{"id":165605,"date":"2025-09-18T14:38:11","date_gmt":"2025-09-18T14:38:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/165605\/"},"modified":"2025-09-18T14:38:11","modified_gmt":"2025-09-18T14:38:11","slug":"is-this-bob-dylans-illegitimate-son","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/165605\/","title":{"rendered":"Is this Bob Dylan\u2019s illegitimate son?"},"content":{"rendered":"

With his tight curls and sharp features, Sam Sussman looks a lot like Bob Dylan \u2014 a resemblance that gained significance when Sussman was 15.<\/p>\n

Driving with his stepfather, Luke, Dylan\u2019s \u201cLike a Rolling Stone<\/a>\u201d came on the radio, and Luke told him: \u201cThere\u2019s a lyric in there about your mother. They used to know each other in her early New York days.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBoy from the North Country<\/a>\u201d (Penguin Press) is Sussman\u2019s auto-fiction novel about his relationship with his mother, and the question of whether he is actually Dylan\u2019s son.<\/p>\n

Sam Sussman has written a novel about his mother\u2019s real-life affair with Bob Dylan \u2014\u00a0and the question of whether he. might be the singer\u2019s son.<\/p>\n

As Sussman eventually found out, his mother, Fran \u2014 called June in the novel \u2014 spent a year in the mid-1970s in a situationship with the music legend.<\/p>\n

The pair were not exactly dating and definitely not exclusive, but became emotionally and artistically intimate over time.<\/p>\n

They connected after meeting in a beginner\u2019s painting class where June was the only student with the courage to criticize Dylan\u2019s art, telling him that the shades of blue in one of his paintings were \u201cso remote from one another it was hard to feel any intimacy.\u201d<\/p>\n

(In the book, Sussman tells the story of their relationship in June\u2019s voice, as she had told it to him in real life.)<\/p>\n

Fran Sussman, seen here with Sam as a young boy, allegedly had an affair with Bob Dylan in the mid-1970s and reconnected with him in 1990, nine months before Sam\u2019s birth. Sam Sussman<\/p>\n

Dylan started arriving, unexpected, at her Yorkville apartment at all hours of the night. The pair would smoke and talk about life, with Dylan dropping conversations mid-sentence if an idea for a new
lyric popped into his head.<\/p>\n

June recalls lighting her stove and handing Dylan a pipe that had been sitting on a poetry book, then reading to him from the book. This scene is depicted in Dylan\u2019s \u201cTangled Up in Blue\u201d from his \u201cHighway 61 Revisited<\/a>\u201d album. <\/p>\n

\u201cHe was completely taken by [the poetry],\u201d Sussman, who currently lives in the apartment where all this took place, told The Post. \u201cThen at a certain point he played her \u2018Tangled Up in Blue,\u2019 and he sang that lyric to [Fran]. That\u2019s her most definitive appearance in his lyrics.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the book, June recalls a time when she and Dylan were cuddling on her floor.<\/p>\n

Sussman has said that if he met Dylan, he would mainly want to ask the singer about memories of Fran, who passed away in 2017. Sam Sussman<\/p>\n

\u201cDylan drew me nearer and whispered, \u2018June, if I had the stars from the darkest night I\u2019d forsake them all for your sweet kiss.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The line was from Dylan\u2019s song \u201cBoots of Spanish Leather,\u201d and it was an important moment in the
relationship for June.<\/p>\n

\u201cI heard the sentence in its familiar rhythm,\u201d Sussman writes, as June. \u201cHe\u2019d taken that sentence right from his own song and tried to place it in my heart. It wasn\u2019t for me. It was from him to himself.\u201d<\/p>\n

After a late-night phone call when Dylan played her what was clearly a love song to his wife, Sara, June realized they were done. She ghosted him from there.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was a thrill that I could have a connection to him,\u201d Sussman told The Post of Dylan (above). \u201cBut there was also a thought that I didn\u2019t understand a significant part of the story of my own life.\u201d Michael Ochs Archives<\/p>\n

The song \u201cTangled Up in Blue\u201d allegedly describes a moment between Dylan and Fran Sussman.<\/p>\n

But the pair reconnected briefly in the early 1990s \u2014 around nine months before Sussman was born. June was married at the time to the man Sussman knows as his father. They divorced when Sussman was two years old.<\/p>\n

Years later \u2014 but before he learned all this \u2014 Sussman felt a kinship with Dylan\u2019s music and life.<\/p>\n

\u201cI felt certain parallels,\u201d Sussman, who grew up in Goshen, New York, told The Post. \u201cI was this young Jewish kid growing up in a rural part of America, longing to go where there was a larger culture.\u201d<\/p>\n

An aspiring poet, Sussman, 34, was deeply affected by learning that Dylan might be his father.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was a thrill that I could have a connection to him,\u201d Sussman said. \u201cBut there was also a thought that I didn\u2019t understand a significant part of the story of my own life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dylan in 1991, the year Sam Sussman was born. Getty Images<\/p>\n

He tried addressing this with his mother over the years, but June wouldn\u2019t discuss it directly. To this day, Sussman does not seem to know if Dylan is his father, and June \u2014 who died of cancer in 2017 at age
63 \u2014 might not have known for sure either.<\/p>\n

His mother\u2019s hesitation to address the topic caused Sussman frustration. But over time, he realized that giving Dylan prominence as a parent could have, in his mother\u2019s eyes, minimized her own role in his life.<\/p>\n

\u201c[Dylan] wasn\u2019t part of our lives,\u201d Sussman said. \u201cI am her son. That\u2019s the center of my relationship to myself. And that\u2019s enough.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, he added that learning about his mother\u2019s relationship with Dylan gave him a deeper sense of who his mother was.<\/p>\n

\u201cBoy from the North Country\u201d is out now.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy determination to know more about him led me much closer to her,\u201d Sussman explained, \u201cand that\u2019s the story I was trying to tell.\u201d<\/p>\n

At this point, he has no need for a definitive answer about his parentage \u2014\u00a0and said that if he met Dylan today, he\u2019d most welcome the chance to ask for the singer\u2019s own memories of June.<\/p>\n

So does Sussman believe that Bob Dylan is his father?<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m my mother\u2019s son,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s where the story ends.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"With his tight curls and sharp features, Sam Sussman looks a lot like Bob Dylan \u2014 a resemblance…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":165606,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[50998,223,236,88],"class_list":["post-165605","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-bob-dylan","tag-books","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165605","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=165605"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165605\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/165606"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=165605"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=165605"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=165605"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}