Highway 61 Revisited is the sixth studio album by 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 backup band on every track of the album in a further departure from his primarily acoustic folk sound, except for the closing track, the 11-minute ballad "Desolation Row". Critics have focused on the innovative way Dylan combined driving, blues-based music with the subtlety of poetry to create songs that captured the political and cultural climate of contemporary America.
Dylan named the album after the major American highway which 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, ranking No. 4 on Rolling Stone's "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time" list in 2003 and repositioned to No. 18 in the 2020 revision.
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. “