How Did Bob Dylan Learn Folk Music by Copying Other Musicians?

David Senra cites Bill Gurley's talk How to Run Down a Dream for how Bob Dylan learned folk music before New York. Over eight or nine months, Dylan studied every folk album he could. He had little money, so he used the listening booth in a record store and stayed for hours. Senra places that work about two years before Dylan signed to Columbia.

Dylan was broke, so he made friends with people who liked folk music and could buy records, then listened through their collections at home. In New York he did the same thing in rooms he would later play. He would play on the street, in a coffee house, for one person, for nobody, or for a hundred people. Musicians from that time said he watched them so closely he could perform their songs the way they did, copying the tone and the tempo.

Back in the book, Senra reads Dylan in the Midwest, hearing Dave Van Ronk and setting out to meet him and learn how to break into the Gaslight.