It would have been very difficult for a teenager growing up in Enniskillen in the 1960s who was interested in folk or rock music not to have been influenced by a new singer-songwriter called Bob Dylan.

In a very short period of time he wrote and recorded a number of songs which quickly became anthemic and caught the spirit of that revolutionary decade perhaps better than anyone else - 'The Times They Are A Changin' ', 'A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall', 'Masters of War', 'Chimes of Freedom', and 'Blowin' In The Wind' ( "Yes, 'n' how many deaths will it take till he knows/ That too many people have died?/ The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind....") to name but a few.

With extraordinary maturity and foresight for such a young man, Dylan wrote of 'Blowin' In The Wind' in 1962: "I still say that some of the biggest criminals are those that turn their heads away when they see wrong and they know it's wrong. I'm only 21 years old and I know that there's been too many wars...You people over 21 should know better. The first way to answer these questions in the song is by asking them. But lots of people have to first find the wind..."

How relevant, sadly, that still is in our war-torn world of 2024!

Bob Dylan, the songwriter, is no one-trick pony, however. He quickly moved on from protest tunes to compose some of the most iconic rock songs of our times - 'Like A Rolling Stone', 'Positively 4th Street', and 'Tangled Up In Blue' and some of the best love songs - 'Girl From The North Country', 'Sara', and 'If You See Her, Say Hello'.

He is now 83 and is still writing and touring. There are approximately 1,500 covers of over 600 Dylan songs, from Hendrix to Bowie, from Christy Moore to Adele. My favourite is The Byrds' 'Mr Tambourine Man'; his favourite is Elvis' 'Tomorrow is a Long Time'.

On our recent road-trip across America we took time out to explore the two Minnesota towns where Bob Dylan was born and reared - Hibbing and Duluth.

I met up with Bill Pagel, a Dylan enthusiast, archivist and collector who now owns and is currently restoring both of the singer's early homes.

We met him at 2425, 6th Avenue in Hibbing and this kind, elderly gentleman gave us an extended private tour of the house where Dylan lived from the ages of six to 18 when he left for university in Minneapolis.

The small bedroom upstairs still contains his bed and some of the original furniture. Books from his childhood adorned a shelf and included some of the English classics and some of John Steinbeck's novels, including 'The Grapes of Wrath' and 'Cannery Row'.

There was a singles collection along the wall, including records by Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Johnny Cash and Gene Vincent. The kitchen table had an old radio which Dylan would listen to each day when he came home for lunch from Hibbing High School three blocks away.

The piano he learned to play on is there, and the basement where Abe Zimmerman built a games room for his two sons has the initials BZ and DZ scratched on the walls - Bobby Zimmerman and David Zimmerman.

Bill is collecting a wealth of really interesting memorabilia which he displays in one of the bedrooms. The official form from the Town Hall confirming the singer's change of name from Robert Allen Zimmerman to Bob Dylan was there, and a very moving letter from Dylan's girlfriend from 1961 to 1964, Suze Rotolo, to her mother pleading with her to give young Bobby a chance as they intended to marry in spite of mum's opposition.

Some schoolboy poems displayed were certainly not of Nobel standard, but of most interest were handwritten and typed lyrics of some of his early songs including 'Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues' and 'Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again', and the many intimate family photos which adorned the walls of the house.

We were very grateful to Bill for his time and generosity in showing us around the childhood home of one of the world's greatest songwriters.

Just down the street from Dylan's home is Hibbing High School, a fine building which the singer attended until his graduation in 1959.

One of his teachers there remembered him as "very quiet, very introverted but very bright".

One incident, though, presaged the individualistic and rebellious Dylan to come.

In 1956 at the age of 15 he fronted a four-piece band in the Hibbing High's Jacket Jamboree Talent Festival, a school talent show.

No-one had any idea of what was coming and Dylan had cautioned his band-mates to say nothing in advance.

In a strange foreshadowing of the legendary occasion at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 when he shocked his faithful folkie followers by going electric and playing the loudest, rockiest set ever heard at Newport, he stunned the school audience by turning the amplifiers and electric instruments up to full volume and screeching out Little Richard and Elvis hits.

Unfortunately for him the school Principal, Mr K. L. Pedersen was showing some local education officers around the school at the time.

He was so startled by the earsplitting performance that he ran backstage and pulled the plugs out of the wall, bringing an abortive end to the set.

The song that Dylan was playing at the time was 'Rock 'n' Roll is Here to Stay' - not that day, it wasn't!

At the front of the school now there is a beautiful monument to Dylan's achievement in winning the Nobel Prize In Literature in 2016 "for having created new poetic expressions within the Great American Song Tradition".

The reverse side of a gently curving wall contains hundreds of swirling, interacting lines from songs of Bob Dylan - a prophet finally recognised in his own backyard.

The following day we drove to the bigger and more attractive town of Duluth and with Bill Pagel's approval explored the "First Home of Bob Dylan 1941- 1947", located at 519 North 3rd Ave, East. That's another story for another day!

Our Dylan pilgrimage was a wonderful experience but I couldn't help wishing when I was there that Enniskillen's biggest fan, Galey Quinn, who did so much to popularise the music of Bob Dylan through his singing and through his Copper Kettle Folk Club in Sloopy's and in other venues, could have joined us.

He would have thought he'd died and gone to heaven!