In 1965 folk singer Odetta released a cover album of Bob Dylan songs, Odetta Sings Dylan. But she had already turned Dylan on to folk. After hearing her album Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues, Dylan said he put down his electric guitar and went acoustic. “Right then and there,” said Dylan, “I went out and traded my electric guitar and amplifier for an acoustical guitar, a flat-top Gibson.”
Just three years later, Joan Baez released Any Day Now, an album featuring more Dylan songs, including “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere,” “Walkin’ Down the Line,” “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” and more. Then, the Hollies released Hollies Sing Dylan with covers of “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “This Wheel’s on Fire, and “Just Like a Woman,” among others.
By the late ’60s, the Beatles, particularly John Lennon, also admitted to going through a “Dylan period,” seeping into the Beatles’ songs like “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown),” “In My Life,” and “Yer Blues.”
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Released in 1979, The Byrds Play Dylan was a collection of Dylan songs recorded during different stages of the Byrds’ career up until that point. By the early ’90s, Judy Collins also released a cover album of Dylan songs—Judy Sings Dylan… Just Like a Woman.
Robyn Hitchcock also had a Dylan covers album, Robyn Sings in 2002, Joan Osborne had Songs of Bob Dylan in 2017, and soul legend Bettye LaVette shared her interpretations of Dylan’s music on Things Have Changed in 2018.
Along with the bounty of individual covers of Dylan’s songs throughout the decades, here are four more Dylan cover albums from later on that reimagined some of the different times and places of his songs, from the early 2000s through the 2020s.
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Postcards of the Hanging, Grateful Dead (2002)
A collection of live Dylan covers by Grateful Dead, from “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry” in 1973, “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” from 1981, “Ballad of a Thin Man” and “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again” from ’88 through “Desolation Row” in 1990 and part of the band’s 2002 covers album Postcards of the Hanging. Released seven years after Jerry Garcia‘s death, Postcards of the Hanging was the band’s decades-long tribute to Dylan.
Throughout the years the band recorded the songs for their covers album, the Grateful Dead were already friends with Dylan, collaborating with him in 1987 on the Dylan & the Dead tour and the 1989 live album Dylan & the Dead.
“There’s no way to measure his greatness or magnitude as a person or as a player,” Dylan said following Garcia’s death in 1995. “I don’t think any eulogizing will do him justice. He was that great, much more than a superb musician, with an uncanny ear and dexterity.”
Dylanesque, Bryan Ferry (2007)
A decade before Bryan Ferry left Roxy Music in 1983, he released his debut solo album These Foolish Things. His debut single, a cover of Dylan’s Freewheelin’ classic “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” also gave him his first solo hit, peaking at No. 10 on the UK Singles chart. “It’s a great Dylan song,” said Ferry of his debut single. “The lyrics are brilliant, that question-and-answer style, and, as a singer, I like to sing good words. It was such a pleasure to do someone else’s song: the pressure was off me as a writer.”
Ferry later released the song on his Street Life: 20 Great Hits from 1986 and his 1999 compilation More Than This: The Best of Bryan Ferry, then returned to Dylan in 2007 with an album full of covers.
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His Dylanesque opens on the Highway 61 Revisited track “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” and features eight other songs Dylan wrote, including “Make You Feel My Love,” “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” “Positively Fourth Street,” and more before closing on “All Along the Watchtower.” The album also includes a traditional Dylan covered, “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down.”
In 2014, Ferry revised Dylan, covering his “She Belongs to Me” on his 81-track retrospective album Retrospective: Selected Recordings 1973-2023.
Lu’s Jukebox Vol. 3 – A Night of Bob Dylan Songs, Lucinda Williams (2021)
For more than a decade, Lucinda Williams was calling her backing band Buick 6, a nod to Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited track “From a Buick 6.” In 1999, Williams toured with Dylan, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and the Allman Brothers to support her breakthrough album Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. She also participated in the album Chimes of Freedom: Songs of Bob Dylan – Honoring 50 Years of Amnesty International with her rendition of Dylan’s “Tryin’ To Get To Heaven.”
During the pandemic, Williams decided to dig back into her musical influences, dubbing it Lu’s Jukebox, and released Runnin’ Down A Dream: A Tribute To Tom Petty, followed by Southern Soul: From Memphis To Muscle Shoals in 2021.
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The third Lu’s Jukebox installment was a tribute to another idol: Dylan. On Bob’s Back Pages; A Night of Bob Dylan Songs, Williams covers 11 songs, including “It Takes A Lot to Laugh, It Takes A Train to Cry,” “Queen Jane Approximately,” “Meet Me in the Morning,” “Man of Peace,” and more along with reworkings of his ’90s songs “Blind Willie McTell,” “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven,” and “Not Dark Yet.”
“This was completely different, yet it was still coming from that folk thing,” recalled Williams of her first introduction to Dylan’s music when she was 12 and a half—Highway 61 Revisited. “I thought, ‘OK, this is what I want to do.’ He was my hero. I’m not embarrassed to say it. That became the challenge for me, to try to be able to write like that.”
Cat Power Sings Dylan: The 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert (2023)
In November of 2022, Cat Power (Chan Marshall) recreated Dylan’s momentous concert at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, England, on May 17, 1966, which was erroneously labeled for years as having taken place at the Royal Albert Hall in London. For her recreation, Marshall performed Dylan’s 15-song set just as he did nearly 60 years earlier but at the Royal Albert Hall on Cat Power Sings Dylan.
Through the first half of the set, Marshall was faithful to Dylan’s original treatment by keeping it acoustic through “Mr. Tambourine Man”; then she settled into the electric second half that opened with “Tell Me, Momma.” During the original concert, before Dylan went into his penultimate “Ballad of a Thin Man,” an audience member infamously yelled out “Judas!” (he who betrayed Jesus), to which Dylan responded, “I don’t believe you … You’re a liar.”
“I wanted this performance to be honorable and elegant and graceful—not ego, not rock and roll,” Marshall told American Songwriter in 2024. “I wanted it to be measured and respectful.”
Photo: Dm/Globe Photos via ZUMA Wire/Shutterstock
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