Who are Johanna and Louise in Bob Dylan’s ‘Visions of Johanna’?
Though he’s often branded a troubadour, Bob Dylan found the destination of his pilgrimage early on in his career. After growing up in North West Minnesota, he ventured south to Minneapolis before following his passion for folk to the Big Apple. In New York City, Dylan became acquainted with his hero Woody Guthrie and, most importantly, joined the city’s thriving folk network. Thus, the spiritual home of much of Dylan’s celebrated 1960s catalogue is New York.
After alienating the folk purists by reconnecting with his teenage passion for electric rock music at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, Dylan entered his most artistically enlightened period. He dipped his toes into the folk-rock sound in Bringing it All Back Home and took a deep plunge into the follow-up album, Highway 61 revisited. With electric guitar virtuoso Mike Bloomfield at hand, Dylan welcomed his fans to more abstract, Beat-inspired lyrics and the enduring figurehead ‘Like a Rolling Stone’.
Reflecting on his revolutionary work of the mid-1960s and the song ‘It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’ in particular, Dylan once suggested the genius arrived as if from an external source. These magnificent songs seemed to write themselves, and from a future perspective, he couldn’t understand how he was able to pen such extraordinary lines. “I don’t think I could sit down now and write ‘It’s Alright, Ma’ again,” Dylan admitted in a 1980 interview via Revolution in the Air. “I wouldn’t even know where to begin, but I can still sing it.” Speaking to The New York Times in 1997, he said the song always gives him “a sense of awe.”
The inspiration of awe wasn’t confined to ‘It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’ either by any means. After his two transitional masterpieces of 1965, Dylan hit a home run with the impeccable double album Blonde on Blonde. To my eyes, this album was the third consecutive entrant in a trilogy of Dylan’s greatest work, with special mentions for The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and Blood on the Tracks.
Of all the songs on Blonde on Blonde and perhaps the entire Dylan catalogue if ‘Desolation Row’ didn’t exist, none intrigue me quite so much as ‘Visions of Johanna’. Written under the working title ‘Freeze Out’, this seven-and-a-half minute epic twists and turns through the choked-up pipes of New York’s Chelsea Hotel and keeps just enough information from the listener to incite unbound poetic imagination. The translucent imagery and opaque narrative bring much to be pondered: Who is Johanna? Who is Louise? What is Dylan going through here?
While writing the lyrics for ‘Visions of Johanna’, Dylan lived with his future wife Sara at the famous Chelsea Hotel. Some accounts suggest the song was written during the East Coast blackout that hit New York and seven neighbouring states on November 9th, 1965. The city is bitterly cold at this time of year, which checks out with the song’s working title.
The main subject of the song, Johanna, has been debated over the years following its release, with Dylan never fully clarifying whether the fictional character was based on any particular real-world person. It is often suggested that Johanna was based on fellow singer-songwriter Joan Baez, with whom Dylan had been in a relationship a year or so earlier.
In Baez’s 1975 song, ‘Winds Of The Old Days’, she seemed to lay claim to being ‘Johanna’. The lyrics read, “A decade flew past her and there on the page, she read that the prince had returned to the stage / Most of the sour grapes are gone from the bough / Ghosts of Johanna will visit you there.” Earlier in the song, the repeated line read, “Ghosts of my history will follow me there.”
Further evidence for the link to Baez can be heard in the final verse with the mention of Madonna. Of course, a ‘Madonna’ is the name given to artwork featuring the Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus in Catholicism. This doesn’t seem out of place in the song, given the other references to museums and art, but the “barefoot Madonna” had also been a nickname for Joan Baez. After a 1959 performance at the Newport Folk Festival, a writer gave Baez the nickname due to her on-stage presence, and the nickname stuck through the 1960s.
As Dylan sings the final few lines of the song, he appears upset that Johanna has now left him: “And Madonna, she still has not showed / We see this empty cage now corrode / Where her cape of the stage once had flowed / The fiddler, he now steps to the road / He writes everything’s been returned which was owed / On the back of the fish truck that loads.”
In these lines, Dylan explains that Madonna has gone, and so now “the fiddler” takes “to the road”. It could be derived that Dylan is the fiddler, and he explains that now that his relationship with Baez is over, it’s time to move on. ‘Visions of Johanna’ could be a song that Dylan used to come to terms with his emotions. Clearly, he still has some remnant lamentation as his “conscience explodes,” and “these visions of Johanna are all that remain.”
Finally, we need to figure out who Louise is. This one is more difficult; if the character does exist in Dylan’s real world, Louise could be Sara, or one of his other close friends at the time of writing, who comes across as a representation of love, understanding and warmth – perhaps a confidante for Dylan, helping him overcome his demons. If Louise isn’t reflecting a real person in Dylan’s life, then perhaps she is one of the blurred ‘Visions of Johanna’ or an embodiment of his own conscience.
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