Word: singers
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...What a pop singer could look like. Physically not a heroic figure (his song-publishing company was called Dwarf Music), Dylan nonetheless had a compelling presence: the voluptuous lips nearly hidden by his harmonica holder, the untelling eyes under a brakeman's cap. He didn't have as much influence on performing styles as Mick Jagger - he was a static figure, while Jagger's stage-sprawling struts set the fashion for rock-band lead singers - but he notarized the dress-down look for pop performers...
...could write the songs. Before Dylan, the decades-long Tin Pan Alley division of labor between singer and songwriter held sway. Dylan's success (and the Beatles') convinced every vocalist he was a poet, and every tunesmith an Elvis. Except in Nashville, the profession of songwriter disappeared. Whatever the lasting results - a lot of ragged vocals, I'd say, and tons of bad songs by singers who should never have picked up a pencil - but the singer-songwriter has been the m.o. ever since...
...when he was a kid. In Chronicles he describes his feeling of kinship with smooth-singing Bobby Vee and Ricky Nelson, with the composer Harold Arlen and the wrestler Gorgeous George. He also played occasionally in rock band and briefly backed Vee in 1959, when the Buddy Holly soundalike singer was booked to fill the dates Holly couldn't make because he'd died in a plane crash in a frosty Iowa cornfield...
...Soon Dylan had assimilated Guthrie - gone through him and come out the other side. Now, as a singer-songwriter, he had joined the folkie scene of people who made, in the words of the New Lost City Ramblers' John Cohen, "Long-playing, short-selling records." Everyone remarked on Dylan's lyric gift and driving ambition. After just a few months, and before he was 20, he had scored his first professional gig in the Village (a supporting act to blues singer John Lee Hooker). Rejected by the traditional labels, Folkways and Vanguard (whose A&R man said...
...INSULT FOLK SINGER...