Today is the birthday of Minnesota's own favorite son, Bob Dylan; he turns 66. Martin Scorsese's recent Dylan documentary occasioned some fine retrospectives of Dylan's career, among which was Ben MacIntyre's preview of the documentary for the London Times: "Minstrel Boy, Forever Young."

In his outstanding City Journal essay on Pete Seeger ("America's most successful Communist"), Howard Husock placed Dylan in the line of folk agitprop in which Seeger stood at the head. Husock's essay is an important and entertaining piece. Dylan is only a small part of the story Husock has to tell, however, and Husock therefore does not pause long enough over Dylan to observe how quickly Dylan burst the agitprop shackles, found his own voice and tapped into his own vein of the Cosmic American Music.

On 1964's "The Times They Are A-Changin'" album, Dylan foreshadowed his break from the folk movement in "Restless Farewell," the album's closing song. Later that year he turned in a more personal direction with "Another Side of Bob Dylan," his last folk album. MacIntyre notes:

Dylan set words to music in a way that no one had done before. He refused to be pigeon-holed by the folkies, the protesters or the rockers. He borrowed and synthesised from the literary, artistic and actual worlds like a musical magpie, and he skilfully evolved his own mystique. And he kept going, even when his listeners booed or complained or, like the enraged Pete Seeger in 1965, threatened to chop off his sound cable with a hatchet at a folk festival in Newport because he had defected to electric sound. At a British concert, we see a furious folkie leaping to his feet and shouting “Judas!” Dylan is defiant: “You’re a liar...Play it ****ing loud,” he instructs the band.

That last moment comes from Dylan's legendary concert of May 1966 documented on volume 4 of Columbia's Dylan Bootleg Series. The concert was misattributed to the "Royal Albert Hall" when it surfaced on bootleg albums in 1970, though it has now been identified as having taken place in Manchester's Free Trade Hall -- in the interest of history, of course.

MacIntyre briefly sums up Dylan's self-education:

In 1960 Robert Zimmerman, a gawky Jewish boy from Minnesota, hitch-hiked to New York City. He came to join the burgeoning folk music circuit, but he also came to read, hunkered down on the sofas of his bookish new friends in Greenwich Village. “I read all of Lord Byron’s Don Juan and concentrated fully from start to finish,” he wrote later. “Also Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. I began cramming my brain with all kinds of deep poems. It seemed like I’d been pulling an empty wagon for a long time and now I was beginning to fill it up and would have to pull harder. I felt like I was coming out of the back pasture.”

Gogol, Balzac, Hugo, Dickens, Thucydides (“a narrative which would give you chills”) Tennessee Williams, Bertold Brecht, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells: all were piled into the wagon, alongside the music of Woody Guthrie and Hank Williams, and the films of Marlon Brando and James Dean. He spent nights studying the American Civil War at New York public library and consuming newspapers: “What was swinging, topical, up to date for me was stuff like the Titanic sinking, the Galveston flood, John Henry driving steel...this was the news that I considered, followed and kept tabs on.”

By the time of "Highway 61 Revisited" in 1965, Dylan was singing, "I need a dump truck to unload my head."

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