“Maggie’s Farm” is a song written by Bob Dylan and recorded in 1965 for his album “Bringing It All Back Home.” Built on a hard electric-blues groove, it is a sharp, sardonic refusal — a worker declaring, verse after verse, that he will not go back to laboring on Maggie’s farm, a complaint about drudgery and authority that reads equally as personal defiance and social protest.
The song has older roots. Dylan reworked it from “Down on Penny’s Farm,” a tenant-farmer’s complaint recorded in 1929 and preserved on the influential “Anthology of American Folk Music” that circulated widely through the folk revival.
“Maggie’s Farm” gained a permanent place in music history when Dylan opened with it, backed by an electric band, at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival — a performance that stunned the folk world and came to symbolize his break with acoustic tradition.
