The Dylan mythology

ONLY A HOBO
“I was raised in Gallup, New Mexico. Got a lot of cowboy songs there. Indian songs. Carnival songs. Vaudeville kinda stuff.”, Dylan claimed in his first ever radio interview on WNYC in autumn 1961. He also claimed to have lived in Cheyenne, South Dakota; Sioux Falls, South Dakota; Phillipsburg, Kansas; Hibbing, Minnesota; and Minneapolis. At least the last two were true.

[This folklore was repeated by Nat Hentoff for the album liner notes for The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963).]

THE CIRCUS BOY
“Oh yea, I spent about six years in the carnivals. Clean-up boy; worked on the ferris wheel — went all the way around the Mid West.”, Dylan told a radio interviewer in 1961. “Didn’t that interfere with your schooling?”, he asked. “Oh, I skipped a bunch of school”, he blithely replied.

THE NAME GAME
“That’s just a rumor made up by the people who like to simplify things”. Dylan said when asked if he’d taken his name from Dylan Thomas. “It’s the name of my family—on my mother’s side. It’s spelt D-I-L-L-O-N and I changed it from there.??? In fact, his mother’s family name was Stone.

THE INDIAN CONNECTION
When he arrived in Greenwich Village, Dylan reinvented several new lives for himself. But of all his tall tales, none was more preposterous than his claim that he was descended from the Sioux Nation. “I remember he solemnly gave us a demonstration of Indian sign language, which he was obviously making up as he went along”, recalls Dave Van Ronk.

— From The Rough Guide to Bob Dylan