Bob Dylan

WASHINGTON -- The White House has announced this year's recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor. The list of 13 honorees includes musician Bob Dylan, writer Toni Morrison, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Shimon Peres. “These extraordinary honorees come from different backgrounds and different walks of life, but each of them has made a lasting contribution to the life of our nation,” President Obama said in a statement. “They've challenged us, they've inspired us, and they've made the world a better place.  I look forward to recognizing them with this award.” The awards will be presented at White House ceremony later his spring.

Levon Helm is most widely known for the songs he sang that found their way onto the pop charts during his long tenure as drummer and singer for the Band: "Up On Cripple Creek," "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" and "Don't Do It," earthy and infectious conglomerations of gospel, country, blues, folk and rock music. But the one that might crystallize his approach to music throughout his life was "The W.S. Walcott Medicine Show," an ode to the kind of freewheeling gatherings in which the musician, who died of cancer Thursday at 71 in New York, thoroughly reveled.

Bob Dylan has been lauded so often as "the poet laureate of rock 'n' roll" that even the man himself, who for decades protested the notion that he was speaking for anything but his own musical muse, eventually caved and now incorporates the phrase into the voice-over introduction at his own concerts. This week, a massive new four-CD tribute album, "Chimes of Freedom: The Songs of Bob Dylan Honoring 50 Years of Amnesty International," amplifies that sentiment with recordings by 80 artists of 75 of his songs that demonstrate his influence not just on his own generation but on several succeeding ones.

The '60s gave us "Blowin' in the Wind," folk-poet Bob Dylan's challenge to the brutal status quo. The '70s served up Neil Young's "Ohio," an anthem of generational rage against the military-industrial machine. The '80s laid down "The Message," Grandmaster Flash's hip-hop jeremiad about the vicious cycle of race-based poverty. The '90s broke loose with Rage Against the Machine's "Bulls on Parade," a rap-rock rant targeting corporate greed and cultural imperialism. And the '00s? It's produced some memorably sardonic screeds (Green Day's "American Idiot")

Barry Feinstein, a photographer who gained renown as one of the premier chroniclers of the 1960s and '70s music scene, including shooting iconic album covers for Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin and George Harrison, has died. He was 80. Feinstein, a longtime resident of Woodstock, N.Y., who had been in failing health the last 10 years, died Thursday at a hospital in Kingston, N.Y., said his wife, Judith Jamison Feinstein. In an award-winning career that began in the 1950s and included shooting many of Hollywood's biggest stars, Feinstein had photos published in Life, Look, Time, Esquire, Newsweek and other magazines.

Singer and songwriter Holly Williams, the granddaughter of country music giant Hank Williams, knew something big was up when Bob Dylan approached her at a gig several years ago and handed her a handful of song lyrics he wanted her to peruse. "He didn't say anything," Williams recalled recently, "but I could immediately tell from the simple English and the cut-to-your-heart, lonesome lyrics. He said, 'These are some [Hank Williams] lyrics that were found, and they've asked me maybe to do a whole album, or I may have other artists do them.'" That was the beginning of her involvement in "The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams," a long-gestating project that's finally seeing the light of day on Tuesday.

Davey Moore may be gone, but he's not forgotten. Longtime boxing fans remember him as a featherweight champion who fell into a coma shortly after losing his title in a bout at Dodger Stadium in March 1963, and died three days later. Pop music fans remember him as the ghostly presence in Bob Dylan's anti-boxing harangue, "Who Killed Davey Moore?" And Moore's 75-year-old widow, Geraldine, remembers him as a hardworking provider and loving husband and father. "We got along famously," she says.

At a time when many other American performers have been banned from China, Bob Dylan was allowed to play Wednesday night in Beijing, but with a program that omitted Dylan's most famous ballads of dissent. Conspicuously absent from the program at the Workers' Gymnasium were "The Times They Are A-Changin'" and "Blowin' in the Wind. " Dylan's set list had to be sanctioned beforehand by the Ministry of Culture, which in its formal invitation decreed that he would have to "conduct the performance strictly according to the approved program.

Bob Dylan, famous for his antiwar songs during the Vietnam War, will perform in the Communist country for the first time next month, his promoter said Tuesday. Dylan will appear at an 8,250-seat stadium in Ho Chi Minh City on April 10, said Rod Quinton, general manager of Saigon Sound System. Dylan is popular in Vietnam because of his antiwar songs. His 1960s songs "Blowin' in the Wind" and "The Times They Are a-Changin'" were inspirations for the American civil rights and antiwar movements.