Highway 61 Revisited (song)

Song infobox
Name = Highway 61 Revisited
Artist = Bob Dylan
Album = Highway 61 Revisited
Released = August 30, 1965
track_no = 7
Recorded = Columbia Studios, New York, June 15, 1965 - August 4, 1965
Genre = Rock, Folk rock
Length = 3:30
Writer = Bob Dylan
Label = Columbia
Producer = Bob Johnston
prev = "Queen Jane Approximately"
prev_no = 6
next = "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues"
next_no = 8"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.

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 1400 miles.

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. Abraham is also the name of Dylan's own father. Verse 2 describes a poor fellow, Sam, who is beyond the helping of the welfare department. He is told to go down Highway 61.

In the third verse, a "Mack the Finger" has this problem: "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 "second mother" and the "seventh son", both 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. This gap in the singing is filled with Al Kooper's imitation police siren sound effect.

The song was covered by PJ Harvey on her 1992 album, "Rid of Me".It was also covered by Johnny Winter on his second album, Second Winter. He made it a live standard of his, notably performed at the 30th Anniversary Celebration concert, Billy Joel and Johnny Cash (for the soundtrack to the 2003 film "The Hunted").

In 2004 the magazine "Rolling Stone" ranked the song as number 364 in their 500 Greatest Songs of All Time [cite web|title=Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time|url=http://www.rollingstone.com/news/coverstory/500songs/page/4|accessdate=2008-08-08] In 2007 Karen O contributed vocals to a version of the song for the "I'm Not There" movie soundtrack. [ [http://www.stereogum.com/archives/new-karen-o-highway-61-revisited-stereogum-premier.html stereogum: New Karen O - "Highway 61 Revisited" (Stereogum Premiere) ] ]

The song was also featured briefly in the Johnny Cash biopic Walk The Line.

External links

* [http://bobdylan.com/songs/highway61.html "Highway 61 Revisited" lyrics from bobdylan.com]
* [http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=33:5s881tknzzma Review by William Ruhlmann in All Music Guide]

References