Before the Beatles, most of the hit songs that appeared on weekly music charts weren't written by the same people who sung them. It wasn't even until the '60s that the majority of artists started writing down their personal feelings and experiences.
For some artists, songwriting came as naturally as breathing. So naturally, in fact, they couldn't quite fathom anyone lacking the skill. "As far as songwriting, any idiot could do it," Bob Dylan said in the book Songwriters on Songwriting. "Everybody writes a song, just like everybody's got that one great novel in them."
Dylan viewed it less as a revelation than a necessity to move through life – something that really wasn't all that remarkable of a skill "unless," he admitted, "someone's gonna come along with a pure heart and has something to say. That's a different story."
And that's something the artists on the below list of the Top 40 Singer-Songwriter Albums can attest to.
