Chronicles, Volume One by Bob Dylan
Written by Shelley Gollust and Nancy Steinbach
10 February 2005

Click the button to listen to a short clip of Dylan's "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall."



Click the button to listen to a clip of Woody Guthrie singing "I Ain't Got No Home."



DOUG JOHNSON: Welcome to AMERICAN MOSAIC, in VOA Special English.
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Bob Dylan's "Chronicles, Volume One"

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Bob Dylan is one of the America's greatest songwriters. Now he has written a book about his life that critics have praised. Shep O'Neal tells us about it.

SHEP O'NEAL: Bob Dylan's book, "Chronicles: Volume One," was published in October. It has been among the best-selling books in America. The New York Times newspaper named it one of the five best non-fiction, or true life, books of two thousand four. And recently, the National Book Critics Circle named it one of the five finalists for best biography or autobiography of last year.

Bob Dylan grew up in the small town of Hibbing, Minnesota. As a young man, in nineteen sixty-one, he moved to New York City with his guitar. He wanted to become a folk singer and musician. In his book, he writes about his experiences playing and singing other people's songs in clubs in the Greenwich Village area. He writes about the many artists, writers and musicians who influenced him.

His main influence was the great folk singer Woody Guthrie. Guthrie was living in a hospital in New Jersey because he had a serious disease. Dylan visited him often and played Guthrie's songs to him. Later, Dylan became extremely famous for the songs he wrote. The media called him the "voice of a generation." But he rejected this fame. He writes: "All I'd ever done was sing songs that were dead straight and expressed powerful new realities. I had very little in common with, and knew even less about, a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of."

Bob Dylan writes that his wife and five children were the most important part of his life. He describes trying to find privacy for his family at his home in Woodstock, a town in New York State. But people from all over the country came to visit him and destroyed his peace.

Dylan also writes about spending time in New Orleans, Louisiana, while recording the album "Oh Mercy" in nineteen eighty-nine. He writes about the process of recording the album. And he writes about the interesting people he met in Louisiana. One was a store owner named Sun Pie, who gave Dylan a sign for his car that says "World's Greatest Grandpa."

Critics have compared Bob Dylan's book "Chronicles" to one of his songs. They say it brings to life images, faces and places. They say the book forms layers of meaning through rich details. "A song is like a dream," Dylan writes, "and you try to make it come true."