All Along The Watchtower by Bob Dylan

“All Along the Watchtower” is a folk song written and recorded by singer-songwriter Bob Dylan. Dylan has performed this song more often in concert than any of his other compositions. It has been covered by other artists in different genres, most notably by Jimi Hendrix on his album Electric Ladyland.

The song was recorded by the artist as a quiet, menacing three-chord Folk song on November 6, 1967, at Columbia Studio A, Nashville, Tennessee. Accompanying Dylan, who played acoustic guitar and harmonica, were Charlie McCoy on bass guitar and Kenneth Buttrey on drums. The producer was Bob Johnston, who had been Dylan’s producer since the album Highway 61 Revisited in 1965. The song was released on Dylan’s equally quiet and sparse album John Wesley Harding, on December 27, 1967.

In recent years, Dylan in live performance has taken to singing the first verse again at the end of the song. As Michael Gray notes in The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, “Dylan chooses to end in a way that at once reduces the song’s apocalyptic impact and cranks up its emphasis on the artist’s own centrality. Repeating the first stanza as the last means Dylan now ends with the words ‘None of them along the line/Know what any of it is worth’ (and this is sung with a prolonged, dark linger on that word ‘worth’).”

_{Sources: Wikipedia}