August 25- October 15, 2025
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How Many Roads: Bob Dylan and His Changing Times, 1961-1964
“America was changing. I had a feeling of destiny and I was riding the changes. New York was as good a place to be as any. My consciousness was beginning to change, too, change and stretch. One thing for sure, if I wanted to compose folk songs I would need some kind of new template, some philosophical identity that wouldn’t burn out. It would have to come on its own from the outside. Without knowing it in so many words, it was beginning to happen.”
—Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One, 2005
How Many Roads: Bob Dylan and His Changing Times traces Bob Dylan’s journey from his arrival in New York City as a young, unknown musician to his sold-out Carnegie Hall concert in October 1963, when he was hailed as the “voice of his generation”—a label he neither sought nor embraced.
Consisting of newly created documentary films on pivotal moments and figures in the civil rights movement, as well as reproductions of materials from the extensive Bob Dylan Archive and from private collectors, this exhibition was originally presented in an expanded version at the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, from May 24 to November 3, 2024, with generous support from Bob Russell and Joe Donnelly.
Greenwich Village
In late January 1961, Bob Dylan arrived in Greenwich Village, the epicenter of American artistic life—home to writers, comedians, playwrights, poets, and especially musicians. He soon began performing at local basket houses and clubs, including Gerdes Folk City, Café Wha?, and the Gaslight Cafe. In the process, he befriended key Village figures like Dave Van Ronk, Fred Neil, and Mark Spoelstra. On July 29, while playing the “Hootenanny Special” at Riverside Church on the Upper West Side, Dylan met Suze Rotolo. The two fell in love, and Rotolo introduced him to the city’s vibrant cultural and political scenes.
“I hadn’t come in on a freight train at all. What I did was come across the country from the Midwest in a four-door sedan, a ’57 Impala, straight out of Chicago. … I slammed the door shut behind me, waved good-bye, stepped out onto the hard snow. The biting wind hit me in the face. At last I was here, in New York City, a city like a web too intricate to understand and I wasn’t going to try.”
—Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Volume One, 2005
The Minnesota Kid
Born Robert Allen Zimmerman on May 24, 1941, Bob Dylan grew up embracing the youth culture and rock ’n’ roll of the 1950s. He formed bands with high school friends, playing gigs at school events and local venues, and taught himself to emulate Little Richard on piano before picking up an electric guitar. In January 1959, Dylan and friends rode their motorcycles to Duluth to see Buddy Holly perform, a life-changing moment for Dylan. Days later, Holly, the Big Bopper, and Ritchie Valens tragically died in a plane crash, an event later called “The Day the Music Died.” After high school, Dylan briefly attended the University of Minnesota, where he immersed himself in the Minneapolis folk scene in Dinkytown. Performing at the 10 O’Clock Scholar, he built a strong repertoire of folk and blues songs and, during this time, adopted the name “Bob Dylan.”
“[Buddy Holly] was powerful and electrifying and had a commanding presence. I was only six feet away. He was mesmerizing. … Then, out of the blue, the most uncanny thing happened. He looked me right straight dead in the eye, and he transmitted something. Something I didn’t know what. And it gave me the chills.”
—Bob Dylan, The Nobel Lecture, 2017
A Woody Guthrie Jukebox
Of all the musicians Bob Dylan discovered during his brief but formative time at the University of Minnesota, none made a deeper impact than Woody Guthrie. Both Guthrie’s music and his autobiography, Bound for Glory, left a lasting impression on the young songwriter.
Dylan soon learned that Guthrie was a patient at Greystone Park Hospital in Morristown, New Jersey, suffering from Huntington’s disease—an incurable and little-understood degenerative neurological disorder. Dylan made the trip to visit him there and continued to see him after Guthrie was moved to Brooklyn State Hospital in 1961 where he was closer to his family.
“I was there more as a servant,” Dylan later recalled. “I knew all of his songs, and I went there to sing him his songs. He always liked the songs. He’d ask for certain ones, and I knew them all. I was like a Woody Guthrie jukebox.”
—Bob Dylan, No Direction Home, 2005
Early Songs
Dylan’s early folk songs reveal a young artist rooted in traditional blues and folk forms while beginning to experiment with his own lyrical voice. He wrote “The Death of Emmett Till”—a stark account of Till’s brutal murder and the sham trial that followed—for a CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) benefit in February 1962. As he explained to Cynthia Gooding on her WBAI radio show, the melody and chord progression were modeled on Len Chandler’s song “The Bus Driver.” Dylan later told Izzy Young it was the best song he had written up to that point—though Young believed his greatest work still lay ahead. He was right. Just two months later, Dylan would write what would become one of the most iconic protest songs of the era: “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
“I can’t say when it occurred to me to write my own songs. I couldn’t have come up with anything comparable or halfway close to the folk song lyrics I was singing to define the way I felt about the world. I guess it happens to you by degrees.”
—Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Volume One, 2005
Talkin’ John Birch Blues
On May 12, 1963, Bob Dylan was set to perform on The Ed Sullivan Show. It was an incredible opportunity for the young folk singer: some 60 million viewers tuned in to watch Elvis Presley on the show in 1956. Folk music was big business on TV, with shows like ABC’s Hootenanny, though controversy wasn’t far behind. Hootenanny had refused to book Pete Seeger due to his perceived communist leanings, prompting a boycott by artists like Dylan and Joan Baez.
For his Sullivan Show appearance, Dylan chose to perform “Talkin’ John Birch Blues,” a satirical critique of the John Birch Society, a right-wing, politically retrogressive organization that exists to this day. Despite getting initial approval to perform the song, Dylan was instructed to choose a different song due to CBS censors fearing legal repercussions from the John Birch Society. He refused, and walked off the show.
“The oppressive mentality of the Cold War still held sway over the culture, and everyone working to change the status quo, whether through the arts or in politics, was chomping at the bit. To be young and on society’s edge in those years made you feel you were standing at the crossroads of something important, energized for what was to come.”
—Suze Rotolo, A Freewheelin’ Time, 2008
Mississippi
In the early 1960s, Mississippi stood at the forefront of the struggle for desegregation and voting rights in the American South. Bob Dylan captured the urgency of the era in several of his early songs, including “The Death of Emmett Till,” “Oxford Town,” and “Only a Pawn in Their Game.” Despite this focus, Dylan did not visit the state until July 1963, when he traveled to Greenwood, Mississippi, with Pete Seeger and Theodore Bikel for a SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) voter registration rally. There, he debuted “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” a song about the assassination of civil rights leader Medgar Evers, who was murdered outside his home on June 12. Just six weeks later, Dylan would perform alongside other folksingers and civil rights leaders at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
“Topical songs weren’t protest songs. The term ‘protest singer’ didn’t exist any more than the term ‘singer songwriter.’ You were a performer or you weren’t, that was about it—a folksinger or not one.”
—Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Volume One, 2005.
Early Concerts
From 1961 to 1963, Bob Dylan honed his craft in the intimate folk clubs of Greenwich Village, performing at iconic venues such as Gerdes Folk City, the Gaslight Café, and Café Wha? alongside artists like John Lee Hooker, Dave Van Ronk, and the Greenbriar Boys. A glowing review by New York Times critic Robert Shelton in September 1961 helped launch Dylan into the national spotlight. That same year, his first solo concert at Carnegie Chapter Hall—organized by Izzy Young, owner of the Folklore Center—was a modest event. But just two years later, following the release of two albums, a string of tours, and the success of Peter, Paul and Mary’s hit cover of “Blowin’ in the Wind,” Dylan sold out Carnegie Hall. However, his decades-long career was only just beginning.
“I’d come from a long ways off and had started from a long ways down. But now destiny was about to manifest itself. I felt like it was looking right at me and nobody else.”
—Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Volume One, 2005
Carnegie Hall
On October 26, 1963, Bob Dylan performed to a sold-out crowd at Carnegie Hall’s prestigious Stern Auditorium in Midtown Manhattan. Some 3,000 people—including Dylan’s parents and Suze Rotolo—packed the hall to hear him play a mix of familiar songs and several never-before-heard tracks from his just-completed album The Times They Are A-Changin’. He opened the concert with the album’s title track and closed with an encore of “When the Ship Comes In,” a song he had performed at the March on Washington two months earlier.
During the set, Dylan introduced “Talkin’ John Birch Blues”—a satirical song that had been famously barred from his scheduled appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show—by saying, “This one is called ‘Talkin John Birch Blues’ … and there ain’t nothin’ wrong with this song.”
“During the concert, the audience hung on every word Bob spoke and sang, and when it was over they gave him a raucous standing ovation. Backstage with Albert Grossman, Dave Van Ronk, Terri Thal, and others, I watched and absorbed what was happening. We all sensed a sea change and it was exhilarating.”
—Suze Rotolo, A Freewheelin’ Time, 2008
The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom
The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, held on August 28, 1963, drew more than a quarter-million people to Washington, D.C., to demand civil and economic rights for African Americans. Organized by A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, the march featured galvanizing speeches from leaders like Daisy Bates, John Lewis, Roy Wilkins, and Martin Luther King Jr., who delivered his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech. Music played a vital role, with performances by Marian Anderson, Mahalia Jackson, Joan Baez, Odetta, Bruce Langhorne, Peter, Paul and Mary, and a young Bob Dylan, whose songs were broadcast nationwide through extensive radio and television coverage. The March on Washington paved the way for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and remains a pivotal moment in the nation’s struggle for equality for all Americans.
“To those who say ‘be patient and wait,’ we must say that we cannot be patient … we want to be free now. We are tired. We are tired of being beaten by policemen. We are tired of seeing our people locked up in jail over and over again, and then you holler to be patient. How long can we be patient? … We must say wake up America, wake up for we cannot stop and we will not and cannot be patient.
—John Lewis, National Chairman, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, August 28, 1963
Bob Dylan
Released on March 19, 1962, Bob Dylan marked the young singer-songwriter’s recording debut. Dylan had been signed by Columbia on October 26 and cut the record less than a month later, on the 20th and 22nd of November. Dylan had few original songs at this point in his career, so the album featured a mix of traditional folk, blues, and gospel covers he’d picked up around the Village from peers like Dave Van Ronk, along with two of his own songs “Talkin’ New York” and “Song to Woody.” Initially dismissed as “Hammond’s Folly” due to poor sales and little critical attention, the album nonetheless signaled Dylan’s entry into the major music world and hinted at the songwriting talent that would soon reshape American music.
“[‘Song to Woody’] was a song that I felt I had to write. I can’t explain it any other way. I felt I had to write that song. I did not consider myself a songwriter, at all, but I needed to write that and I needed to sing it because it hadn’t been written, and that’s what I needed to say. I needed to say that.”
—Bob Dylan, No Direction Home, 2005
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan
Dylan’s second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, marked his breakthrough as a songwriter and lyricist. Almost immediately after completing his debut, he began writing at a rapid pace, quickly emerging as a major voice in the Greenwich Village folk scene. His topical songs—such as “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Masters of War,” and “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall”—became defining anthems of a generation. Meanwhile, heartfelt love songs like “Girl from the North Country” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” established themselves as timeless classics. The album’s cover, showing Dylan walking arm-in-arm with Suze Rotolo through the snowy streets of Greenwich Village, remains one of the most iconic in music history.
“The Freewheelin’ record cover came about by chance. There are a series of pictures in the apartment: we’re on a chair; he’s playing his guitar. Then the next day we were taking pictures outside. It was on West 4th and we were walking and it was snowy and very, very cold, a really unbelievably cold day. How it was chosen for the cover, I don’t know. But it was an unusual thing to have that setting.”
—Suze Rotolo, December 2004
The Times They Are A-Changin’
Released on January 13, 1964, The Times They Are A-Changin’ was Bob Dylan’s third studio album and his first made up entirely of original songs. With stark, often somber lyrics, Dylan addressed injustice, poverty, and racism in songs like “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” and the anthemic title track. As with Freewheelin’, Dylan penned some intensely poignant love songs, including “Boots of Spanish Leather” and “One Too Many Mornings.” Musically stripped to just guitar, harmonica, and voice, the album’s sparse production sharpened the focus on Dylan’s lyrics and message, and Barry Feinstein’s stark cover photo reinforced the mood of the overall album.
“All I’m doing is saying what’s on my mind the best way I know how. And whatever else you say about me, everything I do and sing and write comes out of me.”
—Bob Dylan, 1964
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