The original vagabond, Bob Dylan spent his life introducing listeners to America's many folk musics

I suspect Bob Dylan is the person least interested in Thursday's announcement that he has won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

No artist has ever delighted more in jumping off the pedestals society has erected for him than Bob Dylan. His entire career can be seen as an attempt to simply be left alone. He’s never wanted to answer to anyone, never wanted to speak for anyone.

No, no no it ain’t me babe/it ain’t me you’re looking for.

(It Ain’t Me Babe from Another Side of Bob Dylan, 1964.)

The man from the Midwest

The story of Robert Zimmerman, a middle-class Jewish kid from a small town in an insignificant state in the American Midwest, is a tale of mystery and mastery.

It is hard to identify another figure so renowned, so written about, so adored and so popular about whom so little is truly known. Although numerous biographies exist and many of the facts of America’s greatest living artist are well documented, there always remains a cloud of unknowing over Dylan. What makes him tick? What does he really think?

And if my thought-dreams could be seen
They’d probably put my head in a guillotine.

(It’s All Right Ma, I’m Only Bleeding from Bringing it All Back Home, 1965.)

Dylan has been running from praise and recognition from his earliest days as a talented folksinger in New York’s Greenwich Village in the 1960s. In interviews he not only spread wild and outrageous falsehoods about his upbringing and early career, he so firmly refused to defend or explain his poetry, fans had to resort to digging through his rubbish for clues to his inner thoughts and motivations.

He has snubbed his nose at fans, supporters and critics alike with wicked glee. In 1963, he accepted a prestigious Civil Rights Award and immediately launched into a drunken ramble that insulted his audience of elite liberal benefactors.

Two years later, at the Newport Folk Festival, he incinerated his political-activist folksinger reputation in a matter of minutes by blasting his unsuspecting audience with loud electrified and distorted blues.

In concerts throughout the mid-1960s he battled fans, often resorting to cursing, who wanted him to sing, look and speak in a certain way.

In 1966 after issuing a series of ground-breaking records that completely reset the direction of rock ‘n roll, and with the world at his feet, he inexplicably disappeared from the scene for several years, in total disregard of his fawning, obsessive fans.

And in the late '70s, after re-establishing himself as America’s premier musical artist with another string of outstanding albums, he announced that he’d found Jesus and issued several records of fire and brimstone preachiness. Intellectuals and liberals were horrified. Obituaries were written by the score.

And so it goes. Not only was he written off and left for dead, each death was one of suicide.

This is not a man who craves adulation from the great and good.

Advertising signs they con
You into thinking you’re the one
That can do what’s never been done
That can win what’s never been won
Meantime life outside goes on
All around you.

(It’s All Right Ma, I’m Only Bleeding from Bringing It All Back Home, 1965.)

Past and present

For Dylan, that “life outside” that “goes on” is music. Not only, but especially, American music. The music of generations and centuries before him. The music of slaves and coal miners. The songs of sailors and whores and farmers.

Dylan’s career began by singing the old folk songs of the Appalachians and African American blues. And every album since has been washed in the waters of America’s musical rivers. The blues formed the bedrock of his greatest recordings (Highway 61 Revisited and Bringing it All Back Home) while he refashioned country and dust bowl ballads in Nashville Skyline and The Basement Tapes.

Even those who hated his Christian albums had to concede that on many songs he absolutely tapped into the spiritual vein of Negro spirituals and post war gospel.

After a run of poorly produced and horribly reviewed albums in the 1980s, he reinvented himself with two albums (Good as I Been to You and World Gone Wrong), filled entirely with American and English folk ballads. And from that point on its clear Dylan’s music is as much about honouring the traditions of the past as it is about creating his own musical statement in the present.

If Dylan’s early career reinvented rock n’ roll by introducing intelligent, complex lyrics, his later years will be remembered for reconnecting audiences with the rich diverse heritage of America's many folk musics.

And it was for this that the Nobel Literature Committee has awarded him their highest prize: “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”.