Knockin' on Heaven's Door

Bob Dylan wrote "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" for the soundtrack of the 1973 film Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. The song's two short verses comment directly on the scene in the film for which it was written: the death of a frontier lawman, played by Slim Pickens, who refers to his wife, played by Katy Jurado, as "Mama". Dylan biographer Clinton Heylin described the result as "an exercise in splendid simplicity". Released as a single two months after the film's premiere, it reached the Top 10 in several countries.

The song became one of Dylan's most popular and most performed post-1960s works, and it drew covers from a range of artists. Eric Clapton recorded it, as did Randy Crawford, and Guns N' Roses, the American hard rock band formed in Los Angeles in 1985 from L.A. Guns and Hollywood Rose, made it their own. By the time the band came to the song, their classic lineup of Axl Rose, Slash, Izzy Stradlin, Duff McKagan and Steven Adler had signed with Geffen Records and released Appetite for Destruction in 1987.

Dylan's original retained its standing with critics and lists long after the film faded from view. Rolling Stone ranked it number 190 in their 2004 list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, and number 192 in 2010, before excluding it from the revised list in 2021.