Bob Dylan and Joan Baez had been as soon as folks music’s energy couple. After watching their skilled and romantic relationship play out within the 2024 biopic A Full Unknown—which starred Timothée Chalamet and Monica Barbaro as the long-lasting duo—many followers have a renewed curiosity of their sophisticated historical past.
Their story started in 1961 when Baez, already a folks star in her personal proper, first noticed Dylan performing in Greenwich Village. Regardless of describing him to Rolling Stone as a “scruffy little pale-faced soiled human being” on the time, she was instantly moved by his expertise. “I, in fact, internally went utterly to shreds, ’trigger it was so lovely,” she recalled. What adopted was a relationship that combined music, romance, and finally, heartbreak—leaving many followers questioning the place they stand at present.
The place’s Bob Dylan & Joan Baez’s relationship now?
The quick reply: they don’t have one. Regardless of their profound influence on one another’s lives and careers, Dylan and Baez, each of their 80s now, have largely gone their separate methods.
In a 2023 interview with Folks journal, Baez revealed that she and Dylan by no means actually reconnected after their relationship deteriorated within the mid-Nineteen Sixties. Nonetheless, she described discovering “complete forgiveness” after portray a portrait of the singer. “I put his music on, and I simply dissolved into tears,” she mentioned. “After I was via with the portray, I had no animosity left. None. It’s remained that means.”
Dylan, famously personal about his private life, has sometimes spoken warmly of Baez. Throughout a speech on the 2015 MusiCares Gala, he praised his former companion: “Joan Baez is as tough-minded as they arrive. A very impartial spirit, no person can inform her what to do if she doesn’t need to do it. I learnt numerous issues from her. For her sort of love and devotion, I might by no means repay that again.”
Their closing main musical collaboration got here in 1982 at a Peace Week live performance on the Rose Bowl in Los Angeles. The shock reunion featured a three-song set together with “With God On Our Aspect,” a canopy of Jimmy Buffett’s “A Pirate Seems to be at Forty,” and “Blowin’ within the Wind”—a poignant selection, as Dylan had written the latter shortly after they first met.
When Rolling Stone requested Baez the next yr if the couple would ever get again collectively “once they’re each 60 or one thing,” her response was characteristically blunt: “Spare us, please. Each of us.”
Although their romantic relationship was comparatively transient—Baez as soon as advised Rolling Stone, “You imply what interval of three months was it?”—its creative aftermath has confirmed to final. Their connection impressed a number of songs, most notably Baez’s 1975 hit “Diamonds and Rust,” which Dylan himself admired. “To be included in one thing that Joan had written—ooh. I imply, to at the present time, it nonetheless impresses me,” he mentioned within the 2009 documentary, Joan Baez: How Candy the Sound.
Within the years since, each artists have carved out exceptional particular person legacies. Dylan, with greater than 50 albums and 6,000 songs to his title, has obtained almost each main honor, together with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016. Baez launched over 30 albums earlier than retiring from touring in 2019 and was inducted into the Rock & Roll Corridor of Fame in 2017.