The greatest covers of Bob Dylan, according to Bob Dylan
Over the years, Bob Dylan has been covered more times than the cricket wicket at The Oval.
The singer has delivered so many timeless anthems with such easy melodies that most of the world’s musicians have at least attempted to reproduce a Dylan track. How could you not? His works have permeated society, ensuring that he has fans ranging from NWA to Judas Priest and every other genre in between. Bob Dylan isn’t a folk musician. He’s just a musician in general.
When he arrived from nowhere in 1962, he quickly changed the perception of what a pop star could be. During his near-six-decade career, the freewheelin’ troubadour has given countless musicians cultural credence, profound poetry, political relevance, and songwriting strength, encouraging them to pursue a purer artistic pathway. This has left Dylan as one of the few everlasting popular music figures and made him an undoubted legend, no matter who you ask.
In fact, if you ask a modern great like Jack White, he’ll tell you that Dylan even outsmartmed the cynics. “When Dylan said the answer was blowing in the wind he didn’t tell you what the answer was,” White told the Guardian. “I think a lot of people in the protest days were torn: you want to make a statement but the speaker can be chewed up and spat out. The search for hypocrisy becomes intense once somebody takes the podium and condemns somebody else.”
Lyrically, one of the most impressive artists of all time, Dylan is also more than capable of producing captivating melodies and some notably poignant performances, which shook the audience and sent reverberations across the music world. His influence has never been more clear than when you take a look through the multitude of covers that have come his way… and continue to do so.
It is a list full of the most excellent musicians of modern times, all paying tribute to the legend with their own cover of one of his triumphant songs. After all, he is the most covered solo artist of all time.
The collection of groups is jam-packed with inspirational artists. From David Bowie and all his Starman genius to Jimi Hendrix’s mercurial power—all of them owe a debt of gratitude to Bob Dylan and his almighty prowess with the pen. Unlike any other artist, Dylan carved out a career based on artistic authenticity and morale-driven merit rather than any commercial wave or record executive order. However, many have followed his lead. Covering him is almost an expression of that: I am on the Bob Dylan path.
But which cover of his work is Dylan’s favourite? With more than 1500 officially released covers to choose from, he’s in no short supply. He was honoured by Odetta Sings Dylan when one of his own inspirations reinvented his work, and he has expressed a fondness for a slew of others. However, it is clear that a trio stand out above all others.
Bob Dylan’s favourite Bob Dylan covers:
‘Positively 4th Street’ – Johnny Rivers
In his memoir, Chronicles One, the folk forefather takes a moment of pause to pour some praise on one particular cover of his work. It isn’t a big star back-pat, a drop of the hat to a celebrity friend or the common artistic trait of finding a way to celebrate one of your lesser-known/loved outings either. What’s more, you’d have to be deaf not to concur with Dylan regarding the brilliance that his cover of choice concocts.
It is, in fact, Johnny Rivers and his version of ‘Positively 4th Street’ that receives Dylan’s seal of approval. “Of all the versions of my recorded songs,” Dylan begins. “The Johnny Rivers one was my favourite. It was obvious that we were from the same side of town, had been read the same citations, came from the same musical family and were cut from the same cloth.”
He then goes on to say that he actually liked his version better, writing: “Most of the cover versions of my songs seemed to take them out into left field somewhere, but Rivers’s version had the mandate down – the attitude, the melodic sense to complete and surpass even the feeling that I had put into it.” And boy did he put some feeling into it!
‘All Along The Watchtower’ – Jimi Hendrix
The poignant depth that Dylan added to the music of the counterculture movement was profound. You can see the ripples reverberating in real-time in the more sagacious work following his emergence. Jimi Hendrix made this point perfectly clear when discussing his masterful cover of Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding biblical classic ‘All Along the Watchtower’, stating: “All those people who don’t like Bob Dylan’s songs should read his lyrics. They are filled with the joys and sadness of life.”
“I am as Dylan, none of us can sing normally. Sometimes, I play Dylan’s songs and they are so much like me that it seems to me that I wrote them. I have the feeling that ‘Watchtower’ is a song I could have come up with, but I’m sure I would never have finished it,” the guitarist continued.
The result is a masterpiece that Bob Dylan even preferred to his own, and he amended the structure of his initial track for later live performances to be more like Hendrix’s, explaining: “I liked Jimi Hendrix’s record of this and ever since he died I’ve been doing it that way,” adding: “Strange how when I sing it, I always feel it’s a tribute to him in some kind of way.”
‘Tomorrow is a Long Time’ – Elvis Presley
Upon the ten-year anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death in 1987, Bob Dylan told US magazine: “When I first heard Elvis’ voice, I just knew that I wasn’t going to work for anybody, and nobody was going to be my boss. He is the deity supreme of rock ‘n’ roll religion as it exists in today’s form. Hearing him for the first time was like busting out of jail,” he said, before concluding: “I think for a long time that freedom to me was Elvis singing ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky’. I thank God for Elvis.”
This notion of your childhood hero suddenly channelling your whims is what Bob Dylan had in mind when Rolling Stone asked him if there were any particular artists that he liked to see take on his songs. “Yeah, Elvis Presley,” Dylan replied. “I liked Elvis Presley. Elvis Presley recorded a song of mine. That’s the one recording I treasure the most…it was called ‘Tomorrow Is A Long Time’. I wrote it but never recorded it.”
As Ernst Jørgensen explained regarding the recording in the book Elvis Presley: A Life In Music, Elvis had been expanding his musical interests in the late 1960s, and one album that he took to was Odetta’s covers album of Bob Dylan’s work, Odetta Sing Dylan. One song, in particular, stood out for Dylan, ‘Tomorrow Is A Long Time’, which was a Dylan original that had been covered many times over, but never released on record by Dylan himself. Once Elvis offered his stamp, the original vagabond never bothered to officially release his version.
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