20 Different Takes on Bob Dylan’s Most-Covered Song

With over 300 versions, Bob Dylan‘s “Blowin’ in the Wind” is the most-covered song of his catalog. Each is unique.

Dylan’s work has been covered for decades, by his peers, admirers and up and coming artists. In this way, the songs have taken on countless new lives.

“He got something out of that song I would have never dreamed of myself,” Dylan said of Billy Joel at a 1997 press conference, speaking about a recording Joel did of Dylan’s “Make You Feel My Love.” “That’s what happens when you write a song, somebody can definitely interpret it a different way than the person who wrote it.”

Below, we’re taking a look at 20 Covers of Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” a spectrum of interpretations across eras of music.

1. The Staples Singers (1963)

The Staples Singers recorded “Blowin’ in the Wind” the same year Dylan did, releasing it as a B-side to an original single called “Wish I Had Answered.” Mavis Staples has kept a friendship with Dylan over the years – he even once proposed marriage to her, but she declined. “I often think about what would have happened if I’d married Bobby, though,” she told The Guardian in 2016. “If we’d had some little plum-crushers, how our lives would be. The kids would be singing now, and Bobby and I would be holding each other up.”

 

2. Marianne Faithfull (1964)

Marianne Faithfull was a gifted interpreter of other’s songs — from the Rolling Stones to Tom Waits to Leonard Cohen. In fact, the B-side to her cover of “Blowin’ in the Wind” is a cover of “The House of the Rising Sun,” another Dylan-adjacent number.

 

3. Judy Collins

When Dylan first got to New York City in 1961, he was not yet performing original songs. Some people were fine with that, others could tell his talent was deeper. “Of course when he first began to sing it was old Woody Guthrie blues,” Judy Collins recalled to American Songwriter in 2018. “I didn’t get it and I wasn’t smitten with his versions of old Woody Guthrie blues. After he started writing his own songs I was a total, complete fan. I mean I thought he was brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.”

 

4.  Mountain (2007)

Here’s a bit harder of a version of “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Mountain recorded an entire album of Dylan covers in 2007, titled Masters of War. It included guests like Ozzy Osbourne, Warren Haynes and others. Below is Mountain’s electric version, but they also did an acoustic one.

 

5. Jimmy Buffett (2010)

This is a live version of “Blowin’ in the Wind,” as performed by Jimmy Buffett. Here’s how Buffett introduced the song: “The reason I’ma play this song here is because about 20 years ago, somebody called me and said ‘Hey, do you know that Bob Dylan did ‘A Pirate Looks at Forty’ last night in Hawaii?’ And I went, ‘That’s about as complimentary as you can get.'”

 

6. Dionne Warwick (1966)

In true Dionne Warwick fashion, she added a bit of pep to her cover of “Blowin’ in the Wind,” which appeared on her 1966 album Here Where There Is Love.

 

7. Ziggy Marley (2012)

Bob Dylan but make it reggae. Below is Ziggy Marley’s live version of “Blowin’ in the Wind” that he performed on David Letterman‘s Late Show in 2012. There’s also his studio version, which you can find on the charity compilation album Chimes of Freedom: The Songs of Bob Dylan Honoring 50 Years of Amnesty International.

 

8. Duke Ellington (1965)

You know you’ve written a good song when it’s getting covered by artists from an entirely different genre and background than yourself. Who would have thought that two years after Dylan released “Blowin’ in the Wind” it would be covered by the legendary big band composer Duke Ellington? Ellington’s version appeared on his album Ellington ’65.

 

9. Bruce Springsteen (1998)

It’s no secret that Bruce Springsteen went to the school of Bob Dylan songwriting.”Bob Dylan is the father of my country,” Springsteen wrote in his autobiography, Born to Run. “Bob pointed true north and served as a beacon to assist you in making your way through the new wilderness America had become. He planted a flag, wrote the songs, sang the words that were essential to the times, to the emotional and spiritual survival of so many young Americans at that moment.”

 

10. Timothee Chalamet and Monica Barbaro (2024)

This cover isn’t by another musical artist, but rather by the actor Timothee Chalamet, who portrayed Dylan in the 2024 biopic A Complete Unknown. Chalamet did all of his own singing and guitar playing in the film. He was joined on this version by Monica Barbaro, the actress who played Joan Baez.

 

11. Joan Baez (1978)

Speaking of Baez, she recorded “Blowin’ in the Wind” and has played it live over 100 times — below is a performance from 1978. And of course, she and Dylan performed it together several times, including at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival.

 

12. Peter, Paul and Mary (1963)

Just three weeks after Dylan’s original came out, the folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary put out a cover of it that wound up more commercially successful than Dylan’s, going to No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100. It also won two Grammys: Best Folk Recording and Best Performance by a Vocal Group.

 

13. Sam Cooke (1964)

Leave it to Sam Cooke to turn a serious song like “Blowin’ in the Wind” into an upbeat, bop of a number that makes one want to dance to it. The song reportedly inspired Cooke to write his own anthem of forward progress, “A Change Is Gonna Come.”

 

14. Stevie Wonder (1966)

Peter, Paul and Mary was not the only act to take “Blowin’ in the Wind” onto the charts. Stevie Wonder did it with his 1966 cover, which landed at No. 10. “If anybody can be called a genius, Stevie Wonder can be,” Dylan said at Wonder’s 1989 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction. “Never knew what to think of him really until he cut ‘Blowin’ in the Wind.’ That really blew my mind, and I figured I’d better pay attention.”

 

15. The Hollies (1969)

Many, many years before others started doing it, the Hollies recorded a full album of Dylan songs called Hollies Sing Dylan. On it was a rather fun swing version of “Blowin’ in the Wind.” It’s worth noting that this album — and this cover in particular — didn’t sit well with Graham Nash, who already had one foot out the door of the band, once describing the album as “a sacrilege.”

 

16. Dolly Parton With Nickel Creek (2005)

If there is one thing in common between Dylan and Dolly Parton it’s that they have been, for the most part, unapologetically themselves for the course of their careers. Parton put her spin on “Blowin’ in the Wind” in 2005, inviting the bluegrass band Nickel Creek to back her on it. “I’ve met [Dylan] a few times, but I never felt any warmth from him to me,” Parton recalled to the Daily Mail in 2014. “I think I have offended him somehow by the way I looked or the way I was. I love his music but he’s a weird buckaroo.”

 

17. Diana Ross and the Supremes (1969)

If you hear the names Bob Dylan and Diana Ross in the same sentence, you might think we’re referencing when they both appeared on 1985’s “We Are the World.” But over a decade before that, Ross and her Supremes recorded “Blowin’ in the Wind.” It appeared on an album called Cream of the Crop, which also had covers of Smokey Robinson’s “Loving You Is Better Than Ever” and the Beatles‘ “Hey Jude.”

 

18. Johnny Cash (1992)

In 1992, Johnny Cash was in New York City to participate in the 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration, honoring Dylan. At that concert, Stevie Wonder covered “Blowin’ in the Wind,” but Cash made a stop over at David Letterman’s show to perform the same song.

 

19. Neil Young (1991)

Neil Young has played “Blowin’ in the Wind” live quite a few times over the years. Below is a particularly powerful version that was included on his 1992 live album with Crazy Horse called Weld. This was around the time of the Gulf War. “We were rehearsing ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ before the war and the tour started,” Young explained to Pulse! then. “Basically, the songs took on the ambience of the times. That’s all we do – we just reflect what’s going on.”

 

20. Elvis Presley (1966)

Like many musicians of his era, Dylan found Elvis Presley to be riveting and deeply inspiring — “I didn’t talk to anyone for a week after Elvis died,” Dylan said in 1978. Presley recorded a demo of “Blowin’ in the Wind” in 1966, though it didn’t see the light of day until the 1997 collection Platinum – A Life in Music.