Bob Dylan

Robert Zimmerman arrived in New York in 1961, renamed himself after the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, and absorbed the Greenwich Village folk revival — Woody Guthrie’s social protest songs, Pete Seeger’s repertoire, the tradition of the singer who speaks inconvenient truths. Within two years he had already surpassed it: “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They Are a-Changin’” became anthems of the civil rights movement before he had turned 23.

Then he went electric. At the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 he played with a rock band and was booed by the folk purists. The records that followed — Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde — remain among the most concentrated creative achievements in American music: six-minute single “Like a Rolling Stone,” imagistic surrealism, blues and country fragments reconstituted into something that demanded the same attention as poetry.

He kept moving: John Wesley Harding (1967) pointed toward country-rock; Nashville Skyline (1969) was actual country; Blood on the Tracks (1975) was confessional autobiography at peak intensity. He converted to Christianity in 1979 and released three gospel albums; then returned to the secular catalog. He is, in short, the model of the artist who refuses to be fixed — and whose influence on every songwriter who followed is difficult to overstate. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016.