Hear alongside on Spotify as you learn.

1. Cher: “All I Actually Wish to Do” (1965)

Cher’s debut single, produced by her then husband Sonny Bono, was this jangly cowl of the opening monitor on “One other Aspect of Bob Dylan” — a form of one-person duet between the masculine and female ends of Cher’s vocal vary. As she writes in her extremely entertaining 1998 biography “The First Time,” “Nobody believed it was simply me, as a result of I did each the excessive half and the low half in the beginning of every verse.” She additionally recounts, later in that chapter, how she bumped into Dylan in a New York recording studio as her model was climbing the charts. He advised her that he dug what she’d executed with it, which, Cher writes, “made me really feel like floating away.” (Hear on YouTube)

2. Joan Baez: “Easy Twist of Destiny” (1975)

By the point she launched her 1975 album “Diamonds and Rust,” Baez had been recording attractive, reverent covers of fabric written by Dylan — her folks musical peer, collaborator and former flame — for greater than a decade. Her rollicking cowl of “Easy Twist of Destiny” is one thing else, although: playful, confident and even a bit sassy, particularly when she makes use of a laughably nasal Dylan impression within the second half of the music. Writing the haunting title monitor off “Diamonds and Rust,” a poetic remembrance of her ’60s romance with Dylan, will need to have freed her as much as have some enjoyable along with his materials. (Hear on YouTube)

3. Marianne Faithfull: “It’s All Over Now, Child Blue” (1971)

In 1965, shortly after the discharge of her debut single “As Tears Go By,” Faithfull spent a while hanging within the Savoy with Dylan and his entourage, whereas D.A. Pennebaker was filming “Don’t Look Again.” At one level, Dylan performed Faithfull his newest album: “Bringing It All Again Dwelling.” Six years later, when her voice had begun maturing past mild pop fare and into that seen-it-all croak, Faithfull recorded her personal model of the album’s remaining monitor, “It’s All Over Now, Child Blue.” She’d revisit the music once more a few years later, too, on her 2018 album “Damaging Functionality.” (Hear on YouTube)

4. Nico: “I’ll Preserve It With Mine” (1967)

It’s a uncommon expertise, getting to listen to a music’s muse sing and interpret materials that was written about her. (Allegedly, as we should add with any hypothesis of what or who a Dylan music is “about.”) However such is the poignancy and energy of Nico’s rendition of “I’ll Preserve It With Mine,” which she recorded for her 1967 debut solo album, “Chelsea Lady.” Dylan wrote the music whereas touring round Europe with a pre-Velvet Underground Nico throughout their temporary 1964 romance, and although he tried to file it for “Bringing It All Again Dwelling” and, later, “Blonde on Blonde,” he ended up saving it for launch on his bootleg assortment. Nico’s model, then, might be the very best identified: The signature, heavy-cream richness of her voice makes it sound impossibly melancholy, however there’s a buoyancy to her cadences that conveys the sweetness and devotion to companionship on the coronary heart of the music. (Hear on YouTube)

5. Bettye LaVette: “Ain’t Talkin’” (2018)

I found this smoldering cowl only a few months in the past, after studying about it in Greil Marcus’s nice 2022 ebook “Folks Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs.” (At all times learn Greil Marcus on Bob Dylan.) A type of seven songs is the creepily somnambulant “Ain’t Talkin’,” from Dylan’s 2006 album “Fashionable Occasions,” although Marcus rightly praises this remodeling by the beloved soul singer Bettye LaVette for enlivening the composition together with her distinctive sensibility. He quotes LaVette, talking of this and some different Dylan covers on her 2018 album “Issues Have Modified”: “I wasn’t going to tributize him.” As an alternative she was trying to make the songs “match into my mouth,” as she put it, “simply as in the event that they’d been written for me.” Mission completed. (Hear on YouTube)