Stephen Thomas Erlewine at AllMusic: The official release of The Basement Tapes -- which were first heard on a 1968 bootleg called The Great White Wonder -- plays with history somewhat, as Robbie Robertson overemphasizes the Band's status in the sessions, making them out to be equally active to Dylan, adding in demos not cut at the sessions and overdubbing their recordings to flesh them out. As many bootlegs (most notably the complete five-disc series) reveal, this isn't entirely true and the Band were nowhere near as active as Dylan, but that ultimately is a bit like nitpicking, since the music here (including the Band's) is astonishingly good. The party line on The Basement Tapes is that it is Americana, as Dylan and the Band pick up the weirdness inherent in old folk, country, and blues tunes, but it transcends mere historical arcana through its lively, humorous, full-bodied performances. Dylan never sounded as loose, nor was he ever as funny as he is here, and this positively revels in its weird, wild character. For all the apparent antecedents -- and the allusions are sly and obvious in equal measure -- this is truly Dylan's show, as he majestically evokes old myths and creates new ones, resulting in a crazy quilt of blues, humor, folk, tall tales, inside jokes, and rock. The Band pretty much pick up where Dylan left off, even singing a couple of his tunes, but they play it a little straight, on both their rockers and ballads. Not a bad thing at all, since this actually winds up providing context for the wild, mercurial brilliance of Dylan's work -- and, taken together, the results (especially in this judiciously compiled form with its expert song selection, even if there's a bit too much Band) rank among the greatest American music ever made.

Wiki: The Basement Tapes is a studio album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan and The Band. It was released on June 26, 1975, by Columbia Records and is Dylan's 16th studio album. The songs featuring Dylan's vocals were recorded in 1967, eight years before the album's release, at Big Pink and other houses in and around Woodstock, New York, where Dylan and The Band lived. Although most of the Dylan songs had appeared on bootleg records, The Basement Tapes marked the songs' first official release.

During his 1965-1966 world tour, Dylan was backed by a five-member rock group, The Hawks, who would later become famous as The Band. After Dylan was injured in a motorcycle accident in July 1966, four members of The Hawks came to Dylan's home in the Woodstock area to collaborate with him on music and film projects. While Dylan was out of the public's eye during an extended period of recovery in 1967, he and the members of The Hawks recorded more than 100 tracks together, incorporating original compositions, contemporary covers, and traditional material.