Oh, I can well understand that he was annoyed by it... ;-)

But I think that the REAL reason so many people have been annoyed by Bob Dylan's adaptations and borrowings of a variety of trad tunes and nontrad tunes and lyrical phrases, etc, is simply this: he was very successful in marketing those adapatations.

If he had not been (like so many others who have borrowed in the same way)...no one would care. If you achieve much in a professional way and become famous, then everyone cares all of a sudden.

My point being: Dylan did what thousands of others have done and will continue to do, but he succeeded at it. That's what people really resented. They were secretely thinking, whether they would fess up to it or not, "Why him? Why that little scrawny schnook? Why not me, glorious me!???"

Thus, in my opinion, they do protest overmuch and they are driven primarily by envy, not by more noble impulses.