Bob Dylan Revisited: What A Song Can Be (In-Person)

Please note that this program will be in-person at the Noah Webster Library. 

Bob Dylan (né Robert Zimmerman, from Duluth & Hibbing, Minnesota) has been absorbing influences from uncounted musical and literary sources since he was a teenager, and has in turn influenced over a half-century of songwriters that followed him, as well as the society and culture of his time. We’ll listen to some songs that we know from Dylan’s own singing or from others, consider some of the sources of his lyrics and music and some of the impact he’s had on others’ music, and hear how this iconic American troubadour expanded the boundaries of what a song can say, and mean.

Presenter Robert Cohen has spoken and taught at the Fifth Avenue New York Public Library and the New England Conservatory of Music; New School University in New York and Boston College’s Center for Christian-Jewish Learning and School of Theology and Ministry; the Afro-American Historical and Cultural Museum in Philadelphia and the National Museum of Dance in Saratoga Springs, NY; and the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. He produced and hosted over 100 radio programs in New York on Jewish culture and identity and wrote the NPR documentary "One People, Many Voices: American-Jewish Music Comes of Age."