A Tribute to Bob Dylan and Joan Baez's Duets
Every song they sang together, from the Village folk era through Rolling Thunder and the 1980s
Bob and Joan - Blowing In The Wind
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In a few days, the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown hits theaters. Joan Baez plays a major role in the film, and the actress who plays her, Monica Barbaro, is excellent. So today, I wanted to pay tribute to Baez.
It’s easy when writing about Bob and Joan to get tangled up in the personal drama. But I want to focus purely on the music they made together. Because I don’t think anyone has ever topped Baez as a duet partner for Dylan. She seems to have an innate ability to follow that unpredictable phrasing that trips up so many others. “We could sing just about any kind of thing and make it make sense,” Dylan himself said in the 2009 documentary Joan Baez: How Sweet the Sound.
There were two primary periods where they sang together: the early-to-mid ‘60s and the Rolling Thunder tours. Plus a handful more in the ‘80s as well. Rather than going chronologically, where it’s too easy to veer back into the personal biography stuff rather than the music, I’m going to go alphabetically through the songs they duetted on. I came up with 21 different songs they sang together across all that time—or at least 21 where we have recordings. There are reports of some other early duets we can’t hear: “Masters of War,” “Farewell,” “Don’t Think Twice” (though, notably, not “Girl from the North Country,” which their characters sing together in the movie).
Let’s take a song-by-song look through the canon of Baez-Dylan Duets
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