ABSTRACT
The life of Nobel Prize-winning Bob Dylan was indelibly stamped by his youth on the Minnesota Iron Range. That influence accounts for some of the specific songs and poems he wrote, many smaller references in other songs and his general approach to life: a strong sense of nature, a distrust of the city, a feeling for lost history and bells and railroad trains. Despite the many voices he imitates, Dylan’s language is bedrock Iron Range Minnesotan in his vocabulary, his pronunciation and his delivery. Dylan’s class analysis and anarchist politics owe more to northern Minnesota socialists than to Greenwich Village folkniks, as does his apparent acceptance of the violent curmudgeons of what Greil Marcus called America’s Invisible Republic.
