重访61号公路 (1965)

Highway 61 Revisited is the sixth studio album by the American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released on August 30, 1965, by Columbia Records. Dylan continued the musical approach of his previous album Bringing It All Back Home (1965), using rock musicians as his backing band on every track of the album in a further departure from his initial acoustic folk sound, except for the closing track, the 11-minute ballad "Desolation Row". Critics have focused on Dylan's innovative use of driving, blues-based music and subtle poetry to create songs that captured the political and cultural climate of contemporary America. Author Michael Gray argued that, in an important sense, the 1960s "started" with this album.

Led off by "Like a Rolling Stone", a hit single released ahead of the album, Highway 61 Revisited includes songs that Dylan has continued to perform live over his long career, including "Ballad of a Thin Man" and the title track. He named the album after the major American highway that connected his birthplace of Duluth, Minnesota, to southern cities famed for their musical heritage, including St. Louis, Memphis, New Orleans, and the Delta blues area of Mississippi.

Highway 61 Revisited peaked at No. 3 on the US Billboard Top LPs chart and No. 4 on the UK Albums Chart. Positively received on release, the album has since been described as one of Dylan's best works and among the greatest albums of all time. It ranked No. 4 on Rolling Stone's "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time" list in 2003 and No. 18 in the 2020 revision. It was voted No. 26 in the third edition of Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums (2000) and was featured in Robert Dimery's 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die (2010). "Like a Rolling Stone" was a top-10 hit in several countries, and was listed at No. 4 on Rolling Stone's "The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time" list in 2021, after being placed at No. 1 in the 2004 and 2010 lists. Two other songs, "Desolation Row" and the title track, were ranked No. 187 and No. 373 on the 2010 list.

Dylan and Highway 61

In his memoir Chronicles: Volume One, 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."

When he was growing up in the 1950s, U.S. Highway 61 stretched from the Canada–United States border in far northeast Minnesota (redesignated in 1991 as MN-61), through Duluth, where Dylan was born, along the Mississippi River down to New Orleans. Along the way, the route passed near 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, died after sustaining serious injuries in an automobile accident on Highway 61. Critic Mark Polizzotti points out that blues legend Robert Johnson is alleged to have sold his soul to the devil at the highway's crossroads with Route 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).