The album was produced by Columbia talent scout John H. Hammond, who had earlier signed Dylan to the label, a controversial decision at the time.

The album did not receive much attention at first, but it achieved some popularity following the growth of Dylan's career, charting in the UK three years after its release, reaching #13.

Hammond later told Robert Shelton that he decided to sign Dylan "on the spot" and invited him to the Columbia offices for a more formal audition recording.

That night at Gerdes, Dylan told Shelton about Hammond's offer but asked him to "keep it quiet" until the contract's final approval had worked through the Columbia hierarchy.

He studied the Folkways Anthology of American Folk Music, the singing of Ewan MacColl and A. L. Lloyd, Rabbit Brown's guitar, Guthrie, of course, and blues … his record was in the planning stages.

By the time sessions were held for his debut album, Dylan was absorbing an enormous amount of folk material from sitting and listening to contemporaries performing in New York's clubs and coffeehouses.

The final album sequence of Bob Dylan features only two original compositions; the other eleven tracks are folk standards and traditional songs.

"Talkin' New York" is closely based on Guthrie's song "Talking Dustbowl Blues" and also references "The Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd".

Three additional songs recorded during the Bob Dylan sessions were included on Volume 1 of the Bootleg Series: "House Carpenter", "He Was a Friend of Mine" and another original composition, "Man on the Street".

An alternate (shortened) version of "House of the Rising Sun", heavily overdubbed with electric instruments in 1964 (produced by Tom Wilson), was later included on the Highway 61 Interactive CD-ROM.

"These debut songs are essayed with differing degrees of conviction," writes music critic Tim Riley in 1999, "[but] even when his reach exceeds his grasp, he never sounds like he knows he's in over his head, or gushily patronizing … Like Elvis Presley, what Dylan can sing, he quickly masters; what he can't, he twists to his own devices.

And as with the Presley Sun sessions, the voice that leaps from Dylan's first album is its most striking feature, a determined, iconoclastic baying that chews up influences, and spits out the odd mixed signal without half trying.

The April 14, 1962, issue of Billboard magazine highlighted it as a 'special merit' release, saying, '[Dylan] is one of the most interesting, and most disciplined youngsters to appear on the pop-folk scene in a long time' with 'moving readings of originals such as "Song to Woody" and "Talkin' New York".

Often known by a misnomer, the Minneapolis Hotel Tape soon entered private circulation, providing a thorough look at Dylan's musical potential only a month after recording his debut album.

Among the songs recorded that night were the harrowing, racially charged morality tale "Black Cross", Big Joe Williams' "Baby Please Don't Go" (in which Dylan displays his growing skills at bottleneck guitar), the Pentecostal "Wade in the Water", Dylan's reinterpretation of the traditional "Nine Hundred Miles" (retitled "I Was Young When I Left Home" and later issued on The Bootleg Series Vol.

Though only a few selections from the Minneapolis hotel tape were ever officially released, all twenty-six songs have been heavily bootlegged and celebrated by Greil Marcus, a music critic who wrote about the recordings in Rolling Stone magazine.

Bob Dylan was re-released in 2010 as the first of a 9 CD boxset titled The Original Mono Recordings, with new liner notes by Greil Marcus on a 60 pages booklet.