Diamonds and Rust, Radio 4
Joan Baez, aka the Queen of Folk, is halfway through writing a song when she gets a call from Bob Dylan.
It’s 1974, almost 10 years after their relationship ended.
The song she wrote after the call is famous.
“Well, I’ll be damned / Here comes your ghost again / But that’s not unusual / It’s just that the moon is full / And you happened to call / And here I sit / Hand on the telephone / Hearing a voice I’d known / A couple of light years ago.”
This is the story of a woman in her early 30s getting a phone call from her boyfriend from back in her early twenties, looking back at both the diamonds of their time together and the rust.
It’s about a boy called Bobby Dylan with eyes “bluer than robin’s eggs”.
Music writer EG Perry knows their story well: “It’s easy to see what they would’ve seen in each other.”
Joan Baez helped usher Bob Dylan into the limelight and shared her spotlight with him, said Perry.
“All my mother instincts all poured out because he was a scruffy little mess,” said Baez.
But by Newport 1965, it’s all over between the pair. Dylan goes electric, he is playing rock ‘n roll.
He’s the star, she’s not. He’s getting into drugs, she’s not into that.
“His fame happened so fast and was so huge that I just got lost in the shuffle,” said Baez.
On Soul Music, Edith Hall, classicist, says she could not get this song out of her mind when her first marriage broke up.
At university in Oxford, she was a very young and vulnerable 19 when she went out with a man who treated her appallingly.
A friend of his told her: “You shouldn’t let him treat you like that… I can see you are very smart.”
That friend became her great love. She married him.
But he wasn’t faithful.
“It took me years to get the courage to leave,” she said. “I told him the night that the Berlin wall came down.”
It was a November night and she played Diamonds and Rust over and over again, and wept.
The break-up hit hard. There would be a happy ending with someone else.
“You know what, life has never been technicolour again – it’s that technicolour of your 20s,” she said.
Soul Music is a beautiful listen and this has to be one of my favourites. You’ll be haunted by the song for light years.
This is the story of a woman in her early 30s getting a phone call from her boyfriend from back in her early twenties, looking back at both the diamonds of their time together and the rust