Highway 61 Revisited - Dylan and Highway 61

Dylan and Highway 61

In his autobiography Chronicles, Dylan described the kinship he felt with the route that supplied the title of his sixth album: "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 in to the deep Delta country. It was the same road, full of the same contradictions, the same one-horse towns, the same spiritual ancestors ... It was my place in the universe, always felt like it was in my blood."

While Dylan was growing up in the 1950s, before the construction of the interstate highway system, Highway 61 stretched from Duluth, where he was born, through Minneapolis, where he went to college, down to the Mississippi delta. Along the way, the highway passed close to the birthplaces and homes of influential musicians such as Muddy Waters, Son House, Elvis Presley, and Charley Patton. The "empress of the blues", Bessie Smith, met her death in an automobile accident on Highway 61, and blues legend Robert Johnson was said to have sold his soul to the devil at the highway's crossroads with Highway 49. The highway had also been the subject of several blues recordings, notably Roosevelt Sykes' "Highway 61 Blues" (1932) and Mississippi Fred McDowell's "61 Highway" (1964).

Dylan told biographer Robert Shelton that he had to overcome considerable resistance at Columbia Records, to give his album the title, "I wanted to call that album Highway 61 Revisited. Nobody understood it. I had to go up the fucking ladder until finally the word came down and said: 'Let him call it what he wants to call it'." Dylan critic Michael Gray has argued that the very title of the album represents Dylan's insistence that his songs are rooted in the traditions of the blues: "Indeed the album title Highway 61 Revisited announces that we are in for a long revisit, since it is such a long, blues-travelled highway. Many bluesmen had been there before, all recording versions of a blues called "Highway 61".