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Highway 61 Revisited · 1965

Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues

Set largely in Juarez, Mexico, it was recorded in the summer 1965 New York sessions.

the roadloss

The words

A traveler lost in a border town slides into sickness and despair and resolves to head back to New York.

A drifter narrates his own unravelling in a Mexican border town, where the authorities are crooked, the women are dangerous and every comfort turns out to cost him something. The verses move like a slow hangover, each scene seedier and more sickly than the last, until he gives up on the place and decides to go back to New York. The tone is weary and darkly funny, carried by a loose, rolling band with piano well up in the mix.

Lyrics on bobdylan.com ↗

Listen and watch

The words

A traveler lost in a border town slides into sickness and despair and resolves to head back to New York.

A drifter narrates his own unravelling in a Mexican border town, where the authorities are crooked, the women are dangerous and every comfort turns out to cost him something. The verses move like a slow hangover, each scene seedier and more sickly than the last, until he gives up on the place and decides to go back to New York. The tone is weary and darkly funny, carried by a loose, rolling band with piano well up in the mix.

Lyrics on bobdylan.com ↗

Connections

Covered byJust Like Tom Thumb’s BluesNina Simone · 1969Nina Simone included the song on a 1969 album built largely on contemporary songwriters.Same theme asStuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again1966Both strand a narrator in a strange town far from home.
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In threads

The same year · 1965

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