Speaking Volumes | 55 years ago, Bob Dylan electrified music forever

This week we mark the 55th anniversary of Bob Dylan’s first electrified performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. While on its surface, you may wonder if this really an event worthy of notice, but it has continued to be referenced as an important historical event in both the history of 1960s popular culture and rock n’ roll music.

Bob Dylan, born Robert Zimmerman, quickly became a poster child of the 1960s folk movement after moving to New York City in 1961. Framing himself as that generation’s Woody Guthrie, Dylan became known for dressing in plain work clothes and performing original acoustic songs such as “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They Are a-Changin’” as well as protest songs and folk standards. For many of his fans, his performance at the Newport Folk Festival was a sudden and painful departure of the style and message that had made him famous.

Dressed in all black and sporting a leather jacket, Dylan took the stage with a Fender Stratocaster and a backing band. He began performing “Like A Rolling Stone” to a chorus of boos and heckling from the audience. Now Dylan’s most well-known hit, the song had been released only a few days before his appearance at Newport and was met with derision by attendees. Even music great Pete Seeger commented that he wanted to cut Dylan’s cables with an ax during the set.

Several historians have argued that this moment when Dylan offended traditional folk sensibilities by switching to rock n’ roll represents the bigger cultural transformation of the mid-1960s in America. Dylan’s performance and subsequent reaction was so iconic that it even works to be the subject of a film starring Timothee Chalamet directed by James Mangold, director of the Johnny Cash biopic “Walk The Line.” In 2013, the guitar Dylan used during the festival was sold at auction for nearly $1 million.

Your Manatee Libraries havenumerous biographical titles on Bob Dylan including Howard Sounes’s “Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan,” and “Who is That Man: In search of the Real Bob Dylan,” by David Dalton. We also have several titles about Dylan’s influence on cultural history such as “Why Bob Dylan Matters” by Richard Thomas and Sean Wilentz’s “Bob Dylan in America.”

The library also has numerous physical and digital books that provide unique takes on the 1960s including “Witness to the Revolution: Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year America Lost Its Mind and Found Its Soul,” an oral history of the late 1960s by journalist Clara Bingham which connects the turmoil of that period to contemporary movements. The library also carries, “Nixonland: The Rise of a President and The Fracturing of America,” by Rick Perlstein, which discusses key events during the Nixon presidency that laid the groundwork for divisions still shaping modern politics.

Speaking Volumes is written by members of the staff at the Manatee County Public Library System. Katie Fleck is a librarian at the Central Library.