ABSTRACT
Mark Donnelly has noted that in the early period of The Beatles’ musical development before Bob Dylan had exerted his influence, the lyrics of all 49 of their songs copyrighted between 1963 and 1964 were about boy–girl romance. Dylan himself, in a 1978 interview, later referred favourably, without in anyway implying his own influence, to the highly personal nature of John Lennon’s song writing when he stated that: John has taken poetics pretty far in popular music. The impact of Dylan’s song writing during the 1960s even thereby posed a challenge at the time to the dominant influence of leading American songwriters, largely based at the Brill Building in New York City. Bob Dylan’s wider influence on British popular music during the 1960s, a central part of that cultural phenomenon, not merely in terms of songwriting, was equal to that of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.
