The Joan Baez song she found down the back of Bob Dylan’s piano
Long before Bob Dylan was crowned the king of folk, Joan Baez was the queen. Together, they formed a happy little relationship that changed the world forever from the unlikely foundation of bohemian disarray. They fed off each other in a whirlwind that Dylan thinks even defied reality, claiming that some of his songs weren’t written in the conventional sense; he simply found them somewhere out in the ether. For Baez, that was a little more literal sometimes.
The times were a-changing in more ways than one, and as Dylan proclaims, Joan Baez, or Joaney as he calls her, was at the cutting edge of the movement: “Joaney was at the forefront of a new dynamic in American music. 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,” he declares in the 2009 documentary Joan Baez: How Sweet the Sound.
During that period, Dylan says, “She had crowds of thousands of people enthralled with her beauty and voice.” He was one of those enthralled by her, and soon they started to gravitate towards each other.
“People had told me about this incredible guy, writing these incredible songs,” and when Baez met him, she recalled he “was just scruffier than I had pictured, he was very scruffy. But, what they had said to me about the songwriting to me was true.”
He was also scruffy from a logistical perspective, writing masterpieces and then simply leaving them lying around. This was a bit of a windfall for Baez. “He was very creative during the short time that we were together, and I was going around stealing his songs,” she confessed on Desert Island Discs. “I mean, literally ‘Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word’ he wrote, dropped behind a piano somewhere and forgot about.”
She continues: “I retrieved it in my own house and learnt it. And I guess a year later was singing it, and he said, ‘Hey, that’s a great song, where’s that from?'” Dylan would ask. Baez would reply gobsmacked: “You wrote it, you dope!”
She continued to sing it forevermore. It became a fixture of their 1965 tour together. And on the movie Don’t Look Back, you can hear Baez turn to Dylan and say, “If you finish it, I’ll sing it on a record.”
So, they polished it up together, and it eventually found its way onto her 1968 album of Dylan covers, Any Day Now. But it continues to beg the question: how many Dylan songs from that era simply slid back into the ether from whence they came because of the original vagabond’s ragged ways.