How a song about a joker and a thief became a musical myth

Music · Published 30 September 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: Bob Dylan wrote All Along the Watchtower in a burst of creative recovery, yet he eventually conceded the song to Jimi Hendrix. By adopting Hendrix's arrangement for his own live performances, Dylan turned his original composition into a cover of a cover, creating a unique, circular legacy in rock history.

Recorded in November 1967 for the album John Wesley Harding, Dylan’s original version was a sparse, acoustic track featuring just guitar, harmonica, and bass. Its lyrics, a twelve-line conversation between a joker and a thief, have been interpreted as everything from biblical allusions to the Book of Isaiah to a bitter allegory about the exploitative nature of the music business. Dylan himself described the song as having a reverse-order narrative, a structure that Christopher Ricks noted creates a sense of a myth beginning exactly as it concludes.

Jimi Hendrix’s 1968 interpretation, however, transformed the song into a sonic storm. While Dylan’s version relied on a static, circular harmonic pattern, Hendrix introduced a dense, layered soundscape that utilized the studio to evoke dread and tumult. Hendrix’s version, which reached number 20 on the US Billboard Hot 100, was so powerful that it fundamentally altered Dylan’s own relationship with the song. Dylan later admitted that Hendrix found spaces within the music he had never imagined, and he began performing his own live versions in a 'Hendrixized' style.

The song’s endurance is marked by its sheer ubiquity in Dylan’s career; he has performed it over 2,250 times. In recent years, Dylan has even modified his live performances to repeat the first verse at the end, a choice critics argue shifts the focus from the song's apocalyptic themes to the artist's own centrality. Whether viewed as a parable of justice or a critique of management, the song remains a testament to how a simple, twelve-line composition can evolve through the hands of two masters.

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