1947
Family moves to Hibbing
After his father fell ill with polio, the family moved to Hibbing, an iron-range mining town where Beatty's family lived.
Abram Zimmerman's illness ended his job in Duluth, and in Hibbing he went into business with his brothers, running a furniture and appliance store. Hibbing was built around one of the largest open-pit iron mines in the world, a cold, working town far from any music industry. That distance mattered. Late at night the boy listened to faraway radio stations that carried country, blues and early rhythm and blues, and Hank Williams became one of his first heroes. He had a younger brother, David, and a fairly ordinary small-town childhood, including his bar mitzvah in 1954. Years later he would speak of the town with mixed feelings, but the landscape and the sense of isolation stayed with him and surface again and again in his songs about the North Country.