"Maggie's Farm" is a song written by Bob Dylan, recorded on January 15, 1965, and released on the album Bringing It All Back Home on March 22 of that year.

[4] Dylan only needed one take to record the song, as may be heard on the exhaustive 18-disc Collector's Edition of The Bootleg Series Vol.

[6] "Maggie's Farm" is described by Salon.com critic Bill Wyman as "a loping, laconic look at the service industry."

"[7] "Maggie's Farm" is well known for being at the center of the fervor that surrounded Dylan after his electric set at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival; it was that set's performance of "Maggie's Farm," much faster and more aggressive than on the Bringing It All Back Home recording and featuring prominent lead electric guitar by Mike Bloomfield, that caused the most controversy.

The festival's production manager Joe Boyd claimed that "that first note of 'Maggie's Farm' was the loudest thing anybody had ever heard.

Though Dylan's move from acoustic folk to electric rock had been extremely controversial, many accounts suggest the problem was largely due to poor sound.

[11]However, the style of the music features heavily in several accounts such as that of Elektra Records founder Jac Holzman: "Backstage, Alan Lomax was bellowing that this was a folk festival, you just didn't have amplified instruments.

"[10] The "Maggie's Farm" performance from Newport was featured and discussed extensively in the 2005 Martin Scorsese documentary No Direction Home and released on its accompanying album, The Bootleg Series Vol.

Media reviews of the soundtrack were overwhelmingly positive towards the "Maggie's Farm" performance, yielding such descriptions as "blistering"[12] and "remarkably tight, and downright spine-tingling.

At various times the song has also been a live favorite of Uncle Tupelo (1988–89 tours), U2 (1986–87), The Specials, Richie Havens and Tin Machine, among others.

The song is performed by Stephen Malkmus and The Million Dollar Bashers – a supergroup, which includes members of Sonic Youth and Television – on the soundtrack of the 2007 Dylan biopic I'm Not There.

Muse often perform a variation of the main riff from the Rage Against the Machine cover of the song as an outro to "Map of the Problematique".