Dylan isn't "notorious" for using traditional melodies and lyrics. He's just writing like a folk singer. Always has. Admits it.

As for the idiotic, unkillable canard that he didn't write "Blowin' in the Wind" (though its melody, as is well known, is borrowed from "No More Auction Block"), the full story of this hoax can be found on pages 161-162 of the late Robert Shelton's No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan (1986).

According to a a rumor circulating at the time (a version of which Newsweek picked up and printed), the alleged "true" author was Lorre Wyatt, who's still around and not all that long ago released an Appleseed CD of topical songs with Pete Seeger. Shelton quotes a letter Wyatt wrote to Broadside on June 5, 1963:

"Last year, I wrote a song called 'Freedom Is Blowing in the Wind,' long before I'd ever heard Dylan's 'Blowin' in the Wind'. The lyrics are nothing whatsoever like Bob's, and the tune is completely different. But the titles were similar ... some kids confused it with his, and were very indignant when they heard that Dylan 'stole' my song, which I hadn't bothered to copyright.... I patiently ... explained to them that _only_ the titles were similar -- and that was all."

Then in February 1974 Wyatt confessed in a New Times article that this wasn't true, either. He'd never written anything remotely like the Dylan song (presumably including the title), and that Broadside letter was itself a piece of fiction. Anyone who has heard Wyatt's songs will have no problem concluding he could not have written "Blowin' in the Wind."

It boggles the mind to consider that in the 21st Century there still are people who think that Dylan, even the young Dylan, was incapable of writing the lyrics to "Blowin' in the Wind." Wyatt properly calls beliefs to that effect "fakelore." Maybe "rank bullshit" is more to the point.