The 1927 song that gave birth to Bob Dylan’s ‘Highway 61 Revisited’
The mid-1960s essentially belonged to Bob Dylan. The folk artist captured the hearts of people around the world with his exciting use of rhythm and excellent penmanship.
A lot of the albums that he released during this period have gone down as classics; however, there is no escaping that one of his most successful albums, both in terms of influence and also sound, was Highway 61 Revisited. From the opening song to the close on this LP, the whole thing sounds undeniably stellar, and is also one of those records which holds a mirror up to the world and forces it to look.
There are different reasons as to why people think this album is so successful. When Neil Young was talking about it, he focused on the passion and soul which Bob Dylan is seemingly able to inject into his voice. He specifically mentioned the opening track, ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, saying that the way Dylan sings isn’t something that can be taught; it goes a lot deeper than that.
Young recalled pulling up next to someone in a car who was playing the iconic opener. “He’s blasting ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ and singing at the top of his lungs,” he said, “And I can hear Bob’s voice, this is Bob, this is the essence, you know? Of his feelings and everything when he was delivering that song. And I went, ‘Wow, that is so powerful’. You can’t keep that, that comes and goes, you can’t strive to be that, there’s no way you own it.”
Alternatively, Bruce Springsteen focuses a lot more on the album’s lyrics, saying that Dylan was able to hold a mirror up to the world around him and invite passers-by to take a look, so when he started writing music, Springsteen said that he wanted to make albums that were similar to Highway 61 Revisited, not necessarily in sound, but in how they revealed something brand new to those who listened.
For Bob Dylan, though, it was none of these things; when he was asked about his success in the ‘60s, he said he owed the whole thing to the fact that he was original. When he talks about the 1960s, he says musicians from that decade needed to bring something unique to the table if they wanted to get an audience’s attention, and that’s what he believes separated him from so many others.
“Because I had, and perhaps still do have, that originality that others don’t have,” he said, “Because I come from a time when you had to be original, and you had to have some kind of God-given talent just to begin with. You couldn’t manufacture that. Just about everybody and anybody who was around in the ’50s and ’60s had a degree of originality. That was the only way you could get in the door. That was just a necessary part of your makeup, which needed to be there.”
Of course, while he celebrates the fact that he was an original artist, he also doesn’t dismiss his influences. When talking about his record Highway 61 Revisited, he revels in the fact that it was the byproduct of innovation; however, he also credits one song with being the jumping-off point. What is that song?
“My thing was never heard or seen before, but it didn’t come out of a vacuum,” said Dylan, “There’s a direct correlation between something like Highway 61 Revisited and ‘Blue Yodel No 9’, by Jimmie Rodgers. It just doesn’t spring out of the earth without rhyme or reason.”
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