“Highway 61 Revisited” by Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan's 1965 album took its name from "Highway 61 Revisited", and later that year the song rode along as the B-side of "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?". The road itself is the joke and the key: Highway 61 starts in Duluth, Minnesota, where Dylan was born, and hugs the Mississippi most of the way down to New Orleans, long an escape route north for Black Americans leaving the Deep South.

Dylan turns it into a cosmic dumping ground. In each of five verses somebody hits a bizarre jam, and every time the answer is the same stretch of blacktop, starting with God ordering Abraham to sacrifice a son out there, a biblical gag with a private sting, since Abram was the name of Dylan's own father. Poor Georgia Sam, beyond the reach of welfare, gets pointed down the highway too. Rolling Stone ranked it 364th among its 500 greatest songs in 2004.

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