The 80 Greatest Dylan Covers of All Time

For the Watchmen soundtrack, the glam-emo band rip through a slightly truncated rendition of the sprawling Highway 61 Revisited closer in just under three minutes, transforming an apocalyptic string of imagery into a shout-along anthem, with a solo that quotes “The Star-Spangled Banner” like the Sixties are collapsing into a singularity before your ears. If you ever thought you’d figured out what Bob meant, you sure don’t anymore. In a statement to coincide with the release, My Chem frontman Gerard way thanked Dylan, “for letting us cover the song and for not getting really mad at us for hacking out some of the best lyrics ever written.”  K.H.

The noisy bedlam of Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited” and its quixotic references to the road that stretches between his hometown of Duluth, Minnesota to New Orleans fit in perfectly amid the guitar chaos of PJ Harvey’s breakthrough album, 1993’s Rid of Me. But rather than record a reverent cover of one of Dylan’s most irreverent songs (mercifully, she omitted the original’s irritating slide whistle), Harvey made the tune her own with quiet, almost whispered sections, which sound a bit like a Thirties radio broadcast before they swell into a big, extraverted wave of noise. She adds falsetto harmonies to the Louie the King verse and lets her guitar rumble while wailing the word “highway” in a much more menacing way than even Dylan could have mustered. K.G.

The grand old men of bluegrass, Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, picked up a new audience with their soundtrack for the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde. But they didn’t do this song because they wanted to sound modern — they did it because the song already felt like elemental American roots music. They did a few Dylan tunes on their 1969 album Changin’ Times, but “Don’t Think Twice” is the real killer. They rev it up with Scruggs picking his banjo and Flatt on mandolin, singing with the fatalistic humor of elders who already know how it feels to spend a lifetime on that road. R.S.

Nancy Sinatra became a Sixties pop goddess with her 1966 Number One debut hit, “These Boots Are Made For Walkin’.” She loved nothing more than cutting tough guys down to size, and she stomps her leather boots all over “It Ain’t Me, Babe.” She turns the song into her own feminist kiss-off, brushing off a possessive guy and rejecting all the claims of patriarchy — she shows off what she liked to call “my Nasty Jones persona.” You can tell why Lana Del Rey is so obsessed with Nancy Sinatra — what she does to this song is an act of cultural ultraviolence. R.S.

Dylan demoed this lilting, generous ballad for both Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde but shelved it. “Maybe it didn’t sound like a record to me,” he later said. It’s sounded just fine to many others, from Judy Collins to Nico to Dutch indie-rockers Bettie Severt. English folk-rock greats Fairport Convention’s 1969 version has a pastorale grandeur all its own, lifted by the graceful equanimity in Sandy Denny’s astonishingly pretty vocal. You can also hear Fairport’s Richard Thompson do a heartbreaking version of the song with his wife Linda on the tour for their classic 1982 breakup album Shoot Out the Lights. J.D.

Nick Cave was busy being born in the Eighties, crawling from the wreckage of his band the Birthday Party and mutating into a poetic goth-punk blues shaman, dressed in black with a heart to match. He did “Wanted Man” on his 1985 album The Firstborn Is Dead, raving with over-the-top outlaw braggadocio, adding a road map’s worth of new lyrics. Dylan wrote it for Johnny Cash, who used it to open his 1969 live album at San Quentin Prison. How did Cash feel about Cave’s version? Fifteen years later, he repaid the compliment by doing Cave’s electric-chair confessional “The Mercy Seat.” R.S. 

The Roxy Music frontman’s first solo album was a collection of covers that subversively mixed serious Sixties rock with Brill Building bubblegum and pre-rock standards, as if “Sympathy for the Devil” and “It’s My Party” were all part of the same continuum. He opened the LP throwing down the gauntlet with a gloriously frivolous remake of “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” hotwriting Dylan’s protest folk masterpiece in the vein of Roxy’s art-damaged glam-rock, complete with call and response girl-group backing vocals and silly sound effects — as if Ferry was playing the hits at some sort of apocalyptic sock hop. J.D. 

From its shifting narrative to its numerous metaphors, this ballad, which Dylan himself has never released, could be the subject of an entire college poetry-of-rock course. Who is the burdened woman at the beginning, who is “the father of your kid,” and what’s the connection between them and the disillusioned-romantic narrator, who realizes that “the holy kiss that’s supposed to last eternity/Blow up in smoke, it’s destiny”? Is he implying that “love” is a curse or just an ordinary term? But the straight-backed sturdiness of the melody is a perfect match for Baez, who was first heard singing a snippet of the tune in Don’t Look Back. The sitar that winds its way through her studio version is a tad cheesy. But when she lets her soprano fly for just one note in each chorus,  she proves to be its ideal interpreter — perhaps because she read her and Dylan’s own relationship into it? Another mystery. D.B. 

A shaky concept that worked out surprisingly well, the Brothers and Sisters was a group assembled by producer Lou Adler for a one-off album of churches up Dylan covers, Dylan’s Gospel. The star of the LP is gospel-soul queen Merry Clayton, who would deliver her landmark backing vocals on the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” just a few months later. She wallops her version of “All Along the Watchtower,” and struts her way through the the Mighty Quinn,” a playfully fun-loving moment on a record that was often a little heavy-handed. Her take even surpasses Manfred Mann’s hit 1968 version. J.D. 

Not many artists get to release a Dylan classic before the man himself, but Sheryl Crow gets to count herself among that select group. In fact, Dylan had already recorded “Mississippi” for Time Out of Mind in 1997, but he was unhappy with the production, so he offered it to Crow, who cut a footloose version of it would appear on The Globe Sessions (and influence the Dixie Chicks, who’d regularly perform a version patterned on hers). By the time Dylan released her version on “Love and Theft,” “Mississippi” was practically an oldie. K.H.

Dylan was self-consciously writing a modern standard with “To Make You Feel My Love,” his romantic 1997 piano ballad. Billy Joel rushed to cover it before Dylan’s version even came out, on Time Out of Mind. Since then, it’s become one of his most-covered tunes, cut by Neil Diamond, Garth Brooks, Engelbert Humperdinck, even Boy George. But Adele made it her own, with the tenderly vulnerable version on her 2008 debut album, 19. The lyrics “summed up exactly what I was trying to say in my songs,” she said at the time. “It’s weird that my favorite song on my album was a cover, but I couldn’t not put it on there.” R.S.

This sultry bedroom number was slightly out of character for Dylan, but it was custom-made for Ronald Isley, who would soon be acknowledged as a maestro of getting a ladies to lay. The Isleys tried on a bunch of different styles throughout the Seventies, and for their 1971 album, Givin’ It Back, they covered a series of white folk-rockers, discovering that sweet spot where hippie free love meets R&B seduction. And they stretch it out more than ten minutes, because these guys mean business. K.H.

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.