Today is the 100th anniversary of Dylan Thomas' birthday. If you read any of the Welsh poet's major works, you’ll hear the music of the sea, and the music of the city. And as with any good poet, there is music in his use of language.

No surprise, then, that musicians have been inspired by his poetry since his premature death in 1953. Classical composers, led by Stravinsky, have written pieces dedicated to him or built around his poems. But one of the touches of genius in Dylan Thomas’ writing was the way he combined the formal and literary concerns of classic poetry with a common man’s touch. His work wasn’t aimed at academics or classicists; his work was aimed at Everyman. So here are some of the artists from the wide world of popular music who have drawn inspiration from Dylan Thomas.

Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan has gone back and forth on just how much he was inspired by Dylan Thomas, especially in terms of taking his pen name. But in the song “When The Ship Comes In” you can hear an echo of Dylan Thomas:

For the chains of the sea

Will have busted in the night

And will be buried at the bottom of the ocean.

Dylan Thomas’s Fern Hill ends like this:

Time held me green and dying

Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

Robin Williamson

The Scottish singer and multi-instrumentalist has had a long solo career since his groundbreaking group The Incredible String Band. And one of his finest solo efforts is the album The Seed-At-Zero -- a mix of Celtic-flavored instrumentals and settings of Dylan Thomas’ poetry. Williamson’s performance of the brooding, beautiful “Poem On His Birthday” taps into a deep well of bardic recitation, as the voice hovers in a middle ground between speech and song. 

Pete M. Wyer

This English composer and former rock guitarist put this piece together for this year’s Make Music New York festivities, which happen each year on the summer solstice and, at their best, involve live music-making in unexpected places. Wyer set Dylan Thomas’ And Death Shall Have No Dominion for a walking chorus, synchronized via headphones, which started in ones and twos and only fully came together after a 40-minute trek to Rockefeller Park, and The Asphalt Orchestra, the New York-based avant-garde marching band.

King Crimson

The title of King Crimson's 1974 album, Starless And Bible Black, comes from Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood. The title track is purely instrumental, but confusingly, there is a song called “Starless,” from the subsequent album, Red, that is considered among the band’s very best and actually contains the phrase “starless and bible black.” Side note: There is also a psych-folk band called Starless And Bible Black.

John Cale

“A Child’s Christmas In Wales," from John Cale's classic 1973 album Paris 1919, takes its inspiration from the famed prose work of the same name by Dylan Thomas, but the words here are his own. Cale, who prior to co-founding The Velvet Underground with Lou Reed had been classically trained in the U.K., would later produce a lovely, orchestral setting of Dylan Thomas’ poetry, in the album Words For The Dying. Check out especially his setting of “Do not go gentle into that good night.”