As Bob Dylan promised with an X post a little under a month ago, the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour is coming back in 2026. The musician has rolled out a 27-date United States run, which kicks off March 21 in Omaha and wraps up May 1 in Abilene, Texas.
The tour skips most big metropolitan markets in favor of smaller towns that major rock acts rarely visit, including La Crosse, Wisconsin; Saginaw, Michigan; Spartanburg, South Carolina; Macon, Georgia; and Tyler, Texas.
Nothing is certain with Dylan until it actually happens, but if he sticks to the formula of the last few years, expect to hear the vast majority of songs from 2020’s Rough and Rowdy Ways, along with a smattering of old favorites like “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight,” “When I Paint My Masterpiece,” “Desolation Row,” and “Every Grain of Sand.”
If he’s in the right mood, he might even play a Grateful Dead cover or a song by a local icon. During the final dates of his 2025 European tour, the musician covered Van Morrison’s 2016 super deep cut “Going Down to Bangor” in Belfast, Ireland, and the Pogues’ classic “A Rainy Night in Soho” in Dublin.
The original Rough and Rowdy Ways tour kicked off Nov. 2, 2021, at the Riverside Theater in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The show featured the live debut of practically every song from Rough and Rowdy Ways. After four years of heavy touring, Dylan has now played most of them over 275 times each. (He’s done “Crossing the Rubicon” a mere 255 times, and we’ve yet to hear the 17-minute epic “Murder Most Foul.”)
Along the way, he’s trotted out five different drummers (Matt Chamberlain, Charley Drayton, Jerry Pentecost, Jim Keltner, and Anton Fig), and radically re-worked the arrangements of many the songs.
“One night a song has drums and is a fast, up-tempo song,” Dylan super fan Ray Padgett, who runs the Flagging Down the Double E’s newsletter and website, told Rolling Stone in January. “The next night it’s basically a solo piano ballad, the same song. It turns out, just as much is changing, even though the set list on boblinks.com ends up looking identical. … People need to listen to ‘When I Paint My Masterpiece’ on 2023 tapes and 2024 tapes. One of them sounds like ‘Istanbul (Not Constantinople),’ and the other is a slow piano ballad. I know it looks like it’s the same, but you’ve got to pay attention, and if you do, it’s extremely rewarding.”
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Dylan took brief breaks from the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour over the past two summers to hit the road with Willie Nelson on the Outlaw Music Festival. These shows featured wildly different sets, during which he dropped all the Rough and Rowdy Ways songs in favor of older tunes and surprise covers, including Bo Diddley’s “I Can’t Tell” and Bobby Blue Band’s “Share Your Love With Me.” On the final leg this past summer, Dylan hid himself almost completely from the audience every night, presumably to stop fans from taking video on their phones. (Cellphones are kept in pouches at Rough and Rowdy Ways theater shows.)
It’s unclear if Dylan has signed on for a third incarnation of the Outlaw Music Festival in the summer of 2026, or if he’ll come around and hit major cities like New York, Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles in the fall. For now, if you want to see Dylan, you gotta head to small town America. And if you’re hoping to hear a hit like “Blown’ In The Wind,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” or “Mr. Tambourine Man,” you should play them them on Spotify before heading into the theater. This is simply not that kind of show.
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Bob Dylan’s 2026 Rough and Rowdy Ways tour:
March 21 – Omaha, Nebraska @ Orpheum Theater
March 22 – Sioux Falls, South Dakota @ Mary W. Sommervold Hall
March 24 – Rochester, Minnesota @ Mayo Civic Center Arena
March 25 – Iowa City, Iowa @ Hancher Auditorium
March 27 – La Crosse, Wisconsin @ La Crosse Center
March 28 – Rockford, Illinois @ Coronado Theatre
March 30 – Waukegan, Illinois @ Genesee Theatre
March 31 – Muncie, Indiana @ Emens Auditorium
April 2 – Grand Rapids, Michigan @ DeVos Performance Hall
April 3 – Saginaw, Michigan @ The Theater
April 4 – Detroit, Michigan @ Masonic Temple Theatre
April 6 – Louisville, Kentucky @ The Louisville Palace
April 9 – Columbus, Ohio @ Palace Theatre
April 10 – Cleveland, Ohio @ KeyBank State Theatre
April 12 – Dayton, Ohio @ Winsupply Theatre
April 14 – Knoxville, Tennessee @ Knoxville Civic Auditorium
April 16 – Bowling Green, Kentucky @ SKyPAC
April 17 – Chattanooga, Tennessee @ Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Auditorium
April 19 – Asheville, North Carolina @ Thomas Wolfe Auditorium
April 20 – Spartanburg, South Carolina @ Spartanburg Memorial Auditorium
April 22 – Macon, Georgia @ Macon City Auditorium
April 23 – Dothan, Alabama @ Dothan Civic Center
April 25 – Jackson, Mississippi @ Thalia Mara Hall
April 27 – Baton Rouge, Louisiana @ Raising Cane’s River Cente
April 28 – Shreveport, Louisiana @ Shreveport Municipal Auditorium
April 29 – Tyler, Texas @ Cowan Center
May 1 – Abilene, Texas @ Abilene Auditorium
