When Bob Dylan released his seminal Highway 61 Revisited, on Aug. 30, 1965, the term "folk-rock" was not even in the lexicon.
The adjective appeared for the first time just two months earlier when — writing for Billboard — journalist Eliot Tiegel used the word to describe the hybrid sound of bands like the Byrds and the Lovin' Spoonful. Dylan's sixth studio record represented this new genre more than any record that came before. It became a touchstone for generations of artists who, upon hearing the album, stepped through a door and onto a road less travelled.
"The first time I heard Bob Dylan, I was in the car with my mother listening to WMCA, and on came that snare shot that sounded like somebody had kicked open the door to your mind,” Bruce Springsteen said in reference to the opening percussion on, "Like a Rolling Stone," during his speech inducting his colleague into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
The Boss was not the only one this record (or Dylan in general) influenced. As Joni Mitchell told David Wild in 1991: "I wrote poetry, and I always wanted to make music. But I never put the two things together….. And when I heard ‘Positively Fourth Street,' I realized that this was a whole new ballgame; now you could make your songs literature. The potential for the song had never occurred to me." Three-time GRAMMY winner Lucinda Williams echoed Mitchell's sentiments in a 2021 radio interview: "I loved the combination of the electric with the folk. Nobody had done that at the time. A lot of new ground was being broken."
GRAMMY-nominated singer and musician Valerie June is a student of Dylan’s work, and reflects on Highway 61 Revisited with deep emotion. "There's one thing for sure that Bob Dylan knows how to do, and it is absolutely timeless: When he captures characters, you will never forget them," she tells GRAMMY.com.
Dylan agreed that Highway 61 Revisited was something special, saying at the time of release: "I'm not going to make a record as good as that one." Indeed Highway may bit his biggest artistic statement — and among his most successful. The record peaked at No. 3 on the U.S. Billboard chart and No. 4 on the U.K. charts; it's often included on greatest albums of all time lists.
Deep dives aplenty abound articulating the pop-cultural impact and musical significance that the timeless Highway 61 Revisited represents. In 2002, the album was inducted into the GRAMMY Hall of Fame. The 2024 biopic A Complete Unknown, which starred Timothée Chalamet as Dylan, touched on the making of Highway 61 Revisited. As a result, the album was discovered by a whole new generation.
On the occasion of the record's 60th anniversary, GRAMMY.com offers yet another take on this pivotal collection of songs that ushered in a new era of music-making.
The Historic Highway
Highway 61 was the singer/songwriter's second of two studio releases in 1965. This chart-topper followed Bringing it All Back Home — a record that hinted at Dylan's transformation from folk to rock. That release saw Dylan backed by a full band and featured sprinklings of the fusion of blues-based sounds and literate lyrics that would be on Highway 61 Revisited.
Highway 61 directly pays homage to the blues, focusing on the ways the genre and its artists influenced Dylan himself and also early rock 'n' roll pioneers. Better known as U.S. Route 61, and often dubbed the Blues Highway, this historic road begins in Dylan's home state of Minnesota and meanders parallel to the mighty Mississippi River for most of its 1,400 miles, ending in New Orleans; in between, the highway touches eight states. Musically, and thematically, these white lines are threads Dylan uses to stitch the album together.
As Dylan wrote in Chronicles, Vol. 1, his best-selling 2004 memoir: "Highway 61, the main thoroughfare of the country blues, begins about where I began. I always felt like I'd started on it, always had been on it and could go anywhere, even down into the deep Delta country. It was the same road, full of the same contradictions, the same one-horse towns, the same spiritual ancestors."
The blues is like a trusted friend Dylan trusts and returns to throughout his career. Sometimes it's loud and sweaty — infused with rock and roll — and sometimes it's jazzy or more acoustically-inclined and traditional, like his famed talking blues of the 12-bar variety that blend the best of country and folk. No matter what branch of the blues trail Dylan follows, it's a universal influence on his art.
Capturing The Spirit Of The Times
Highway 61 Revisited brought new fans into Dylan's camp. Concurrently, it also alienated his dyed-in-the-wool folk followers that began with the infamous and controversial headlining set earlier that summer at the Newport Folk Festival when he plugged in and rocked out with the members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and Al Kooper.
Each of Highway 61's compositions were born mostly in New York City and Dylan's rustic retreat in Woodstock, New York. Once finished, the songs were recorded in two separate sessions with two different producers at Columbia's Studio A in midtown Manhattan: two days in June and sojourn at the end of July. Both sessions featured an all-star backing band that included guitarist Mike Bloomfield, drummer Bobby Gregg and pianist Koooper. While only nine songs long, these lyrically-rich ruminations made a statement and collectively captured the zeitgeist of the mid-sixties.
Indeed the times were a changin' when Dylan wrote and recorded Highway 61 Revisited. In 1965, the U.S. deployed ground troops to Vietnam escalating this war that lasted another decade; Malcolm X was assassinated; and the Civil Rights Movement was marked by the Selma to Montgomery protest march. While much has changed since that watershed year, many sentiments Dylan espoused in the songs on Highway 61 Revisited resonate, and are relevant, still.
"Like a Rolling Stone," with its rhetorical questions asked in the chorus like —"how does it feel to be on your own," and be "a complete unknown," — speaks to the loss of innocence felt by many disenchanted youth during the turbulent 1960s.
Highway 61 Revisited influenced the folk-rock music released over the next decade. Musicicologist Greil Marcus captured the gravitas of this record in the July 23, 1970 edition of Rolling Stone in his record review of Self Portrait, Dylan's most recent release. The esteemed critic listed 25 points about the album, and No. 19 states, "because of what happened in the middle sixties, our fate is bound up with Dylan's whether he or we like it or not. Because Highway 61 Revisited changed the world, the albums that follow it must — but not in the same way."
Valerie June spent significant time in Clarksdale, Mississippi, where bluesman Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads of Highways 61 and 49 and generations toiled in cotton fields.
"I feel, and have felt for many years, the energy of that area," June says. "For Bob Dylan to name this record Highway 61 Revisited is very impactful in the flow of the land and the richness of those cotton fields where folks worked, where the blues men played and in the water. And once you get into the water, you're on a totally different level."
The Poetic, "Desolating" Bookend
Three chords and the truth. "Desolation Row," the song that bookends this masterclass in songwriting, is the only all acoustic number on the record. And, while musically it's propelled by only three chords, lyrically it's one of the richest offerings on Highway 61 Revisited.
Clocking in at more than 11 minutes, "Desolation Row" is an epic parable in song that requires repeated listens to understand all the lessons and observations that Dylan is making. Even then, there is so much mystery that remains as to the song's essence. The song showcases Dylan's penchant for writing lyrics that straddle between prose and poetry — Biblical references, name drops of everyone from American poets Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot to Shakespeare's Romeo, 18th-century Italian adventure Casanova, and Beat poet language all appear.
"These characters that he's singing about are characters that walk down the street, or go into a Walmart," June continues. "Their names might not be the Hunchback, Cain and Abel, Ophelia the Maid, or Einstein, but you'll see these same characters in the world."
Fifty-one years before the bard was the first musician honored with the Nobel Prize for Literature, "Desolation Row" makes the case for why he was bestowed that prestigious honor.
For all of the above songwriting greatness, and so much more, Dylan received yet another honor in 1991 when he was bestowed the Recording Academy Lifetime Achievement Award. Bob Dylan's road is not yet complete, but it's worth taking a pause and spending time to revisit one of his greatest records. Spontaneous, surprising and unexpected. An unplugged Dylan, unrelenting in his invectives and commentaries about the world in flux around him, makes Highway 61 Revisited a must listen and a record to ruminate on for just as long in 2025 as it did 60 years ago.