The 80 Greatest Dylan Covers of All Time

The hip audience had soured on Sonny & Cher’s brand of pop by the late Sixties, so in 1969 Cher went to Muscle Shoals in Alabama to introduce some funk and soul into her sound. She also selected some sharper material, including three Dylan songs that were, at the time, fresh and contemporary — all from his recently released Nashville Skyline. This is the most effective of the three, imbuing Dylan’s pledge of fidelity with sexy soul while retaining its country grounding. K.H.

The Australian singer-songwriter’s Dylan covers album Blonde on the Tracks turned out to be healing for us in the pandemic — and Swift herself. “Sad, listless and desperate, I began singing Bob Dylan songs as a way to have something to wake up for,” she said. Swift tackles Dylan classics ranging from “Simple Twist of Fate” to the recent “I Contain Multitudes,” but the opener “Queen Jane Approximately” best displays how she tells these songs from a female perspective. The instrumentation might be delicate, but she navigates through the lyrics with strength and compassion, almost as if she’s ending each line of “Won’t you come see me, Queen Jane” with a polite “please?”  A.M.

At the peak of his Eighties stardom, Springsteen signed on to the six-week Amnesty International Tour, accompanying the likes of Sting, Peter Gabriel, Youssou N’Dour, and Tracy Chapman to raise money and awareness for the human rights organization. You can hear him announce that on the introduction to his rendition of this Another Side of Bob Dylan number, from a four-song live EP recorded in Stockholm. As is Bruce’s wont, he expands the acoustic song to an anthem big enough to fill a sports stadium without sacrificing any of Dylan’s political yearning or poetic vision. K.H.

Van Morrison and his Belfast garage-R&B band Them turned “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” into an Irish soul benediction without losing any of the original’s acerbic bite; Morrison delivered Dylan’s lyrics like he was experiencing them in a Blakean reverie. “I did something totally different with that song,” Morrison told Rolling Stone. “My version — I owned it. I didn’t really connect with Dylan as a songwriter. I connected with what he was doing with the songs.” Three decades later, Beck and the Dust Brothers sampled Them’s version beautifully on the Odelay standout “Jack-Ass.” J.D. 

Johnny Cash said he brought a portable record player on tour with him in the Sixties so he could listen to The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan immediately before and after a show. Dylan admired the country star so much that, according to Johnny’s son John Carter Cash, when they finally met “Bob came in the hotel room, jumped up and down on the bed and said, ‘I met Johnny Cash!’ just like a little kid.” Here, with June’s harmonies softening up the chorus and a campfire harmonica a bit less wheezy than Dylan’s, Cash demonstrated how thin a line there was between country and folk — and scored a big hit single in the process. K.H. 

During the recording of Another Side of Bob Dylan, Dylan told writer Nat Hentoff that its songs would downplay protest in favor of personal: “There aren’t any finger-pointing songs … you know, pointing to all the things that are wrong. Me, I don’t want to write for people anymore – you know, be a spokesman.” That was especially true of “My Back Pages,” which implied he had grown weary of that “spokesman” role and wanted to move on in his work. With its melancholy harmonies and muted jangle, the Byrds’ rendition added a new level of wistfulness to the song – even if David Crosby, who was soon fired from the band, later complained to Rolling Stone, “It was a formula, it was a cop-out … It was, ‘Oh, let’s make “Tambourine Man” again.’ … It was a piece of shit, had all the commitment and life of a four-day-old mackerel.” No wonder the band sounds weary itself. D.B. 

Rod the Mod was a self-proclaimed “Man of Constant Sorrow” — but he was also a man of many Dylan tunes. In his early “Maggie May” folkie prime, he could capture a scruffy sadness in these songs that sounded like nobody else. He sang “Mama, You Been on My Mind” on his 1972 album Never a Dull Moment, with wistful accordion, mandolin, stand-up bass, Ron Wood’s pedal steel. It’s one of the loneliest things Rod ever recorded — yet one of the most beautiful. It sounds like a song he might have sung for Maggie May later, wishing he never let her slip away. R.S.

Within two years of releasing “Masters of War,” Dylan’s idols, the Staple Singers, were already covering the songwriter’s anti-war meditation as the United States escalated its involvement in Vietnam. The Staple Singers covered many of Dylan’s early material – “Blowin’ In the Wind,” “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” –but “Masters of War” is perhaps their finest Dylan-covering moment, with Pops Staples delivering a slow-building, tour-de-force vocal performance. J.B. 

Replace Scarlet Rivera’s violin from the original with distorted, bluesy guitar riffs and you get a signature White Stripes makeover. Jack White has covered various Dylan songs throughout his career — from “New Pony” with the Dead Weather to “Love Sick” with the Stripes — but he takes this Desire gypsy dirge to new heights, thanks to his tortured vocals and Meg’s dense drums. The cover appeared on their 1999 debut; five years later, White joined Dylan onstage in Detroit for “Ball and Biscuit” — kicking off a friendship. After venturing down to the valley below, check out the Stripes’ other Desire cover: “Isis.” A.M. 

Roky Erickson and his band of drugstore cowboys rolled out of Austin, Texas in the mid-Sixties, pioneers in the brave new world of psychedelic rock. They blew minds from coast to coast with their massively influential version of “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” the centerpiece of their 1967 classic Easter Everywhere. The Elevators took a totally new approach to the Dylan songbook — instead of reverent folksy imitation, focused on the lyrics, they just cranked up their amps and let the ghosts of electricity howl through their guitars. This doomy power-drone performance rewired how people heard and played Dylan’s music. It’s a fearsome sound — one of his most terrifying songs, in its most terrifying incarnation. R.S.

Dylan had a lot of motivations for recording the Basement Tapes with the Band in 1967 and early 1968, but the primary one was to write songs that other artists could cover. One of the first groups to get their hands on a Basement Tapes song was the Byrds, who used it as the leadoff track on their pioneering 1968 country rock LP Sweetheart of the Rodeo. But Roger McGuinn misheard the lyric “Pick up your money, pack up your tent” as “Pack up your money, pick up your tent.” And when Dylan re-recorded the song for Greatest Hits Volume 2, he sang “Pack up your money, put up your tent, McGuinn/You ain’t goin’ nowhere” as a good-natured dig at his longtime friend. A.G.

Dylan’s frequently covered protest folk-song changed Cooke’s outlook on music—the soul great’s only frustration was that he wished that a Black artist had written it. Cooke introduced “Blowin’ in the Wind” to his live set upon hearing it, and eventually it spurred him to write his towering civil rights classic “A Change Is Gonna Come.” For a taste of the unique spin Cooke put on the song, you can hear an easy-swinging version on Sam Cooke at the Copa. K.H.

To a man, the Beatles idolized Dylan, but it was the Quiet One who ended up getting to know him best. George and Bob formed one of the most iconic rock-star friendships, enduring from their Sixties days strumming together in Woodstock to the Traveling Wilburies. After Harrison’s death in 2001, Dylan did “Something” on his next tour as a tribute, sending it out “to my buddy George.” “If Not For You” was a highlight of George’s 1970 solo classic All Things Must Pass, just a few months after Dylan debuted it on New Morning. Even better, they also sang it as a stunning stripped-down duet, in rehearsals for the Concert for Bangla Desh. R.S.

GNR started performing Dylan’s classic of Seventies frontier fatalism in 1987, and even released a live version on the 12-inch of “Welcome to the Jungle.” But the five-and-a-half-minute arena rock epic we all know first emerged on the Days of Thunder soundtrack three years later, only to be finessed for inclusion on Lose Your Illusion II. Slash finds his way back to the blues as a horde of multi-tracked Axls wail, groan, and plead around one another. And no one is really sure what’s up with that free-associative answering machine message. K.H. 

When Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner asked Dylan to name his favorite cover of one of his songs in 1969, he didn’t go with obvious candidates by the likes of the Byrds, Jimi Hendrix or Joan Baez. He instead went with Elvis Presley’s relatively-obscure 1966 take on “Tomorrow Is a Long Time.” Dylan wrote the song in 1962 when his girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, was studying abroad in Italy and he yearned for her to come home. His version wouldn’t come out until 1971’s Greatest Hits Volume 2, but Odetta covered it in 1965 on her LP Odetta Sings Dylan, which captured the attention of the king. His bare-bones take radiates with the heartbreak that Dylan felt when he wrote the song. “That’s the one recording I treasure the most,” Dylan said. A.G.

Bob Dylan’s enrapt encomium upon hearing the Byrds’ 12-string dream-jangle vision of his folk sound — “Wow, man, you can even dance to that!” — remains true to this day. “Mr. Tambourine” took folk-rock to the top of the charts, played a huge role in jumpstarting the L.A. rock scene, and, in Roger McGuinn’s dappled vocals, proved that singing like Bob Dylan might have unlikely commercial potential. When the Byrds first heard a demo of “Mr. Tambourine Man,” they weren’t sure they could use it (David Crosby, for one, thought it was too long). As McGuinn later recalled, “I had an idea of how to save ‘Mr. Tambourine Man.’ I’d been playing around with some Bach licks on the 12-string and thought, ‘What if I put an intro like this . . . and we change it to a Beatle beat?! It worked! We got a Number One hit and were allowed to record the rest of the album!” Template for reverent rock reimaginings of Dylan had been set.  J.D.

Though Dylan has a rep in some circles as a cranky fellow, he maintained acquaintances of mutual respect with many of his peers. He first met Simone on the New York folk circuit in the early-Sixties, and she came to cover his material regularly throughout her career. This Highway 61 Revisited song is one of three Dylan numbers she included on her 1969 LP To Love Somebody. Her piano gives it a soft, shuffling rhythm and her vocal is gentle and exploratory—where Dylan rambled across the countryside he sang about, Simone floats. K.H.

From the moment it arrived on John Wesley Harding, the cryptic “All Along the Watchtower” has been analyzed and picked apart. Is its conversation between a “joker” and “thief” (in which “businessmen, they drink they wine” and “the hour is getting late”) metaphorical or apocalyptic? Political or personal? But one thing nearly everyone agreed upon is that Hendrix’s gale-force version of the song, from Electric Ladyland, may be one of the few times Dylan was bested on one of his own tunes. Dylan’s original was taut and acoustic. But from the metallic shard of its opening chords to its howling wah-wah solo, Hendrix’s interpretation truly does sound like the end of the world. Unlike so many others who covered Dylan songs before and since, Hendrix didn’t approach his version with awestruck reverence. Instead, he dismantled and attacked it, adding a sinister quality to its lyrics; even his shrieking notes he elicits from his guitar sound like screaming doomsday voices. As Dylan himself reportedly said to Hendrix, “I don’t know if anyone has done my songs better.” D.B.