Well, it all depends on what you think a "folksinger" is, and what you think about that depends on when and where you were growing up, around whom, and who you were influenced by, right? We all have mental patterns that were set by our earliest experiences, and those patterns go on justifying themselves for the rest of our lives.

In the end, all that matters about Dylan or any other singer whatsoever is...do you enjoy listening to them? If you do, great, enjoy them. If you don't, fine, just go and listen to someone else instead that you like better.

If Dylan's not a folksinger to you, okay. That's up to you. To me, he's a singer and a writer who went through a number of stages...country/rock/blues/folk/protest/"folk-rock"/country/all of the below together/religious rock/and who knows what else...

At around 14, he played country music (inspired mostly by Hank Williams). After that he played rock n' roll, inspired by Little Richard and Buddy Holly and other rockers...and he fronted a couple of really loud high school rock bands "Ellston Gunn and the Rock Boppers" and "The Golden Chords". He played a lot of piano then, Little Richard style.

Then he got into the old acoustic blues stuff, like Robert Johnson and Blind Willie McTell, etc, and he did a lot of that on acoustic guitar for years afterward.

Then he got into Woody Guthrie and the folk music thing. For awhile he had a huge repertoire of Guthrie songs. Was Guthrie a folksinger? Most people seem to think so.

You appear to be bothered by the fact that Dylan does almost exclusively his own songs. Why by bothered by that? He did almost exclusively cover tunes for years and years (all through his teens) and most of the songs on his first album were cover tunes of various wellknown folksongs, blues, etc.

AFTER that he started doing mostly his own songs. You know why? Probably because he felt like it, having spent all of his teenage years ALREADY immersing himself in playing hundreds and hundreds of cover tunes and traditional numbers.

Aww...poor Bobbie...he just didn't want to keep doing the very same thing forever and ever. You guys would all probably love him if he'd just STOPPED at one particular moment that suited your taste perfectly and kept on repeating that moment forever like an old record on the turntable.

Well, hey, you've got folksingers and pop singers and country singers who do that. Hundreds of them. They simple repeat the past endlessly. They could probably do it in their sleep. So my advice is, listen to those guys and be happy. They will never let you down.