Bob Dylan's archive became a public centre in Tulsa

Person: Bob Dylan
Lived: b. 1941
Field: Music
From: American

The story

For decades, the working papers behind Bob Dylan's songs were private. Dylan, born Robert Zimmerman in Duluth, Minnesota, in 1941 and raised in the small Jewish community of Hibbing, had kept notebooks, drafts, recordings and correspondence from across a career that began in New York's folk clubs in 1961.

In March 2016 it was announced that his archive of about 6,000 items had been acquired by the Tulsa-based George Kaiser Family Foundation and the University of Tulsa, for an estimated 15 to 20 million dollars. Dylan chose Tulsa after learning about the Woody Guthrie Center, which had opened there in 2013 to preserve the papers of the folk singer who was his earliest hero. The foundation's American Song Archives, which also holds Phil Ochs material, now describes its Dylan collection as running to more than 100,000 items, including essays, poems, liner notes, letters and previously unseen photographs.

To house and display the archive, the Bob Dylan Center opened to the public on 10 May 2022 in Tulsa's Arts District, on Reconciliation Way across from the Guthrie Green park. The building, designed by the architects Olson Kundig with exhibitions by 59 Productions, has some 29,000 square feet of space, and its façade carries a large mural of the young Dylan based on a Jerry Schatzberg photograph. Inside, visitors can follow how songs that changed popular music were drafted and rewritten line by line, and see objects such as a Royal Caravan typewriter of the model Dylan typed on.

The archive is also a working research collection. Scholars can apply to study the materials, and the University of Tulsa Institute for Bob Dylan Studies organised Dylan@80, a virtual conference marking his 80th birthday in 2021. In 2023 the center published Bob Dylan: Mixing Up the Medicine, a 608-page book of more than 600 images that includes draft lyrics, writings, photographs and drawings never before circulated.

Keeping the papers together and open to the public means that the creative record of a Nobel laureate is not scattered among private collectors. Students, songwriters and fans can now see for themselves how a body of work that shaped the civil rights era and won the Nobel Prize in Literature was actually made.