Highway 61- Let Him Call it what he wants too..,

While Dylan was growing up in the 1950s, before the construction of the interstate highway system, Highway 61 stretched from Duluth, where he was born, through Minneapolis, where he went to college, down to the Mississippi delta. Along the way, the highway passed close to the birthplaces and homes of Southern music greats such as Muddy Waters, Son House, Elvis Presley, and Charley Patton. The "empress of the blues", Bessie Smith, met her death in an automobile accident on Highway 61, and blues legend Robert Johnson was said to have sold his soul to the devil at the highway's crossroads with Highway 49. The highway was also the subject of several classic blues recordings, notably Roosevelt Sykes' "Highway 61 Blues" (1932) and Mississippi Fred McDowell's "61 Highway" (1964).

For most of its nearly 1,700 miles (2,700 km), Highway 61 runs parallel to the Mississippi River, which provided a migratory route from the 1920s through the 1950s for African Americans leaving the Deep South for better economic prospects. With them, they brought their music. As Dylan's biographer Robert Shelton commented, "Jazz came up the river. Blues came up the river. A lot of great basic American culture came right up that highway and up that river."

Dylan told Shelton that he had to overcome considerable resistance at Columbia Records, to give his album the title, "I wanted to call that album Highway 61 Revisited. Nobody understood it. I had to go up the fucking ladder until finally the word came down and said: 'Let him call it what he wants to call it'."