Bob Dylan Awarded Honorary Doctorate from Berklee College of Music

Berklee College of Music has awarded an honorary Doctor of Music degree to Bob Dylan, recognizing a lifetime of songwriting that changed the sound and scope of modern music.

For more than six decades, Dylan has drawn from folk, blues, gospel, country, and rock to create a body of work that captures both the American story and the inner life of the people living it. Through his writing, he showed that a song could tell the truth with the economy of a poem and the reach of a novel, influencing generations of artists who still look to his work as a map for what’s possible.

“Thank you, Berklee College of Music, for bestowing on me this prestigious honor. What a pleasant surprise,” Dylan said. “Who knows what path my career might have taken if I’d been fortunate enough to learn from some of the great musicians who taught at Berklee. It’s something to think about.”

In presenting the honor, Berklee recognized not only Dylan’s extraordinary influence on modern music but also his lifelong commitment to creative exploration. “This is an incredible moment for this institution," said Berklee President Jim Lucchese. “Bob Dylan’s music has shaped how the world hears itself. He’s an artist who has never stopped evolving, who keeps chasing truth through sound and language. That’s the spirit we try to cultivate here every day. Honoring him feels like a reaffirmation of the creative impulse that built this place.”

Emerging from the 1960s folk scene, Dylan expanded the possibilities of popular songwriting, joining the everyday and the poetic, the intimate and the political. Over the course of more than 40 studio albums—including early landmarks like The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, the confessional Blood on the Tracks, and the atmospheric Time Out of Mind—he has continually explored new sounds and ideas while defying categorization. He has sold more than 100 million records and inspired over 30 films and 2,000 books, reaching audiences on a scale few artists have matched.

“Bob Dylan has spent a lifetime learning, absorbing, and transforming every American song tradition, and Berklee strives to teach all the music that Dylan loves,” said Matt Glaser, artistic director of Berklee’s American Roots Music Program. “His deep immersion in African American blues parallels much of Berklee’s curriculum, which is rooted in the distinctly American variants of the music of the African diaspora.”

“As anyone who has read his books or listened to his hundred-plus radio programs can attest, Dylan is also a great teacher and learner,” Glaser added. “He shows us how to keep learning about music and the arts our whole lives through, and to embrace it all as one thing. I love the anecdote Dylan himself tells: he once went up to Thelonious Monk at the Five Spot in Greenwich Village, introduced himself, and said, ‘I play folk music down the street.’ Monk replied, ‘We all play folk music.’”

His work has been recognized with nearly every major artistic honor. He has earned 10 Grammy Awards, an Academy Award, and a Golden Globe, and has been celebrated with the Kennedy Center Honors, the National Medal of Arts, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. A member of the Rock & Roll, Nashville Songwriters, and Songwriters halls of fame, Dylan also received a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation in 2008. In 2016, he became the first and only musician to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.”

Dylan joins a distinguished roster of Berklee honorary doctorate recipients that includes Duke Ellington (the first, in 1971), Aretha Franklin, Quincy Jones ’51, Joni Mitchell, B.B. King, Ringo Starr, Tito Puente, Roberta Flack, Juan Luis Guerra ’82, A. R. Rahman, and Loretta Lynn, among others.