Folk prophet and a barefoot Madonna: What happened between Bob Dylan and Joan Baez?
Music history is full of stories of rich loves, explosive breakups and emotional odes penned to fellow artists. There is perhaps no one emotion quite as inspiring as love. At its best, it’s a joy like no other that seems to inspire songwriters endlessly. At its worst, heartbreak is just as good of a motivation as anything else. However, when it comes to Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, their mutual inspiration was vivid, and their relationship status was far less clear.
Baez and Dylan are two of music’s most influential duos. In the early 1960s, they emerged as folk’s new wonder kids, using their artistry to spread awareness and tackle social and political injustices. For years, they travelled around the festival circuit, singing duets and getting closer and closer.
But then, by the mid-1960s, a rift pulled the pair apart. It was never quite as simple as a classic breakup or heartbreak. As their relationship was always interlinked with their music, being collaborative in life, love, and art, their seeming split could never be separated from their work. For years, even decades, to follow, both sides seemed to address one another in their music.
That wouldn’t be the end for them. The Baez and Dylan story is an extended one that never truly seems to end as they forever remain in each other’s creative orbit. It would be impossible to cover every single moment or milestone, but here is an overview of the complex tale of two folk star’s love.
Meeting the Madonna
While Dylan is often considered the ultimate and best folk star, Joan Baez was there first. Her career was launched in 1959 after an appearance at the Newport Folk Festival left crowds stunned. As she got up on stage with Bob Gibson for a duet, people were instantly hypnotised by Baez’s angelic folks and the gorgeous folky flutter of her voice. It earned her the nickname of “the barefoot Madonna”, instantly making her the new star of the scene.
Then, in 1961, Dylan met the Madonna. After her first albums had been a storming success, she invited the new folk start-up to open for her on tour. Each night, as he played his own set and then regularly joined Baez for a duet of one or other of their songs, he was introduced to the world thanks to her support. From then on, for the first few years, they’d be found sharing a microphone at festivals around the world. “I always liked singing and playing with her,” Dylan recalled, “I thought our voices really blended well; we could sing just about any kind of thing and make it make sense. To me, it always sounded good, and I think it sounded good to her, too.”
Their deep love and admiration for one another and each other’s music was born then. On her 1962 live album Joan Baez in Concert, there’s the first recorded cover she did of one of Dylan’s songs. Ever since that recording of ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright’, the folk singer has recorded many Dylan covers.
“Joaney was at the forefront of a new dynamic in American music,” Dylan said of the singer, “She had a record out that was circulating in the folk circles, I think it was just called Joan Baez and everybody was listening to it, me included, I listened to it a lot.” Continuing his praise, he added, “She had that heart-stopping soprano voice, and I couldn’t get it out of my mind.”
Lost in the shuffle
But while Baez had introduced Dylan to the world, his star rose high and fast, quickly exceeding Baez’s own. By the mid-1960s, Dylan was one of the most famous musicians on the planet, inspiring even huge artists like The Beatles.
While the pair had previously been on a level playing field, sharing the stage and the spotlight, Dylan was soon racing off on his own. Hooked by his own success and becoming increasingly blind to those around him, his relationship with Baez was neglected. “I think that his fame happened so fast, and it was so huge, that I kind of got lost in the shuffle,” said Baez.
Even he admits that. “I was just trying to deal with the madness that had become my career, and unfortunately, she got swept up along, and I felt very bad about it,” he said, adding, “I was sorry to ever see our relationship ever end.”
The secret marriage
However, it wasn’t just Dylan’s career pushing the pair apart. In 1965, Dylan secretly married Sara Lownds, who was pregnant with their first child. The wedding came as a total surprise to Baez, not only because of her connection to the musician but because he seemingly never wanted commitment like that. In 1965, mere months before his wedding, he told Playboy, “No, I don’t think about those things.”
To add insult to injury, Dylan’s decision to marry Lownds all seemed to come down to not wanting to be overshadowed. His tour manager, Victor Maymudes, confronted Dylan about his decision. “I asked him about it. ‘Why Sara?! Why not Joan Baez?’ He responded with, ‘Because Sara will be home when I want her to be home, she’ll be there when I want her to be there, she’ll do it when I want her to do it. Joan won’t be there when I want her. She won’t do it when I want to do it.’”
It seemed that after all those years, he wanted a traditional wife, not the Madonna.
Diamonds and Rust
It took ten years for Joan Baez to finally find the right words for her feelings towards the split. It seemed that in the time after the wedding, Dylan still didn’t leave her mind, her heart or really even her life. In his own song, ‘Oh Sister’, he sings, “Oh, sister, when I come to lie in your arms / You should not treat me like a stranger,” supposedly about Baez. Even after his marriage, their ties still kept them within each other’s orbit, but now in a painfully strained connection.
All of that comes to a head on ‘Diamonds and Rust’, Baez’s devastating reflection on their relationship and split. As the verses go on, she deals with Dylan’s fast-rising celebrity, the way it changed him and how she was made to feel inferior by the musician. “My poetry was lousy, you said,” she sings, calling him “The unwashed phenomenon” as she says he “burst on the scene / Already a legend” in a sly dig about how she introduced him to the world.
But the song is as sad as it is savage. Even a decade on from Dylan’s marriage, Baez was still begging for the memories to fade. In the final moments, she prays for a reprieve from the reminders of what they could have had, singing, “’Cause I need some of that vagueness now / It’s all come back too clearly / Yes, I loved you dearly / And if you’re offering me diamonds and rust / I’ve already paid”.
Total forgiveness
But that wasn’t the end of the duo; it felt like nothing ever would be. In the autumn of 1975, Baez joined Dylan on his Rolling Thunder Revue. It seemed like their friendship was renewed and revived, with some thinking that a romantic relationship was also briefly back on. In Martin Scorsese’s documentary of the tour, the two are seen laughing and joking, with Baez pulling pranks on the musician and them returning to their ritual of duets.
At one point, they even have a conversation about Dylan’s secret marriage. “What would’ve happened if we ever got married, Bob?” Baez asks, to which he replies, “I married the woman I loved.” The tenderness and pain is palpable in the moment as the two musicians, forever caught in a complex web of connection, struggle to find their way through.
Reflecting on the relationship now, Baez called it “totally demoralising” but claims she’s since found forgiveness. “We were stupid, and you can’t blame somebody forever. I certainly tried but finally stopped,” she said. All it took was some art therapy. One day, she put on his music and picked up her brushes to paint a portrait of her old friend.
“I put his music on, and I just dissolved into tears. When I was through with the painting, I had no animosity left. None. It’s remained that way,” she said. It’s said that the two remain friends, though very distant now, as the memories finally fade and the pain of the years turns to a separated fondness.
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