What happens if Bob Dylan arrives on the folk scene with his guitar
and his, shudder, harmonica and does his Ramblin' Jack Elliot
influenced singing. However, he never writes a song and tries to make
it as a singer.

He came in very high in a recent poll of the "best singers" and I just
wondered if anyone here thought he could have possibly made a living
at it, sans his powerful songwriting.

Obviously, I don't think so but other opinions are welcome.

I "came here" intending to post this on AFH2 because I would have put it on AFH but we have an off-topic forum, so I figured why not.

--
Will in New Haven

I'll admit that Bobby Z. puzzles the hell out of me sometimes.

Short answer: at his best, Dylan was one of the most powerful voices of the sixties, in the first rank of protest/folk singers.

At his average to worst, which was most of the time, he'd have needed to play behind chicken wire. Horrible, barely on key screeching doesn't have much of an audience. (I saw him on TV perhaps ten years ago and it was so embarrassingly bad I had to turn it off. I've heard him sing better since so I can only assume he was having a bad day. But he's had a lot of mediocre to bad days over his career.)

OTOH, if he'd been a songwriter who never played or sang a note, he'd still be in the R&RHF.

I've always found that when I begin to doubt Dylan was one of the most important artists of the last century (as a singer and songwriter), I just put my copy of Highway 61 Revisited on the turntable. The doubts vanish.

What's a "turn table"?

Surely Bob Dylan's songwriting is at a level where he has few rivals. But his singing does have its own character. It's not music-school polished, perhaps unpolishable; but that's not all bad.

As a little test of vocal effect, or of singer's interpretation without the songwriter's effect, I just ran through a few renditions of "Corrina, Corrina" I have handy on iTunes; John Lennon (1980), Bob Dylan (1963), Joe Turner (1956), Merrill Moore (1952), and the Texas Wanderers (1937).

All are distinctive, and I rather like them all.

I was just visiting with the woman who attended a Rolling Thunder Tour performance with me. We talked about this thread and that performance. She remembered thinking that Rambling Jack Elliot sounded like he was imitating Dylan. I knew that someone had said that back then but I didn't remember that it was Joan. There is an extremely great similarity in phrasing and it is pretty clear, given when each of them came onto the scene, who was imitating who.