Into the lobby of the public exhibition space at the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, strides a man who doesn’t need 115 dreams. Steven Jenkins ’89 is busy living this one.
“It’s unimaginable to think of another position that would merge my professional experience and my personal interests as one of these crazy Dylan fans,” said the center’s director, a former English major at the University of California, Berkeley.
Housing the musician’s archives, the Bob Dylan Center occupies part of the former distribution warehouse of the Tulsa Paper Company. The Center opened in 2022, precisely a century after the building went up. It sits on a quiet street called Reconciliation Way—formerly named for a Ku Klux Klan member who participated in the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre in the Greenwood District, a couple of blocks away. Over the course of two days, a mob destroyed a neighborhood once christened the Black Wall Street by Booker T. Washington.
How did Dylan’s personal archives end up here?
You can follow the footsteps of the Minnesota-born Dylan on a walking tour in New York. But Tulsa? Ask a fan for a song title to represent their image of the city, and they’d probably say “Desolation Row.”
Tulsa was in a bad way two decades ago. The one-industry town was left holding the barrel when oil companies moved to Texas. Twentieth-century urban renewal highway construction destroyed most of what was left of the post-1921 rebuilt Greenwood District and cut swaths through other central neighborhoods. Automobile-induced suburbanization took its toll.
City Hall launched a plan in 2010. In parallel, the George Kaiser Family Foundation began making acupuncture-styled interventions. One logical step was to acquire the archives of Oklahoma-native folk music hero Woody Guthrie. When it opened in 2013, the Guthrie Center was designed to serve as an anchor in a neighborhood that has evolved into today’s Tulsa Arts District.
Three years later, Bob Dylan was mulling over his stuff. Lots of stuff. Starting in 1964, when he was a budding folk star, Dylan began to “put things away in a desk drawer, in cardboard boxes, and often on closet shelves,” said Jenkins. He seemed to know he was destined for greatness.
Word of the Guthrie Center had reached Dylan, for whom the older legend was a lodestar. Dylan famously visited the ailing Guthrie in 1961, singing back to the master the songs that he could no longer play. “Dylan said at the time he was a Woody Guthrie jukebox,” noted Jenkins.
Where better for his materials than “essentially under the same roof”? he added.
Tulsa may have resonated in other ways as well. Jenkins speaks of “the casual hum of the heartland that he feels here, almost like a radio. I think of it as like a radio frequency that he tunes into here in ‘green country,’ as I’ve learned to call it, as a transplant to Tulsa.” The “hum” reflects an affinity for the Tulsa Sound, epitomized by the likes of Leon Russell, J.J. Cale, Jim Keltner, and Jesse Ed Davis.
Dylan is of course familiar with “the good, the bad and the ugly” of Tulsa history, as Jenkins, a longtime habituée of the Pacific Film Archive and onetime Chair of the Berkeley Art Museum/PFA Student Committee, put it. “He referenced the Tulsa race massacre as recently as 2020 in a song called ‘Murder Most Foul,’ where he says, ‘Take me back to Tulsa to the scene of the crime.’” And since “this is Native American land, he certainly did more than just nod to that.”
Tulsa became home to tens of thousands of items. “We are the stewards of the largest archive devoted to a living artist,” Jenkins believes.
So how did Jenkins arrive here?
Flashback to the San Fernando Valley circa 1970. A precocious Steven Jenkins is rummaging through his mom’s record collection. He pulls out Dylan’s Greatest Hits, Volume One. “I was very struck by the visuals of that album, the front cover, and particularly the poster, this great pop image of Dylan,” Jenkins recalled. “We have it on display here, by the designer Milton Glaser. I had that on my bedroom wall as a five-year-old.”
“His voice really captured my attention. I don’t know what I made of the songs … but I was struck at a pretty young age by Dylan.”
An avid reader, Jenkins studied English at Berkeley, “taking lots of art history and film courses as well, going to concerts as many nights a week as I could.” He covered the arts for the Daily Cal, “just sort of learning how to write about an exhibition or interview an artist.”
Following an M.A. in English and Film Studies at San Francisco State, Jenkins gravitated to a career with Bay Area non-profits in film and the arts. Just prior to signing on with the Dylan Center four years ago, he served a five-year stint as development director of the University of California Press.
Along the way, Jenkins became one of those people affectionately referred to by the Center staff as Diehard Dylanologists.
Even so, when the offer came, did he really want to take a job in Tulsa?
Oklahoma’s red politics “gave us some pause,” he admitted. As did the threat of tornados spewing their red dust. “I was assured Tulsa was a blueish bubble,” he said. Evidence came from programs such as the Kaiser Foundation’s Tulsa Remote, which is “literally investing in more diversity by encouraging [remote workers] to move here.” More came from a myriad of established institutions, such as the art house film theater and the Philbrook Museum, where Jenkins’s husband found work. Affordable housing also loomed large, making home ownership a reality after a lifetime of renting.
As for the tornados, “We don’t think about earthquakes as much,” he said. “There’s other natural disasters to contend with.”
Jenkins now travels the country to host film screenings and Dylan-esque shows featuring the likes of fellow alum Susanna Hoffs ’80 of the Bangles. The lifelong Californian now feels comfortable serving as “somewhat of an ambassador, not only for the centers, but for the city.”
Back in Tulsa, it’s Tuesday morning. A middle-aged man stares forlornly at the hours posted on the entrance to the Dylan Center. Closed Monday-Tuesday. He hadn’t noticed the Tuesday part when he was here yesterday.
He’s one of those diehard fans who form the core of the Center’s guest list. “We love to engage in good-natured dialog and debate with them, because these are folks who spend a lot of their waking hours and probably many of their dream ones in the Dylan universe.”
But even Dylan novices are welcome. “Often we’ll hear from younger visitors, ‘I didn’t know he wrote that. I love that song. I thought that was a Garth Brooks song’ or ‘I know Adele’s version of Make You Feel My Love.’ It’s fun for people to discover that they were kind of Dylan fans without knowing it.”
Visitors have hailed from 46 countries so far. “The most fun is to see who’s gonna arrive today,” said Jenkins. “That might be Bruce Springsteen, or it might be a multi-generational family from Lithuania, with grandpa running in and saying, ‘This is who I’ve been talking about!’”
Musicians, scholars, and others can apply for access to the archives—as long as they’re working on bona fide projects. Unofficial biographer Clinton Heylin and writer Terry Gans both visited while writing books. The power musical couple Elvis Costello-Diana Krall trolled the back corridors.
What about Dylan himself?
He’s been in town at least twice since 2022, Jenkins said. “First, about three weeks before we officially opened. But, of course, we were ready for him. Then again in March of 2025. He played two blocks away at the Tulsa Theater.
“He has not come in.”
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Bill Hinchberger earned two degrees at UC Berkeley: a B.A. in Political Science and an M.A. in Latin American Studies. Before going nomad, the native Californian spent quality time in Brazil and France. His work as a journalist, writer, consultant, and educator has taken him to over 70 countries.
