changing the song's structure as he recorded different takes. According to Clinton Heylin, most of the revisions were to the song's arrangement, rather than to the words. Eventually, after recording for three hours, a master take, the twentieth and final take, lasting seven minutes and six seconds, was chosen. It was released as the second track on side two of Dylan's seventh studio album, the double album Blonde on Blonde, on June 20, 1966. Take five was released on The Bootleg Series Vol. 7: No Direction Home: The Soundtrack (2005). In 2015, take 13 was released on the two-disc edition of The Bootleg Series Vol. 12: The Cutting Edge 1965–1966. This, and four additional takes were on the six-disc Deluxe edition, and the entire recording session was released on the 18-disc Collector's Edition. The song has sometimes been listed as "Memphis Blues Again" or "Stuck Inside Of Memphis With The" on album releases; the correct title first appeared when it was in included on Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits Vol. II (1971). Critical comments Michael Gray identified several possible influences on "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again", including "The Memphis Blues" by W.C. Handy, who wrote the music, published in 1912, and George A. Norton, who wrote the lyrics the following year; Ma Rainey's "Memphis Bound Blues" (1925); "South Memphis Blues" by Frank Stokes (1929); and "North Memphis Blues" by Memphis Minnie (1930). Gray sees similarities with the Bukka White song "Aberdeen Mississippi Blues" (1940), which has the line "Sittin' down in Aberdeen with New Orleans on my mind". The song has nine verses, each, according to critic Andy Gill, providing "an absurd little vignette illustrating contemporary alienation". Musicologist Wilfrid Mellers describes the song as strophic; Literature scholar Timothy Hampton felt that Dylan's "technique of varying the chorus as a way of isolating the singer from the listener" that he employed on some of the Blonde on Blonde tracks is in evidence on "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again", where the chorus is sung differently by Dylan each time. Journalist Oliver Trager suggested that, like other Dylan songs of the time, the themes were "suspicion of authority figures, solicitous females, and a confused, persecuted, and possibly intoxicated narrator". Mellers wrote that the song, which features a list of characters including Shakespeare, Mona, Ruth, a ragman, a senator, a preacher and a rainman, railroad men and