Bob Dylan revealed the true origin of his name to …

Bob Dylan, whose real name is Robert Zimmerman, revealed that the choice of his artistic alias was for fear of anti-Semitism existing at the time, and relativized that it was a tribute to the writer Dylan Thomas, as was always believed.

This is how he told it in a series of interviews in 1971 with his friend Tony Glover, many of them through an exchange of letters that only now came to light when they were published in the magazine Rolling Stone, on the occasion of an auction to be held on November 19.

When asked about the reasons for his stage name, the mythical musician and 2016 Nobel Prize Winner explained that there was “a lot of discrimination against Jews” in those days.

“Many people have the impression that Jews are simply bankers, merchants, and watch sellers. A lot of people think that Jews have tails, or are going to eat your daughters and that sort of thing. Many people think that way, and you have to teach them things differently, “wrote the artist in one of the responses sent to his interlocutor.

Dylan remarked that the name change allowed him to “assume a role with more character” because neutralizing any discriminatory criticism gave him “freedom” to concentrate on music.

But The biggest myth demolished with this clarification was the one that affirmed that the surname Dylan was the product of the artist’s supposed love for the writer Dylan Thomas, an explanation that I had already outlined some years ago in another interview.

“I haven’t read much of Dylan Thomas. Not that I was inspired by reading one of his poems and changed my last name to Dylan. If I believed that he is so great, I would have sung his poems, and for the same reason I could have changed my name to Thomas ”, he had clarified.

In the letters released now, the artist expands the explanation by giving an account of the process that led him to rename himself Bob Dylan, which began with an attempt to introduce himself under the pseudonym Robert Allen.

“It sounded like the name of a Scottish king and I liked it. It reflected my identity. Then I had the intention of changing him to Robert Allyn, when I ran into a saxophonist named David Allyn. I suspected that his last name was actually Allen, and that I would have changed him to Allyn because he was more exotic and inscrutable. I would do the same ”, he explained.

That’s where he claimed that he remembered the writer and began to think that Allyn and Dylan sounded similar if they spoke quickly, but that the inclusion of the letter D gave it “more strength.”

And he completed: “When I arrived in the city of Saint Paul, Minnesota, when they asked me who I was, I spontaneously answered: ‘Bob Dylan’. It wouldn’t have worked if he had changed the name to Bob Levy or Bob Johnston or Bob Donut. There had to be something special to take it to that extra dimension. “