Most music aficionados will cite Bob Dylan as one of the greatest songwriters of the 20th century (if not the greatest). But Dylan didn't always write songs, he started out as a song interpreter.

"I just wanted a song to sing," he says of his early days, performing traditional folk and blues. At a certain point, he explains, "I had to write what I wanted to sing, because what I wanted to sing, nobody else was writing. I couldn't find that song someplace. If I could, I probably would have never started writing."

Happily, he didn't find "that song," and he did start writing, and he wrote rather prolifically. He released nine studio albums in the '60s (eight of which were mostly or all original material), and there were many songs from that era that didn't make it onto any of Dylan's albums.

But Dylan's self-titled debut album from 1962 featured mostly covers. There were, however, two originals: "Talkin' New York" and "Song to Woody." The latter was a tribute to legendary folk singer Woody Guthrie. Guthrie, as it turned out, was the first artist Dylan was aware of who wrote his own songs, which he also discusses in this interview clip.