“Destiny”: the musician Bob Dylan said meant the most to him
There’s dedication, and then there’s making something your life mission to achieve that nothing can get in the way of – in the case of Bob Dylan during his younger years, there was little else he wanted to do more than be like his idol.
Having worshipped American folk icon Woody Guthrie as if he were a demi-demigodgod since his early teens, Dylan knew that this was the person he wanted to emulate in every aspect of his life… While musically there are plenty of characteristics Dylan admired in Guthrie, the latter was also known for his anti-fascist political leanings, with much of his work possessing a socially conscious approach to lyricism and commentary that Dylan would lean towards through much of his career.
While he took plenty of steps towards following in Guthrie’s footsteps as a young man, growing up in Duluth, Minnesota, meant that there weren’t too many opportunities afforded to Dylan to present himself to an audience that could eventually lead him to national levels of notoriety.
From the 1950s onwards, Guthrie’s ailing health and diagnosis of Huntington’s Disease meant that Dylan was going to have to brace himself to deal with the grief of losing the one person he looked up to most. However, rather than pay his respects in the ordinary way, he chose to do something different and decided that he was going to pay a visit to his hero in his hospital bed at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in New Jersey in January 1961.
Of course, for a teenager to be able to make his way from the Midwest to the East Coast by himself would be no easy feat, especially when you factor in that Dylan chose to make an additional pilgrimage to New York City as part of the same trip, but according to an interview with biographer Tony Glover, Dylan proclaimed that he was prepared to go to extreme lengths to ensure he reached his destination.
“Hitchhiked out of St Paul and wound up in Madison, Wisconsin,” Dylan told Glover about his journey. “Destiny just brought me there, I had no idea. It was just some stroke of luck. I got out of the car… and ran into some guitar players. After staying around there for a few days, I can’t recall. Think we got a ride from Madison all the way from two young New Yorkers.”
While his trip may have seemed arduous and unnecessary as a way of paying respects, Dylan would go on to defend his decision to travel halfway across the country in the hope that he’d meet Guthrie, and also be able to insert himself into a city that had much more going on culturally than Duluth.
“I mean, I had to leave,” Dylan argued. “The only other choice was to sell shirts, or work in the mines, or maybe to learn to fly an airplane. I don’t think I wanted to be James Dean, but there was a period of time when I blocked out everybody else. No one else really meant anything as much as Guthrie did.”
Knowing full well that he wouldn’t be able to rest easy without having met his hero, and that he wouldn’t have a chance of success in Minnesota, Dylan decided to take the biggest leap of faith in his life. This is just about as dedicated as one can get, and evidently, it paid off.
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