Dylan's work was always grounded in folk music's Dust Bowl roots, but something cast the spell of change on him every few full moons or so.  What prompted his changes and his later experiments with country and gospel?  What thoughts, feelings or events pushed Dylan to evolve, to wander far from his loyal fan base?  

I can't promise a definitive set of answers to these questions, only an interpretation of fact and opinion.  Below are my tools and my thought process.  Use them as you may.  Find your own meaning, your own understanding.   

Text and Sonic Resources   

"Letter from Okemah, Oklahoma:  A hobo's unhappy home"   
From The Economist   

This is a brief on the life of Woody Guthrie, perhaps Dylan's greatest influence.  Guthrie was a self-described hobo, an American poet and wanderer.  Like Dylan, his life was a perpetual search.  Sometimes, he didn't even know what he was looking for, only that he had to pick up his roots and move on.  "So long, it's been good to know ya," Guthrie once sang, "this dusty old dust is a-gettin' my home, i've got to be drifing along."   

This is where Dylan found his first perspective as a folk singer, a young man from Hibbing, Minn., trying to scrounge a day's pay in the music scene of New York City.  Guthrie is the force that molded his early sound (too much, some say), forming the growling protest of "Another Side of Bob Dylan" and the outtakes from "The Bootleg Series, Vol. 1."  This article details Guthrie's literal excommunication from his hometown, Okemah, Okla., which parallels Dylan's exile at the hands of his fans when he began to experiment with his sound.  Coincidence?  

"Bob Dylan"   
By Bob Dylan   

The debut album is the best place to start analyzing Dylan's body of work.  It's his pastoral poem, an homage to heroes and influences that preceded his epic works in the 1960s.  Dylan strings together a list of classic folk and blues tunes learned from friends and mentors and gives them his own searing touch.  The highlight is "Baby Let Me Follow You Down," which he learned from blues man Rick VonSchmidt.  But the debut album is only a window to what lies ahead, the necessary foundation for looking at Dylan's metamorphic career.   

"Academics have discovered the wisdom of Bob Dylan"   
From St. Louis Dispatch   

Dylan has long been ignored by academia because he doesn't fit neatly into a category.  He's musical, literary, political and philosophical.  Dylan is a historical-social icon, a cultural masterpiece.  But the brain trust at Stanford University now recognizes the uncanny circles his work runs around philosophy and literature and offers classes on Dylan's music.  This article dives fairly deep into philosophical waters.  

Great minds share a certain wavelength, and Dylan's is no exception.  Like Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, he's a loner, a man living out his destiny by walking a solitary line.  Academics note the strains of melancholy, romanticism and yearning he shares with the likes of T.S. Eliot.  Eliot was a considerable influence on Dylan's work, his poetry flavoring the first decade of his work, from gorgeous strings of music like "Masters of War" to "Girl of the North Country."   

This, to me, sheds the first light on his eventual conversion to Christianity.  Again, his life is a search, a perpetual hunt for truth and meaning.  Such a deeply personal search naturally leads many to religion.   

"Bringing It All Back Home"   
By Bob Dylan   

This is the album that first threw his fans for a loop.  At 1965's Newport Music Festival, he donned an electric guitar and committed what many fans called the ultimate betrayal.  He went electric (commercial, they said).  But why?  It's hard to say exactly, but my research points to two things.  First, Dylan owned an electric guitar in the late 1950s, but when he first heard the voice of Mississippi's legendary Odetta, he traded it in for a six-string.  Perhaps he missed the old electric sound and felt the need to branch out.  Second, he may have grown tired of traditional folk and felt the itch of change.  Great artist never homogenize their work from birth to death.  Experimentation is the rule.   

Invisible Republic:  Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes   
By Greil Marcus   

The main stretch of Dylan's brilliant early run ended when he retreated from the limelight after a 1967 motorcycle accident.  The folk-turned-rock singer was due for another change, having explored the venue of mainstream rock.  Enter Marcus, who documents Dylan's time in Big Pink with The Band.   

Dylan was tired of conventional categories, hoping to let the music flow spontaneously.  Marcus dissects the songs that became "The Basement Tapes," the returning shadows of Woodie Guthrie, country legend Jimmie Rodgers and traditional folk music.  Marcus' analysis is sometimes too dense and cumbersome, but it shows Dylan in the proper light — in recluse, where the music flows freely from inspiration.   

No Direction Home   
By Robert Shelton   

The man who discovered Dylan wrote probably the most accurate biography.  While working for The New York Times, Shelton reviewed Dylan's performance in a Greenwich Village bar, praising him and literally taking the first step to stardom for him.  Shelton tied the songs to Dylan's life, to what was happening as each song came to life.  No Direction Home provided considerable insight as to what led him to compose albums and songs. There was an abundance of details from the 1960s and 1970s, a hard time for Dylan when a messy divorce that bore a famous son (Jakob Dylan of The Wallflowers fame) led him to compose "Blood on the Tracks," an album of anger, bitterness and attempted healing.   

The book moved into modern times as Dylan -- weary from divorce, unpopularity and an inner emptiness -- converts to Christianity.  At last, he found a solid foundation, a new musical outlet.  Dylan experimented with gospel music, much to the dismay of his fans, expressing the joy he felt from the love of God, not the joy of folk or rock music.