Bob Dylan’s civil rights work and Mississippi connections to be focus of Overby Center program

By Overby Center Staff

The music and early civil rights work of legendary singer-songwriter Bob Dylan will be the focus of a fall program at the Overby Center for Southern Journalism and Politics. “Songs of Freedom: Bob Dylan’s Mississippi,” will be presented Oct. 8 at 5:30 p.m. in the Overby Center Auditorium on the Ole Miss campus.

Dr. R.J. Morgan will present the program that will focus on the impact Dylan’s early songs had on the American Civil Rights Movement, particularly in Mississippi, including a historic 1963 appearance where he sang at a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee rally outside Greenwood, Miss., with Pete Seeger, Theo Bikel, the Freedom Singers and others.  

Morgan is an instructional associate professor in the School of Journalism and New Media at the University of Mississippi, director of the Mississippi Scholastic Press Association and a member of the Overby Center panel of experts. 

Morgan teaches a popular journalism course on campus called “Bob Dylan & the South,” which drew students from more than a dozen different majors in its first iteration this spring. The course covers Dylan’s many and varied intersection points with the region and its media, including his early civil rights work, a number of important albums recorded in Nashville, New Orleans and Muscle Shoals, Ala., and his intertextual use of southern poets, writers and events in his modern catalog. 

Dylan (originally named Robert Zimmerman) was born in 1941 in Hibbing, Minn. After dropping out of the University of Minnesota, he found his way to New York City’s Greenwich Village and joined its thriving scene of folk musicians, ultimately writing his own socially conscious songs, many of which would come to define the era. 

Dylan famously “went electric” in 1965 at the Newport Folk Festival and has continued to confound fans and critics many times over in the decades since. That controversial move to electric instruments and other events in his life are the subject of a critically acclaimed film, “A Complete Unknown,” starring Timothée Chalamet and released in 2024. The film is based on the 2015 book, “Dylan Goes Electric!” by Elijah Wald. 

In 2016, Dylan became the first musician awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition." He was the first American to win the award since Toni Morrison in 1993. Oxford native William Faulkner won the award in 1949.

The public is invited to the Overby Center program and there is no charge for admission. Free parking is available on the Ole Miss campus. A reception for all attendees will follow the program.