How Bob Dylan Reinvented the Blues Highway for Contemporary America

An illustration of the history of blues music would look a little like a meteorological chart, with centers of stylistic innovation marked with concentric lines and the direction of influence with arrows. At its center would be the blues birthplace, the Mississippi Delta, a vast tract of fertile cotton-growing ground. There would be Highway 51, where bluesmen joined the Great Migration of African-Americans north, plugged in and created Chicago Blues, and Highway 61, which links the Mississippi Delta to Duluth, Minnesota: the birthplace of Bob Dylan.

As an adolescent, Dylan first heard the blues of Muddy Waters and B.B. King coming through the radio stations of the American South in the 1950s. “Highway 61… begins about where I came from,” he wrote in Chronicles Volume One, acknowledging the Blues Road’s influence on his music and its place in his mythology. “I always felt like I’d started on it, always had been on it, and could go anywhere from it.” On the title track of his album Highway 61 Revisited, he unforgettably reimagined the famous American road to say something about the state of the country in 1965.

For a nation whose course was so influenced by the Enlightenment ideal of individual liberty, roads, and rivers have long appealed to the American literary and musical imagination. In the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the Mississippi River (running for most of its course alongside Highway 61) represents Huckleberry’s journey towards greater self-knowledge, liberating himself from racial prejudice. In Woody Guthrie‘s “Blowing Down This Road”, the road represents the optimistic search for a better world away from the Dust Bowl. Another prototype hippie, Jack Kerouac, saw America’s highway as a way to accumulate enriching experiences and a symbol of individual freedom. But in the Mississippi Delta, with its history of cotton plantation slavery, Jim Crow laws and segregation, job insecurity, poverty, juke joints, and tumbledown shacks, the American road became something far bleaker.

So little is known about some of the Mississippi Delta bluesmen that myths have grown to fill the gaps, most notably in Robert Johnson‘s fabled transaction with the devil at the crossroads. In reality, many lived between barrelhouses, prisons, and plantations. Johnson himself lived a footloose life hopping freight trains from Texas to Canada in search of an audience to play to. Blind Willy McTell ran away from home to join the carnival in his adolescence. By 1940, he was found busking outside a fast-food joint. Son House spent time in jail for manslaughter before he was discovered by Paramount in 1930.

The picture of the Delta bluesman emerging from the music is of a lonesome drifter, down on his luck, usually because his woman has badly treated him; a man who wakes up to find all he has is gone, who appears perpetually on the verge of hanging his head and crying, who always has “has rambling on his mind”. For these rolling stones, the highway doesn’t promise a life-changing journey or freedom; it is the only means of escape from a life gone wrong.

From the 1920s, small sketched illustrations of blues history began to be filled out; new arrows were drawn to indicate its extending influence. Labels recognizing the commercial potential sent mobile recording units south to make early scratchy recordings of country bluesmen. In the 1930s, Alan and John Lomax drove through the Mississippi Delta with a huge recording machine in the back, placing Muddy Waters in the Library of Congress for the first time. Made on roadsides, in cheap hotel rooms, and penitentiaries, these recordings led to a boom in country blues; at his recording studio on Union Avenue, Sam Phillips recorded B.B. King and Howlin’ Wolf in the 1950s.

Eventually, the music would influence British bands like the Yardbirds, the Animals and the Rolling Stones, Cream, Fleetwood Mac, and Led Zeppelin, and in America, Canned Heat, Johnny Winter and Santana. After coming to prominence on the Greenwich Village coffeehouse circuit, Dylan covered no fewer than five blue songs on his debut album, including Curtis Jones’ “Highway 51”.

When Bob Dylan came to record Highway 61 Revisited in 1965, America was a place of enormous social and political turbulence. The draft for the Vietnam War had already fuelled anti-war sentiments, and students were burning their draft cards. Following the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, the threat of nuclear annihilation seemed very real. In the same year, Dylan arrived at Columbia Studios to record the album; Malcolm X had been assassinated, Martin Luther King had led the Selma March, and the Los Angeles district of Watts had turned into flames in rioting, which resulted in 34 deaths. America in the middle of the 1960s was a far less certain place than it had been ten years earlier when Rosa Parks sparked the civil rights movement by refusing to give up her bus seat.

The first hippie commune, Drop City, might have promised a social paradise, and LSD might have offered enlightenment, but how would the hippie utopia play out, and what happened after you had “broken through to the other side”? “Where do all these highways go now that we are free?” Leonard Cohen sang in 1967’s “Stories of the Street”. The Doors‘ “The End” suggested the counterculture’s liberation was just a dystopia whose roads led nowhere. Jim Morrison’s reverb-drenched voice implores the listener to ride the highway west that a bus is calling, but the driver has no idea where everyone is heading.

The black-and-white photographs of the Highway 61 Revisited recording sessions show Bob Dylan wearing RayBan sunglasses, his face decorated in cigarette smoke with a harmonica holder hanging from his neck. To record the album title track, Dylan removed his blues harp and replaced it with a toy whistle. When the instrument opens the song, it sounds like a police car siren starting up as it drives through America in turmoil. The song followed a blues song’s 12-bar structure, given a rock edge by Mike Bloomfield’s ringing slide guitar.

Dylan’s road is something of a first. This is not the bluesmen’s highway of escape or Huckleberry Finn’s journey towards self-knowledge; it is not Woody Guthrie’s search for a better world or Jack Kerouac’s exhilarating pursuit of individual freedom. It is a phantasmagorical place, a destination in itself. Whether it was the influence of the Beats, the Symbolist poets, or LSD, Dylan’s lyrics of 1965 had become more imagist, fragmented, and surreal. His Highway 61 is a dumping ground for shoe strings and broken telephones, where God asks Abraham to kill him a son, any son. It is, we might reasonably speculate, a metaphor for America in 1965: a senseless place of consumer waste and, amid the Vietnam War, a moral wasteland where God doesn’t wish to test Abraham’s faith, but only see a young man dead.

Most poignantly, Bob Dylan gives over a verse to two of the greatest Mississippi Delta bluesmen: ‘Georgia Sam’ aka Blind Willy McTell and “poor Howard”, a pseudonym for Lead Belly. They are involved in a desperate conversation. Blind Willy McTell’s nose is bleeding, he cannot get any money from welfare, and he needs to escape from unnamed difficulty. He asks Leadbelly where he should go and is told there is only one place: Highway 61. Nothing had changed, the lyrics suggest. Despite the decade-long struggle for better civil rights, the Blues Highway remained the only means of escape for African-Americans from a troubled world.

The final verse completes the picture of a contemporary America gone wrong. We learn that Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 is where a gambler is trying to start the next world war. Following Lead Belly’s advice, Blind Willy McTell will arrive there soon. Perhaps it is a reference to the draft for Vietnam, where African Americans fought for a country that had kept them impoverished and disenfranchised.

There is a poignant footnote to Dylan’s return to Highway 61. In the same year as he recorded his record, at the same Columbia Studios, aging Delta bluesman Son House, now in poor health and an alcoholic, he recorded the album Father of Folk Blues, bringing his music to a broader audience. Hearing the old field recordings and then that state-of-the-art recording is like watching an old sketch become a color photograph. Capturing the hard lives of African Americans in the Mississippi Delta and released amidst the flames and tear gas of the civil rights struggle, it is a quietly powerful protest album all of its own. Dylan undoubtedly would have agreed. He frequently acknowledged his debt to the Mississippi Delta bluesmen. In Chronicles Volume One, he described hearing Robert Johnson in Greenwich Village for the first time: “From the first note, the vibrations from the loudspeaker made my hair stand up”.

“I always felt like I’d started on it,” Bob Dylan had said of “Highway 61”. “I always had been on it and could go anywhere from it.” The blues would be woven through his work for decades to come. His masterpiece of 1997, Time Out of Mind, was a musical reimagining of the Mississippi Delta blues. In 2006’s Modern Times, Dylan covered the Delta blues standard “Rollin’ and Tumblin’”, previously recorded by Robert Johnson, John Lee Hooker, and Muddy Waters.

In 1956, President Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act, which began America’s new Interstate Highway System. But whilst the term interstate became a synonym for highway, the new nomenclature never took hold in American music. The highway was far too steeped in lore for that. Tom Cochrane titled his sophomore album Life Is a Highway in 1991, and Corey Kent’s Highways was released in 2021. But the road would never again sound as loaded with authentically weary feeling as it did in the Mississippi Delta blues, nor ever undergo a more spectacular reinvention as on Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited.