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.

[2] Preceded by the hit single "Like a Rolling Stone", the album features songs that Dylan has continued to perform live over his long career, including "Ballad of a Thin Man" and the title track.

He 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.

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.

Along the way, the route passed near the birthplaces and homes of influential musicians such as Muddy Waters, Son House, Elvis Presley and Charley Patton.

Critic Mark Polizzotti points out that blues legend Robert Johnson is alleged to have sold his soul to the devil at the highway's crossroads with Route 49.

[15] In the first recording session on June 15 Dylan was backed by Bobby Gregg on drums, Joe Macho, Jr. on bass, Paul Griffin on piano, and Frank Owens on guitar.

[26] To create the material for Highway 61 Revisited, Dylan spent a month writing in his new home in the Byrdcliffe artists' colony of Woodstock in upstate New York.

[27] When he returned to Studio A on July 29, he was backed by the same musicians, except Harvey Brooks replaced Joe Macho on bass and his producer had changed from Tom Wilson to Bob Johnston.

At the close of the July 29 session, Dylan attempted to record "Desolation Row", accompanied by Al Kooper on electric guitar and Harvey Brooks on bass.

[35][36] "Highway 61 Revisited", "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues", "Queen Jane Approximately", and "Ballad of a Thin Man" were recorded successfully and masters were selected for the album.

"[42] Highway 61 Revisited opens with "Like a Rolling Stone", which has been described as revolutionary in its combination of electric guitar licks, organ chords, and Dylan's voice, "at once so young and so snarling ... and so cynical".

[45][46] It was suggested that Miss Lonely, the song's central character, is based on Edie Sedgwick, a socialite and actress in the Factory scene of pop artist Andy Warhol.

[47] Critic Mike Marqusee said the composition was "surely a Dylan cameo", and that its poignancy becomes apparent upon realizing that "it is sung, at least in part, to the singer himself: he's the one 'with no direction home'.

For critics Mark Polizzotti and Andy Gill, the reality behind the song is the then-escalating Vietnam War; both writers hear the "king of the Philistines" who sends his slaves "out to the jungle" as a reference to President Lyndon B.

[60] Robert Shelton hears the song as "an earthy tribute to another funky earth-mother",[60] while for Heylin it is close to filler material; he argues that only through the musicians' performance is Dylan able to "convince us he is doing more than just listing the number of ways in which this 'graveyard woman' is both a lifesaver and a death-giver".

[62] Robert Shelton describes the song's central character, Mr Jones, as "one of Dylan's greatest archetypes", characterizing him as "a Philistine ... superficially educated and well bred but not very smart about the things that count".

[60] Polizzotti, in his study of Highway 61 Revisited, writes that the opening track of Side Two, "Queen Jane Approximately" is in a similar vein to "Like a Rolling Stone", but the song offers "a touch of sympathy and even comfort in place of relentless mockery".

[64] Gill calls this song "the least interesting track" on Highway 61, but praises the piano ascending the scale during the harmonica break as an evocation of "the stifling nature of an upper class existence".

[71] The lyrics describe a nightmarish experience in Juarez, Mexico, where, in Shelton's words, "our anti-hero stumbles amid sickness, despair, whores and saints.

[72][73][74] In this song, critics have heard literary references to Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and Jack Kerouac's Desolation Angels.

[72][75][76] The backing musicians, Bobby Gregg on drums, Mike Bloomfield on electric guitar, and two pianists, Paul Griffin on tack piano and Al Kooper on Hohner Pianet, produce a mood that, for Gill, perfectly complements the "enervated tone" of the lyrics.

Gill has characterized "Desolation Row" as "an 11-minute epic of entropy, which takes the form of a Fellini-esque parade of grotesques and oddities featuring a huge cast of iconic characters".

These include historical celebrities such as Albert Einstein and Nero, the biblical characters Noah and Cain and Abel, the Shakespearean figures of Ophelia and Romeo, ending with literary titans T.S.

'"[91] As he had on his previous three albums, Dylan contributed his own writing to the back cover of Highway 61 Revisited, in the shape of freeform, surrealist prose: "On the slow train time does not interfere & at the Arabian crossing waits White Heap, the man from the newspaper & behind him the hundred inevitables made of solid rock & stone.

"[103] The English poet Philip Larkin, reviewing the album for The Daily Telegraph, wrote that he found himself "well rewarded" by the record: "Dylan's cawing, derisive voice is probably well suited to his material ... and his guitar adapts itself to rock ('Highway 61') and ballad ('Queen Jane').

"[104] In September 1965, the US trade journal Billboard also praised the album, and predicted big sales for it: "Based upon his singles hit 'Like a Rolling Stone', Dylan has a top-of-the-chart-winner in this package of his off-beat, commercial material.

[109] On its merits, he said Dylan showed good taste in accompanying musicians, but his style of rock "had a loose feel, almost tacked on, in contrast to the tight arrangements which had become typical."

"[110] Michael Gray calls Highway 61 "revolutionary and stunning, not just for its energy and panache but in its vision: fusing radical, electrical music ... with lyrics that were light years ahead of anyone else's; Dylan here unites the force of blues-based rock'n'roll with the power of poetry.

[111] "This seminal folk-rock classic" showcased "Dylan's seething, not-quite-out-of-control vocal delivery and a rough-and-tumble instrumental attack", as well as his "transformation from a folk singer to a rock and roller", Sam Sutherland wrote in High Fidelity.