The poet's poet: 'Queen of folk' Joan Baez and Bob Dylan

It was in the early 1960s that Joan Baez, firmly on her way to earning the crown of “queen of folk”, met the “urban hillbilly”, and fell in love with him and his music. The romance lasted for two music-fuelled years. Bob Dylan became a superstar and moved on with his life, his lovers and his music — the music evolved from acoustic to electric, and from folk and protest to life itself.

Dylan moved on from rock ’n’ roll renegade to becoming husband and father; then, when sunniness turned to pain, to write about heartache; then to gospel songs; then to a period of obscurity in the ’80s (like “the complete unknown” he wrote about two decades earlier); before acknowledging in the early 2000s that he “was out of range/I used to care, but things have changed”. Baez was less prone to change, and perhaps found it more difficult to stop caring. Almost a decade after he had bid adieu to the phase of a protest singer, Baez was imploring Dylan to return.

In 1972 she wrote a song “To Bobby” with lines that went: “You left us marching on the road and said how heavy was the load/ The years were young, the struggle barely had its start/ Do you hear the voices in the night, Bobby?/ They’re crying for you/ See the children in the morning light, Bobby/ They’re dying…” If Bobby heard the song, he wasn’t listening. For his part, he was dealing with a heavy load of a different kind. Musically, he had hit a dead end and, by 1973, his eight-year marriage to first wife Sara was beginning to come apart. The divorce came four years later, but not before Dylan released, in 1975, what many believe is his greatest and most blistering piece of work, Blood on the Tracks, which critics were quick to dub the “divorce album”; perhaps one of them was slightly more accurate when he called it “ an angry, ragged farewell to his wife… when hope and optimism turn to pain and confusion”.



That pain resulted in some of the most fertile, poignant and pathos-laced poetry Dylan had ever written: “People tell me it’s a sin/ to know and feel too much within/I still believe she was my twin, but I lost the ring/ She was born in spring, but I was born too late/ Blame it on a simple twist of fate.” If Bobby was the anguished romantic in the 1970s, Baez was still wearing the activist hat, singing songs that expressed her social and political views, and involving herself in human rights work. Unlike Dylan, though, she hadn’t quite moved on, or rather hadn’t quite moved away. Evidence of that was her much-acclaimed 1975 album Diamonds & Rust in which the activist hat is kept aside to write about “ghosts of my history”, and “memories tumbling like sweets from a jar.”

Songs like “Winds of the Old Days”, “Never Dreamed You’d Leave in Summer”, a (not purely coincidental) cover of “Simple Twist of Fate” and the most reminisced “Diamonds & Rust” left little to the imagination who Baez was pining for. One of those sweets from a jar that tumbled out in “Diamonds & Rust” was that Dylan didn’t think much of Baez as a poet. Perhaps Dylan believed activism and poetry didn’t quite mix. He wasn’t wrong.And if Baez proved him wrong — that she could indeed write lyrical verse — she could do so only when not writing protest songs, and instead preferring to be a romantic — an anguished one, much like Dylan was in those years; but, unlike Dylan, stuck in the past.

Dylan had little time and sympathy for nostalgia: perhaps his masterpiece “Visions of Johanna” was a rare exception in which he gazes into the immediate past; the visions that had once “conquered his mind” are “all that remain” by the end of the song; Baez was sure the song was about her, written as it was in 1966, after they had parted ways. In “Diamonds & Rust”, Baez acknowledges their differences on nostalgia. “Now you’re telling me, you’re not nostalgic/ Then give me another word for it/ You are so good with words/ And at keeping things vague….”

With lyrics like that, Dylan would have admitted that Baez’s poetry finally wasn’t so “lousy”, after all. Hours after Dylan was declared a Nobel laureate, Baez wrote on a Facebook post: “The rebellious, reclusive, unpredictable artist/composer is exactly where the Nobel Prize for Literature needs to be. His gift with words is unsurpassable. Out of my repertoire spanning 60 years, no songs have been more moving and worthy in their depth, darkness, fury, mystery, beauty and humour than Bob’s. None has been more of a pleasure to sing. None will come again.” Few would accuse Baez of sinking into nostalgia with such precise, honest and fulsome praise. You could, however, give her another word for it. And you don’t even have to be good at words to do that.

Joan Baez after Bob Dylan won the Nobel: “His gift with words is unsurpassable. Out of my repertoire spanning 60 years, no songs have been more moving and worthy in their depth, darkness, fury, mystery, beauty and humour than Bob’s. None has been more of a pleasure to sing. None will come again.”