In modern, popular culture - Joanna Newsom. Listened to Have One On Me and damn, she somehow keeps brilliant melodies and orchestrations going for the entire two hours. Bob Dylan would be my second choice, purely because he's been going since he was a kid and the breadth of amazing songs probably hasn't been matched.
There's probably someone better out there though who does classical or something, and is theoretically a genius.
From the poll I would certainly lean towards Joanna Newsom, in addition to her melodic abilities, she has quite a bit of range, writing both very simple songs and some quite complex.
Its kind of tempting to just list all of my favourite musicians who write pieces of music which could vaguely be defined as "songs"...but I'll interpret songwriter as people who write short pieces of music focused on melody...and out of that I'd point towards Low (Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker), who have managed to write a large number of beautiful songs with decent variety in writing style (simple basic chords and melodies, longer chromatically moving things, songs built around dissonant harmony, smart uses of vocal harmonies and the odd counter-melody) despite almost always remaining within their self imposed constraints of slow and minimal songwriting.
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