Bob Dylan Arrived in NYC 65 Years Ago and Transformed Folk/Rock Scene Forever

On Jan. 24, we marked a special anniversary in the musical annals of New York City: the 65th anniversary of Bob Dylan’s arrival in New York.

It seems that Dylan scholars can point to virtually any day of the week as one landmark or another in the life of one of the city’s most celebrated cultural figure from the second half of the 20th century. For instance, social media breathlessly hailed Jan. 20, 2025 as the 50th anniversary of the release of Dylan’s great album, Blood on the Tracks–and Jan. 2026 marked the 58th anniversary of his appearance at the Carnegie Hall memorial concert for Woody Guthrie, which commemorated Dylan’s first stage show in 18 months after Dylan’s infamous July 1966 motorcycle crash.

Still, this reflection of his coming to New York is a big deal for New York music history as well as for Dylan, who was awestruck by the Big Apple. As he told interviewer Cameron Crowe in the liner notes to his album “Biograph:”

“You just didn’t get on a plane and go there, you know. New York. New York! Ed Sullivan. The New York Yankees. Broadway. Harlem... You might as well have been talking about China. It was some place which not too many people had ever gone, and anybody who did go never came back.”

Dylan was fittingly showcased on the final print edition cover of the Village Voice in September 2017. As the defining New Yorker of his time, Dylan influenced music and culture particularly in Greenwich Village. Perhaps only John Lennon, who lived in the Dakota on West 72nd Street for nearly a decade before his death in 1980, put a stamp on a New York neighborhood like Dylan did with the West Village. You might go so far as to proclaim that there were two distinctions in the city–Before Dylan and After Dylan. The 2024 movie, A Complete Unknown with Timothée Chalamet as Dylan (as well as the Coen Brothers’ film, Inside Llewyn Davis) made this point eloquently.

Of course, Dylan didn’t invent folk music. Before he came to town, the likes of Dave Van Ronk, Pete Seeger, Ramblin Jack Elliott, Peter, Paul and Mary and Joan Baez had made their mark. (For a terrific insight, I suggest you check out Rolling Stone journalist David Browne’s excellent book, Talkin’ Greenwich Village.). Still, Dylan continues to be the single figure who is most identifiable with folk music. Some 60 years after Dylan “went electric,” at the Newport Folk Festival on July 25, 1965, pundits mindlessly routinely call him a folk musician–as if he had never picked up that Fender Stratocaster electric guitar or sat down at a piano.

Dylan emerged from the start as a performer to respect. He crashed at new friends’ flats in his early days in New York. It didn’t take long for him to establish himself as a major talent. Within a year of his arrival, he had gotten a rave review in the New York Times and acquired a recording contract from Columbia Records’ legendary producer, John Hammond.

College Dropout Made Good

A few days before he stepped foot in Manhattan, Dylan, then a 19-year-old, newly designated college dropout at the University of Minnesota, had hopped a ride from the Midwest. He hoped to make his presence felt in the thriving Greenwich Village folk-music scene and meet his idol, Woody Guthrie, then living in a hospital in Morristown, NJ. Until then, Dylan had never spent a day in New York.

His driver dropped him off at the George Washington Bridge, wished him luck and sped off. Dylan was carrying a battered suitcase and his trusty acoustic guitar. He had arrived smack in the middle of what some termed the worst snowstorm in the city in roughly 17 years. As Dylan subsequently noted 1985 to Crowe in the liner notes for Biograph, he was used to the snow, having grown up in Hibbing, Minnesota.

Historical Exclamation Point

In a historical note, Dylan’s emergence in New York was hardly the only historical note that week. President John F. Kennedy had his inauguration on Jan. 20, 1961, ushering in a whole new sensibility in the nation. Young people rallied around the 35th President and identified with his agenda for social change and his devotion to presenting a new, modern style to the rest of the world.

It is a delicious visual to imagine Dylan sitting in a car speeding toward a new life in New York just as President Kennedy was opening a new way of thinking in Washington.

Kennedy was a tacit supporter of the Aug. 1963 civil rights March on Washington, where Dylan and Joan Baez were among the many performers and speakers. And of course, it was where Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream Speech.” But JFK was assassinated before Dylan truly made his mark. But it is easy to imagine the young President inviting Dylan to give a concert at the White House and listening raptly to Dylan performing “Blowin in the Wind” and “The Times They Are A-Changin.”

Dylan would’ve likely thrived in that environment. The spirit that he carried to New York City on Jan. 24, 1961 would have carried the day. It always will.