‘Farewell Angelina’: The song Bob Dylan gave to Joan Baez
Any assessment of Joan Baez‘s long and storied folk tapestry is inevitably entangled with her personal and creative relationship with 20th-century songsmith Bob Dylan.
Gifting Baez several of his poems early in her career, playing together at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, and the starkly documented break-up as captured on DA Pennebaker’s seminal Don’t Look Back picture, Baez and Dylan play an integral feature of each other’s life sagas despite remaining tight-lipped on their whirlwind romance.
It’s routinely glossed over how important Baez was to the up-and-coming Dylan, as women often are in any given field. Already a recording artist with prior Folksingers trio and subsequent solo LPs, plus featuring on Time magazine before the folkie was known outside the Greenwich Folk scene, Baez offered Dylan a space on her 1961 tour and touted by the press as joint folk royalty til their bitter split during Dylan’s UK tour in 1965. The ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’ singer had behaved less than nobly, cheating on Baez throughout 1964 with actress and model Sara Lownds, marrying her six months after their split.
Popularising many of Dylan’s works early in both their careers, Baez was given a piece whose initial cut would never see the light of day until an official release of his early bootleg material in 1991. Discarded after an initial attempt at recording during the Bringing It All Back Home sessions, ‘Farewell, Angeline’ proved to serve as one of Baez’s most loved songs, frequently a part of her live repertoire and featured on the Live Europe ’83 record.
Written in the surreal vein of ‘Gates of Eden‘ and ‘Tombstone Blues’, much analysis has been poured into the song’s exact meaning. Imbued with apocalyptic energy, its motif of a changing sky toward its ultimate “erupting” state coupled with the regular parting to the titular Angelina pointed toward darker themes belying its gentle folk.
Always leafing through the good book for a biblical reference, its opening line may be a reference to Revelation 8:7: “The first angel blew his trumpet, and there was hail and fire mixed with blood, and it was thrown at the earth so that a third of the earth was burned up, a third of the trees were burned up, and all the green grass was burned up.”
The second to last verse is less clear. Grabbing the attention with an intriguing dose of pop culture, the lines “King Kong, little elves on the rooftops they dance. Valentino-type tangos while the makeup man’s hands shut the eyes of the dead, not to embarrass anyone” cryptically explore the Hollywood of Dylan’s youth. This almost certainly refers to the silent film star and “Latin lover” Rudolph Valentino who died of pleurisy at the age of 31, the “makeup man” has been speculated to imply the 1920s sex symbol’s mortuary make-up artist, adding a macabre undercurrent to his old 1850s sailors song reimagining.
Recorded another song with similar themes simply titled ‘Angeline’, whatever the evocative piece is exploring clearly has resonance with the immortal vagabond. Long destined for eternal academic musicological study along with everyone else Dylan’s written, it’s Baez’s that will stand as its definitive rendition.
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