"John Wesley Harding" is a song by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan that appears as the opening track on his 1967 album of the same name.
Dylan told Jann Wenner in a 1969 Rolling Stone interview that the song "started out to be a long ballad.
"[2] Biographer Clinton Heylin states that Dylan has had a well-documented interest in outlaw cowboys, including Jesse James and Billy the Kid,[3] and in the past Dylan has said that his favorite folk song was "John Hardy",[4] whose real-life title character in 1893 murdered another man over a game of craps.
[3] Dylan has stated that he chose John Wesley Hardin for his protagonist over other badmen because his name "[fit] in the tempo" of the song.
[2][7] He told Cameron Crowe in 1985 that after recording the John Wesley Harding album, he "didn't know what to make of it.