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Bob Dylan

BOB DYLAN

YEAR

1988

INDUCTED BY

Bruce Springsteen

CATEGORY

performers

Bob Dylan is one of the greatest songwriters of all time, a gifted wordsmith with a political conscience, incisive storytelling abilities and a poet-like acumen for meter and language.

As a musician, he has shaped popular music in innumerable ways—from inspiring the Beatles and bringing folk-rock into the mainstream to proving that electric guitars could be as revolutionary as acoustic ones.

Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan

HALL OF FAME
ESSAY

By Michael Hill

“You don’t necessarily have to write to be a poet,” Bob Dylan once said. “Some people work in gas stations and they’re poets. I don’t call myself a poet because I don’t like the word. I’m a trapeze artist.”

Perhaps Bob Dylan has always resisted labels because he has found himself defined and redefined in public so often. He was originally hailed as the musical heir apparent to Woody Guthrie, a rebel with a cause, the most promising and galvanic of the young New York-based folkies Pete Seeger called “Woody’s children.”

Then he  was transformed into  a renegade rock and roller, a gaunt vision in black who unleashed his stream of consciousness with a stark beat and created a new kind of pop music that was brilliant, challenging, even downright dangerous.

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Class of 1988
I knew that I was listening to the toughest voice that I’d ever heard.
Bruce Springsteen
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