Post by erik on Apr 3, 2021 17:17:07 GMT -5
Not only by chosen musical genre, Joan Baez is inextricably linked to one Bob Dylan. Case in point: a folk-country cover of a song Dylan wrote but never recorded that is in this week's Pop Music Hits Spotlight.
LOVE IS JUST A FOUR-LETTER WORD (Joan Baez; Vanguard; 1969)—If there were two “titanic” figures of the urban folk music explosion (or scare) of the 1960’s, they were Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. Joan, while only occasionally writing her songs (while Dylan did almost all of his own heavy lifting, often of the stream-of-consciousness variety), frequently covered Dylan’s early and classic modern folk material, including “Don’t Think Twice (It’s Alright)”. Dylan, of course, had bigger fish to fry; for while he did write socio-topical material that was hugely popular with the folk music base, he was looking to expand into the wider rock and roll field, especially once the British Invasion nearly wiped out all traces of anything American on the radio in 1964. This did cause a cleft between the two folk music titans, who were often romantically linked; but it was only temporarily. Ironically, while Joan continued to be incredibly popular with folk music audiences, even the rock and roll audience eventually considered her to be as important to them as Dylan. By 1968, Baez took a fairly radical step. She recorded an entire album of songs written by Dylan; and while that in and of itself may have been easy to predict, it was where she chose to record it that kind of shocked people. She chose to do what Dylan, the Byrds, and Buffy Sainte-Marie were doing at the time, and recorded her album with the famous session mafia in Nashville, the capital of country music, the very members of whom, with the major exception of Johnny Cash, were extremely suspicious of people with long hair. But the Nashville session musicians, who had also worked with Elvis, were hugely supportive of working with outsiders. The album she recorded, Any Day Now, included a song written by Dylan as far back as 1965, but which he himself never recorded, entitled “Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word”. Although Dylan had been known for writing sometimes scathing, scorned-love material, this song definitely stood out. With such a folk/country approach, at a time when the thought of steel guitars on folk-rock records was considered reactionary, it was not terribly surprising that the song stalled out at #86 on the Hot 100 in May 1969. Nevertheless, it became one of Joan’s most popular songs to do in concert; and she would continue to record in Nashville over the next few years, including her biggest hit, her 1971 cover of The Band’s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”.
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LOVE IS JUST A FOUR-LETTER WORD (Joan Baez; Vanguard; 1969)—If there were two “titanic” figures of the urban folk music explosion (or scare) of the 1960’s, they were Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. Joan, while only occasionally writing her songs (while Dylan did almost all of his own heavy lifting, often of the stream-of-consciousness variety), frequently covered Dylan’s early and classic modern folk material, including “Don’t Think Twice (It’s Alright)”. Dylan, of course, had bigger fish to fry; for while he did write socio-topical material that was hugely popular with the folk music base, he was looking to expand into the wider rock and roll field, especially once the British Invasion nearly wiped out all traces of anything American on the radio in 1964. This did cause a cleft between the two folk music titans, who were often romantically linked; but it was only temporarily. Ironically, while Joan continued to be incredibly popular with folk music audiences, even the rock and roll audience eventually considered her to be as important to them as Dylan. By 1968, Baez took a fairly radical step. She recorded an entire album of songs written by Dylan; and while that in and of itself may have been easy to predict, it was where she chose to record it that kind of shocked people. She chose to do what Dylan, the Byrds, and Buffy Sainte-Marie were doing at the time, and recorded her album with the famous session mafia in Nashville, the capital of country music, the very members of whom, with the major exception of Johnny Cash, were extremely suspicious of people with long hair. But the Nashville session musicians, who had also worked with Elvis, were hugely supportive of working with outsiders. The album she recorded, Any Day Now, included a song written by Dylan as far back as 1965, but which he himself never recorded, entitled “Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word”. Although Dylan had been known for writing sometimes scathing, scorned-love material, this song definitely stood out. With such a folk/country approach, at a time when the thought of steel guitars on folk-rock records was considered reactionary, it was not terribly surprising that the song stalled out at #86 on the Hot 100 in May 1969. Nevertheless, it became one of Joan’s most popular songs to do in concert; and she would continue to record in Nashville over the next few years, including her biggest hit, her 1971 cover of The Band’s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”.