Sunday, April 12, 2009

Highway 61

At the time Dylan was writing, Highway 61, sometimes called the "Blues Highway," goes from New Orleans through Memphis and from Iowa through Duluth (Dylan's birthplace) to the Canadian border; the section of Highway 61 from Wyoming, Minnesota to Duluth was de-designated in 1991. It was regularly featured in blues songs, notably Mississippi Fred McDowell's "61 Highway" and James "Son" Thomas's "Highway 61." Bessie Smith met her death in an automobile accident on that roadway; Robert Johnson was said to have sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads of Highway 61 and Highway 49 (itself the subject of a Howlin' Wolf song); Elvis Presley grew up in the housing projects built along it; and Martin Luther King, Jr. would later be murdered at a motel just off Highway 61.
"A lot of great basic American culture came right up that highway and up that river", Robert Shelton told a BBC interviewer. "And as a teenager Dylan had travelled that way on radio. ... Highway 61 became, I think, to him a symbol of freedom, a symbol of movement, a symbol of independence and a chance to get away from a life he didn't want in Hibbing."
While "Like a Rolling Stone" was completed in mid-June of 1965, the rest of the album was recorded with a different producer, Bob Johnston, in four days of sessions shortly after Dylan's legendary appearance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival; the sessions also produced Dylan's next single, "Positively 4th Street", not included on the LP.

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