| "Highway 61 Revisited" | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Song by Bob Dylan from the album Highway 61 Revisited | ||||
| Released | August 30, 1965 | |||
| Recorded | Columbia Studios, New York, August 2, 1965 | |||
| Genre | Folk rock, garage rock[1] | |||
| Length | 3:30 | |||
| Label | Columbia | |||
| Writer | Bob Dylan | |||
| Producer | Bob Johnston | |||
| Highway 61 Revisited track listing | ||||
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"Highway 61 Revisited" is the title track of Bob Dylan's 1965 album Highway 61 Revisited. It was also released as the B-side to the single "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?" later the same year. In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine ranked the song as number 364 in their 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.[2]
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Highway 61 runs from Duluth, Minnesota, where Bob Dylan grew up in the 1940s and 1950s down to New Orleans, Louisiana. It was a major transit route out of the Deep South particularly for African Americans traveling north to Chicago, St Louis and Memphis, following the Mississippi River valley for most of its 1,400 miles (2,300 km).
The song has five stanzas. In each stanza, someone describes an unusual problem that is ultimately resolved on Highway 61. In Verse 1, God tells Abraham to "kill me a son". God wants the killing done on Highway 61. This stanza references Genesis 22, in which God commands Abraham to kill one of his two sons, Isaac. Abram, the original name of the biblical Abraham, is the name of Dylan's own father. Verse 2 describes a poor fellow, Georgia Sam, who is beyond the helping of the welfare department. He is told to go down Highway 61. Georgia Sam may be a reference to Piedmont blues musician Blind Willie McTell, who occasionally went by Georgia Sam when recording.
In the third verse, a "Mack the Finger" has this problem of getting rid of particular absurd things: "I got forty red white and blue shoe strings / And a thousand telephones that don't ring". "Louie the King" solves the problem with Highway 61. Verse 4 is about the "fifth daughter" who on the "twelfth night" told the "first father" that her complexion is too pale. Agreeing, the father seeks to tell the "second mother", but she is with the "seventh son", on Highway 61.
The fifth and last verse is the story of a bored gambler, trying "to create the next world war". His promoter tells him to "put some bleachers out in the sun / And have it on Highway 61". There is an evident political undertone in this absurd tale.
There is a pause in each verse while Dylan waits for some event in the story to finish; in the third verse, for example, the pause occurs while Louie the King attempts to resolve the shoestring-and-telephones problem. Between each verse Dylan is heard blowing an imitation police whistle, known as a "Siren Whistle" [1], brought in by Sam Lay who was drummer on the Highway 61 sessions as noted by Tony Glover in the liner notes to Live 1966.
In 1969, Johnny Winter covered "Highway 61 Revisited" on his second Columbia release, Second Winter. Winter's rendition is regarded as "a career-defining track," and the song continues as a live standard of his.[3] A 10-minute version of the song appears on his 1972 live album, Captured Alive!, and he also performed it live in 1992 for the The 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration album, which saluted Dylan's three decades as a recording artist.[4][5]
Ex-Dr Feelgood guitarist Wilko Johnson included "Highway 61 Revisited" in his concert sets in the late 1970s and released a live recording of the song on an EP given away with his 1978 album Solid Senders. The recording now forms part of the album's CD release.[6] In 1987, Dr Feelgood also covered the song for their album Classic, a track Allmusic describes as "utterly inspired."[7]
The song has also been recorded by P.J. Harvey on her 1993 album Rid of Me. Paste magazine selected this version as the 15th best cover of a Dylan song of all time, while also paying homage to "Johnny Winter's classic electric-blues version."[8]
"Highway 61 Revisited" has even been covered by Billy Joel. The song highlights a selection of covers that appear on his 2005 box set My Lives.[9]
Terry Reid also covered Highway 61 Revisited
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