The songwriter Bob Dylan called the pinnacle of music: “At the top”
In the early 1950s, listening to the Grand Ole Opry radio show, Bob Dylan encountered the music of Hank Williams. “The sound of his voice went through me like an electric rod,” he later reflected, and it would be an introduction that would surely change the course of his life.
Rock ‘n’ roll pioneer Johnnie Ray was “the first singer whose voice and style” that Dylan “fell in love with”, emulating his look and sound as a teenager, playing in bands while attending high school and, in fact, his yearbook would feature him with the caption, “Robert Zimmerman: to join ‘Little Richard.’”
Clearly, a love of rock ‘n’ roll and its roots in rhythm and blues stuck with Dylan from an early age, but, for a young Dylan, the genre “wasn’t enough”, as he told Cameron Crowe in his album Biography’s liner notes.
Instead, rock ‘n’ roll opened a door to folk music, where Dylan felt that his spectrum of emotions was most at home. “The songs are filled with more despair, more sadness, more triumph, more faith in the supernatural, much deeper feelings,” the musician explained to Crowe. Dylan discovering folk music was like opening the doors to another dimension, one that yielded an intimacy and honesty in both his songwriting and delivery. With his idol Woody Guthrie’s footsteps to follow in, Dylan set out for New York City and, as we know quite well, the rest is music history.
Even as Dylan rose to inconceivable levels of fame and influence, becoming certainly one of the most recognisable and influential figures in both music and culture, at large, he maintained a reverence for the singer-songwriters who paved the way for his poetic folk renditions to flourish. One of these primary figures is Willie Nelson, whose abundant discography and outspoken ethos have resonated with Dylan for decades.
As recently as December of 2025, in a New Yorker piece honouring Nelson, Dylan expanded on why he regards the country singer as one of music’s greatest.
“What do you say about a guy who plays an old, battered guitar that he treats like it’s the last loyal dog in the universe?” Dylan questions, writing, “Cowboy apparition, writes songs with holes that you can crawl through to escape from something. Voice like a warm porchlight left on for wanderers who kissed goodbye too soon or stayed too long.”
With a poetic flair, Dylan captures the essence of Nelson’s work, a musicality that continues to reverberate with an unmistakable timelessness. Back in 1993, at a birthday celebration performance for Nelson, Dylan described the musician as “a philosopher poet,” before expanding, “He gets to the heart of it in a quick way, gets it out and it’s over, and it just leaves the listener to think about it.”
“His guitar playing is pretty phenomenal,” he continued. “I don’t really ever see anybody giving him any credit as a musician, but in my book, he’s pretty up there on top. Whatever thing he’s singing [about], he makes it his, you know? And there’s not many people who can do that.”
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