Bob Dylan  by Bob Dylan

On March 19, 1962, a record appeared on the market featuring on its cover a young boy with a flat cap holding an acoustic guitar and looking at the camera photographing him with a bored and ironic gaze. At the point where the guitar's fretboard ended, the name Bob Dylan was written, followed below by the titles of the album's songs.

As was natural and expected, the album went unnoticed. The initial sales of the Bob Dylan album reached 2,500 copies, and if it hadn't been a cheap album to produce—recording lasted only two days—Columbia would have turned its back on him, and no one knows how the subsequent musical history of Robert Allen Zimmerman would have been written, nor that of the rest of rock music.

Bob Dylan is a bunch of covers of country, folk, and blues songs as felt and recorded by a twenty-one-year-old playing harmonica, strumming an acoustic guitar, and singing them with a quite off-key voice. The only original composition was Talkin' New York. Today, it is considered a landmark album solely because it was the first recording effort of such a great composer and performer.