel Prize is not the first time Dylan has set a precedent by winning a prestigious award. In 2008, he became the first rock musician to win a special Pulitzer Prize citation. He also received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012, though he is not the first musician to do so.
- The now retired Pope Benedict once tried to stop Dylan from performing for his predecessor, Pope John Paul II. The Guardian reported that Pope Benedict recalled the 1997 concert for a book he released a decade later, in which he wrote that he still doubted "whether it was right to let this kind of so-called prophet take the stage." Then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Benedict was unable to put a stop to the concert. Pope John Paul II afterward offered a sermon in which he used Dylan's "Blowing in the Wind" to spread his message about Christ. "You ask me how many roads a man must walk down before he becomes a man," Pope John Paul said, according to the newspaper. "I answer: there is only one road for man, and it is the road of Jesus Christ, who said, 'I am the Way and the Life'."
- Despite all of his success and acclaim, Dylan has never had a song reach No. 1 on the U.S. Billboard chart, at least not under his own voice. The Byrds' 1965 cover of his "Mr. Tambourine Man" hit No. 1 on both the U.S. and U.K. charts.
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