Bob Dylan

Born in Duluth, Minnesota, in 1941, Bob Dylan spent the better part of six decades being impossible to pin down. Folk prophet, then the man who plugged in and got booed for it. Protest singer who refused the title. Born-again, then not. The one constant is that the moment anyone decided what he was, he had already moved.

By the mid-1990s a lot of people had quietly filed him under past tense. The voice was rougher, the records came less often, and the assumption was that the great work was behind him. Then in 1997 came Time Out of Mind, recorded in Miami with Daniel Lanois, and it landed like a man reintroducing himself. It won Album of the Year. That spring he had been seriously ill, a heart infection that put a comeback in genuine doubt before it arrived.

What gets lost in the legend is how much of his catalog the wider world now knows without knowing it is his. Songs covered so often they float free of their author. He has won the Grammy, the Oscar, the Nobel in Literature. And still the surest way to surprise a casual listener is to tell them which famous songs he actually wrote.