In the mid-1960s, Bob Dylan described his music as “that thin, wild, mercury sound”, a description that anticipates follow-up questions and cuts them off at the pass. They would be the wrong questions anyway. One might suppose that this is the mercury part of the equation, applicable to both the music and to the man who wrote it. One of the benefits of that quality in Bob Dylan’s work is that it opens up the possibilities of what forms those songs can take. That is certainly true to Dylan’s own approach, known as he is to reinvent his material on stage, sometimes from night to night.
What this mercurial quality also does is to open up the possibilities for other musicians to do the very same, which many have done over the decades and across a spectrum of styles and approaches. There are many excellent examples. For our purposes, here are 20 great covers of Bob Dylan songs that capture the spirit of the originals in their own distinctive styles, bring out new facets never heard before, or simply provide delightful surprises that allow us to enjoy them as they are without the need to compare them to anything outside of their own intrinsic greatness.
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All Along the Watchtower by The Jimi Hendrix Experience
Jimi Hendrix’s famous and expansive version of Dylan’s song has become the gold standard for Bob Dylan covers. Hendrix and the Experience took the sepia-toned framework of 1968’s John Wesley Harding original and made it into a widescreen, full-colour anthem on a Biblical scale for a tumultuous year of political assassinations, escalating war, and riots in the streets.
The off-the-beat rhythm of the intro seems to twist and shift as weeping lead and rhythm guitar ramps up into whirlwinds of sound. Hendrix’s own impassioned vocal evokes images of landscapes on fire in the darkness, and of a world looking on from its parapets to an uncertain future. That Biblical tone is certainly applicable.
Listen: All Along The Watchtower
It Ain’t Me Babe by First Aid Kit
A lot of the music that inspired Bob Dylan to become a songwriter was in the folk tradition, kept alive by families singing together in the decades and centuries before he was born. Swedish duo First Aid Kit performed this in 2016 in their home country on the event of Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize for Literature win.
Here, their voices intertwine in an almost supernatural fashion, making “It Ain’t Me Babe” sound far older than it is. In fact, it sounds like one of those very songs out of the folk traditions of long ago, crossing the seas of time and cultures, and nations to become a human story in which everyone can find commonality.
Listen: It Ain’t Me Babe
This Wheel’s on Fire by Siouxsie & the Banshees
Siouxie & the Banshees’ interpreted this Dylan song from the more familiar-to-them 1969 Julie Driscoll and Brian Augur Trinity cover. Siouxie & the Banshees recorded this take for their 1987 album Through the Looking Glass, being spacious and shadowy and with a slight Middle-Eastern feel to accompany Siouxie’s distinctive lead vocal.
She and the band add a sense of latent menace here that just isn’t present in any other version of this tune. This version shows how translatable the material is again and again across diverse musical milieus and eras without jarring results or loss of impact.
Listen: This Wheel’s On Fire
Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again by Cat Power
Cat Power’s aka Chan Marshall’s version of this sprawling and absurdist Dylan tune that appears on 1966’s Blonde on Blonde is a joyous soul revue with horn shots and choruses, Memphis guitar licks, winding bass, moaning organ, and snappy drumming. But the central treasure on this is still Marshall’s trademark smoky lead vocal.
Her singing adds a splash of blue to the material to contrast the happy groove the band lays down behind her. Within that, she delights in every syllable of Dylan’s evocative and sometimes surreal imagery. We are there with her every step of the way, mostly due to Marshall’s singular talent as a vocalist and her palpable love for the material.
Listen: Stuck Inside of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again
Rainy Day Women 12 & 35 by Merry Clayton
By the time Merry Clayton recorded this for her 1975 Keep Your Eye on the Sparrow album, she’d worked with a range of artists across the pop music spectrum as a top-of-her-tree interpretive singer. Here, she turns the inebriated stomp and revelry of Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde original into a bouncy showtune-meets-gospel number with glossy horns, bright piano, and just a hint of churchy organ.
Clayton’s vocal phrasing and delivery add significant dimension to this song about being criticized, pigeonholed and dismissed. It departs from the lighthearted Falstaffian ramble of the original with more sobering implications about how much rain a woman will endure before she’s had enough.
Listen: Rainy Day Women # 12 & 35
Gotta Serve Somebody by Mavis Staples
Mavis and “Bobby” as she calls him became friends in the early 1960s, recording many Dylan songs with her family band The Staple Singers since then. Mavis’ 1999 solo take on “Gotta Serve Somebody” is a superlative inclusion on the Dylan tribute album Tangled Up in Blues.
The original song from 1979’s Slow Train Coming found Dylan sermonizing about pride and what goeth before it. Mavis’ formidable powers as a singer of authoritative and purposeful intent in gospel traditions is on full display here giving this version supreme gravitas. Her delivery is helped along by a truly funky arrangement with croaking clavinet, call and response backing vocals, and a sweaty groove to inspire body and spirit alike.
Listen: Gotta Serve Somebody
Ring Them Bells by Sufjan Stevens
Equally of a mind to put across spiritual ideas, Sufjan Stevens takes the beautifully desolate original version found on 1989’s Oh Mercy, and makes it into a kind of indie-folk church pageant. Stevens takes the listener on a journey to the end of the world with sparkling piano, angelic harmony vocals, pedal steel, country blues inflected electric guitar, and wonderfully anthemic brass.
This is the gentlest and most joyful end of days song that was ever laid down, full of energetic tempo changes, progressive instrumental passages, and a smorgasbord of musical textures. Its sense of hopefulness and childlike wonder conveys the feeling of waking up to a new day instead of mourning the end of one. That’s quite a trick when singing about judgement day.
Listen: Ring Them Bells
Just Like a Woman by Richie Havens
Bob Dylan was as compelling as an artist to his Sixties peers as much as he’d become to his heirs in the decades to come. Richie Havens makes “Just Like a Woman” featured on his 1966 debut record Mixed Bag, into a rendition that’s utterly original. This is primarily down to Havens’ distinctive and stylistically label-free voice, characterized by a resonant baritone spectrum of varied textures.
His own guitar accompaniment sounds spare and harmonically complex at the same time, likely down to his unique open-E tuning, thumb chording style. Otherwise, Havens makes this cut sound autobiographical rather than just an interpretation, infused with rainy day sweetness and devotion, and with an ocean of ennui beneath.
Listen: Just Like A Woman
Most of the Time by Sophie Zelmani
Sophie Zelmani’s half-spoken phrasing on her 2003 version of “Most of the Time” is stylistically similar to the original found on Oh Mercy, yet diverges from it at the same time. This is a powerful interpretation of a song about loss and the emotional journeys on which that experience takes us.
On Dylan’s version, his voice reveals sorrow that’s barely contained. In this case, the emotional tone is one of numbness and detachment with Zelmani’s narrator decidedly resigned instead of sorrowful, the sound of someone who is all cried out. This version reminds listeners that even with such universal themes, loss can provoke a range of emotions beyond just sadness, with each being as valuable and valid as the next.
Listen: Most of the Time
Mr. Tambourine Man by Gregory Isaacs
Gregory Isaacs’ take on this well-known Dylan composition is a highlight on the 2004 Dylan tribute record, Is it Rolling, Bob?, a compilation of reggae artists covering Dylan’s catalogue. This cover version of Dylan’s 1965 original is characterized by a contented pulse that complements its spiritually-inclined lyrics. Isaacs’ singular voice beams with affability on this version, which is a big part of its greatness.
The singer communicates as much of his personality as Dylan’s immense and emotionally connected sense of melody and evocative lyrics. Isaacs turns this song into an anthem of contentment in a rendition that is supremely at peace in spirit, and coming off as a prayer of devotion even as it suggests the grandness of creation and one’s small but contented place in it.
Listen: Mr. Tambourine Man
Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright by Hailey Tuck
This song, originally from 1963’s The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan is about leaving something unrewarding behind even when one doesn’t have a clear plan for what comes next. That’s certainly musical territory that jazz vocalist Hailey Tuck is qualified to sing with conviction. She grew up in Texas, later to escape a Baptist boarding school at 18 in favour of an artistic life in Paris. Instead of dustbowl Woody Guthrie, she chose 1920s Josephine Baker and Louise Brooks as role models.
Her take on “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” from her self-titled 2014 EP effortlessly frames her cool and detached delivery in a jazz age style that’s more Cole Porter than Bob Dylan. By repositioning this old song into a style that’s even older while also retaining its ironic humour, Tuck transforms it into something entirely new.
Listen: Don’t Think Twice , It’s Alright
Tangled Up in Blue by Indigo Girls
In tribute to one of the duo’s key influences as writers of densely poetic songs, Indigo Girls’ live 1992 take from their 1200 Curfews album makes Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks cinematic epic into a barnburner of a live jam. The duo and their band put their full weight behind this song about drifters making connections and discarding them too easily.
The arrangement comes complete with Dylan emerita Scarlet Rivera on violin who lays down a brace of scorching solos to enhance principals Amy Ray and Emily Saliers traded verses. The slow blues shuffle during the I lived with them on Montague Street verse is an undeniable highlight with melodic bass and driving drums. When it comes to full-scaled ensemble playing, this one is the best example on the list.
Listen: Tangled Up In Blue
Things Have Changed by Bettye LaVette
Bettye LaVette is an advanced-level interpretive singer, taking any song and making it her own. She approaches this Oscar-winning Dylan song from the movie Wonder Boys with authority as she sings of troubled times and coming judgement. This number is a glove-like fit for her uniquely textured voice that holds at least as much world-weariness and hard-won wisdom as Dylan’s own, and perhaps more.
This rendition is the title track on her Steve Jordan-produced 2018 album of Dylan covers that cherry picks from his long career. “Things Have Changed” establishes her singular musical pedigree right out of the gate as she makes this song into one about clear intentions, paying dues, and being vulnerable while also taking no shit. When Bettye LaVette sings things have changed, it’s decidedly not a negotiation.
Listen: Things Have Changed
Maggie’s Farm by Rage Against the Machine
By at least 1965, Bob Dylan was tired of being the poster boy for the folk movement. When he performed this song at the Newport Folk Festival that year, he did so with amps and electricity to very loudly deliver his letter of resignation. Here in Rage Against the Machine’s version, that sentiment of refusing to take what one is given is entirely applicable, this time taking on political and social ramifications.
“Maggie’s Farm” is an anthem of rebellion against forces that seek to dehumanize and to keep people in place as they do so. Appropriately in this version, the wattage has only increased here on one of Dylan’s angriest songs. As viscerally exciting as it is outraged in this version, this song sounds like it could be one of their own, with raging against any kind of oppressive machine having always been central to the material.
Listen: Maggie’s Farm
Knocking on Heaven’s Door by Guns & Roses
Included on their 1991 Use Your Illusion II album at the apex of their career, Guns & Roses turn Dylan’s contemplative roots rock anthem from 1973’s Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid soundtrack into a stadium-ready power ballad. G’n’R put some rock meat on the bones of the song to make up the difference for their sports arena-scaled audience while still preserving the spare and confessional spirit of the original.
This is perhaps unexpectedly affecting as an out and out rock anthem that’s true to their sound, appealing to a new generation just before grunge came along to change the rules again. Like the original, it marks its times and feels like an elegy to an era about to pass, being an Eighties fade-out as “Smells Like Teen Spirit” heralded the start of the Nineties that very same year.
Listen: Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll by Cage the Elephant
Taken from the pages of a 1963 newspaper, Bob Dylan wrote this topical song about a miscarriage of justice, his original appearing on The Times They Are A-Changing that year. As a kind of opposite approach to that of Guns ’n’ Roses, rock band Cage the Elephant cinch their impulses to rock out in favour of a spare and ghostly arrangement, their version appearing on the 2012 Dylan tribute album Chimes of Freedom.
The space the band creates for the narrative is effective to make the drama that much more infuriating and tragic, as does the coldness of its atmosphere. This take displays a distinct sensitivity to Dylan’s subject matter, a tale of an innocent and largely powerless Black woman who died undefended and humiliated, the most lonesome kind of death there is.
Listen: The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll
If You See Her, Say Hello by Jeff Buckley
In the early Nineties, Jeff Buckley had a residency at New York City’s Sin-é, a small and stageless café in Manhattan’s East Village. There, he workshopped his repertoire and tried his hand at a range of styles and songbooks, including Bob Dylan’s. Included on the 2003 expanded version of Buckley’s now-classic Live at Sin-é, “If You See Her, Say Hello” is a curio of that period as he works his way into the song that otherwise appears on Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks.
Buckley takes his time with this one, ramping up the emotional content of the song — admiration, regret, loss, and liberation all at once. In so doing, he showcases his superb skills as a vocalist and guitarist while immersing himself into the story as an actor might, filling the small venue with arena-sized gravity and feeling.
Listen: If You See her, Say Hello
Blind Willie McTell by Garth and Maud Hudson
An outtake from Dylan’s Infidels and later appearing on the Biograph box, Garth Hudson regularly played this tune live with former Dylan accompanists The Band during their post-Last Waltz incarnation. The Band’s studio version appears on their 1993 Jericho record. This version by Hudson and wife Maud is taken from the 2005 disc Live at the Wolf, presented as a vivid act of musical storytelling.
It features Garth’s distinctive Art Tatum-meets-Chopin piano and Maud’s evocative sung-spoken vocal style delivering a song about the damage of slavery and Jim Crow contrasted with vibrant American music from Black communities. Here, the bittersweet reality of great art coming out of great suffering is both joyful and sobering all at once.
Listen: Blind Willie McTell
I Contain Multitudes by Emma Swift
Nashville-based Australian singer-songwriter Emma Swift put out this version of Dylan’s more recent epic single within weeks of Dylan’s original April 2020 release — a remarkable achievement given the song’s weight and complexity. This is a song that explores human complexity and contradiction and the complicated nature of identity, and of being known. Amazingly, Swift delivers this song with such care and affection, it’s as if this is her song that Dylan covered.
Featured on her superb Blonde on the Tracks album, Emma Swift’s version applies the meaning of this song more broadly by making it about all of us. In her hands, we’re reminded that each of us contains whole universes of experiences, memories, fears, and flaws and so much more than we can ever know in a lifetime, even in ourselves. She takes Dylan’s mercurial point of view and unmasks it, brings it down to earth, and offers it to us as an act of musical generosity.
Listen: I Contain Multitudes
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Runners up and bubbling under:
- “My Back Pages” by The Byrds
- “Buckets of Rain” by Neko Case
- “Changing of the Guard” by Frank Black & the Catholics
- “Absolutely Sweet Marie” by Jason & the Scorchers
- “Tomorrow is a Long Time” by Rod Stewart
- “Every Grain of Sand” by Emmylou Harris
- “You’re Going to Make Me Lonesome When You Go” by Madeline Peyroux
- “When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky” by The Jeff Healey Band
- “I Threw it All Away” by Elvis Costello
- “Sign on the Window” by Sarah Jarosz
- “The Girl from the North Country” by Howard Tate
- “Not Dark Yet” by Robyn Hitchcock
- “One More Cup of Coffee” by The White Stripes
- “To Ramona” by The Flying Burrito Brothers
- “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” by Nina Simone
- “Positively 4th Street” by Sue Foley
- “Queen Jane Approximately” by Emma Swift
- “Percy’s Song” by Fairport Convention
- “A Million Miles” by Bonnie Riatt
- “Boots of Spanish Leather” by Nanci Griffith
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Bob Dylan’s work lends itself to such a wide range of interpretative possibilities that musicians across a wide spectrum of styles, origins, eras, and intentions have risen to the occasion with tremendous effect. As much as the open-endedness of his songs have fascinated fans as much as they have confounded them at times when taking different forms on stage, this quality has only revealed the full extent of their power. Their mutability allows them to go well beyond where they started to take journeys of their own apart from their author.
In this, Dylan’s songs bring new audiences to the table with established fans as a part of a musical tradition. More and more, his work begins to resemble the traditions of folk songs that captured the imagination of a young Minnesotan who yearned to ramble, to discover where he was supposed to be in having been born so far from home as he felt. In this, the multiple artistic paths that his single journey has inspired reflects the quest for meaning and belonging that we all feel, all with a vibrant soundtrack to that particular road trip built right in.
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Learn more about Bob Dylan at bobdylan.com.
For more articles relating to Dylan’s history, influence, and songs, and to connect with other fans, check out expectingrain.com
