In Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” that rooster crowing “at the break of dawn” was probably a New York City chicken, not a rural farmyard bird.

Indeed, Mr. Dylan may have styled himself as a vagabond country boy, but those familiar with his life know he first rose to prominence as a driven folk singer hanging out in the coffeehouses of Greenwich Village. His first apartment was at 161 West Fourth Street, and Suze Rotolo, his girlfriend at the time, suggested strongly in her 2008 memoir that the crowing came from roosters in a nearby store near the intersection of Thompson and Bleecker Streets that sold freshly slaughtered chickens to residents of what was then a largely Italian-American neighborhood.

Mr. Dylan, who on Thursday won the Nobel Prize for Literature, has had a complicated but extraordinarily fertile romance with New York. Although he grew up in Hibbing, Minn., and now lives in Malibu, Calif., New York was where he lived during what was arguably his most creative period in the 1960s and 1970s. It was the place where he sparked his fiery fling with Joan Baez; snared the contracts with Columbia Records that brought his civil rights and antiwar ballads to a national audience; and raised several of his six children. But it was also a place with more than a few obsessives who sometimes assaulted his privacy.