Hard reign: Bob Dylan's song borrowing. (Behind the song: a closer look at some of the music we love).

"The difference between a bad artist & a good one is: the bad artist seems to copy a great deal; the good one really does copy a great deal."

-- William Blake

Bob Dylan didn't start out as a songwriter. Like everyone else, he began by singing songs of other people. His tastes varied wildly, as evinced by the various early bootleg tapes and the recordings (Bob Dylan, Dylan, Self Portrait, World Gone Wrong, etc.) on which he mostly sings songs other than his own. Personally, I think Dylan wrote his best songs before 1970. For the last thirty years he's had to…