Thanks, Don.

When Bob Dylan was young he was a big fan of various singers and he imitated their styles for a time. First was Hank Williams, then Buddy Holly and Little Richard, then he got into the old black acoustic blues players in a big way, then he went nuts on Woody Guthrie. And with each phase he modified his own singing style to imitate those people. This is something that enthusiastic young musicians often do, so it's not surprising to me that Dylan did it, but he moved more rapidly from one phase to the next than most people do.

All that bizarre stuff he invented about his supposed Woody-Guthrie like roaming years on the road in places like Gallup, New Mexico, etc....well, it's amusing in retrospect. ;-) He clearly wanted to be someone like Woody Guthrie, not just a nice Jewish kid, son of a small storekeeper from a small town, who had lived a middle class life and gone to high school. I can understand how the romance of it all appealed to him when he made up those wild stories. Most people wouldn't have the nerve to carry it off the way he did...I'd say he was very focused on what he wanted to do.

The saving grace to it all is that he soon matured into something uniquely his own. I'd say that that was already happening by the time he did the "Freewheelin'" album, but it reached full fruition by the time he recorded "Bringing It All Back Home" in 1965, by which time he was writing and performing absolutely unprecedented material which was entirely his own in every sense and unlike anything that had preceded it.

I can forgive him the youthful fakery while he was finding his way. ;-) It led to good things farther down the road.

You can't get away with made-up stuff like that for long now, because information is so easy to investigate and verify through the Net and so on. It was very different in those days...a much more innocent and free-wheeling time.