I first heard this album in 1965, when I was just 17 and living on the beach in Málaga. It was an exciting time for me, a time of discovery; sex, drugs and … well not exactly rock and roll, not just yet, but certainly folk and blues. And a bit of flamenco. It was in every sense of the word a formative time for me.

The title song is an outtake from ‘Bringing it all Back Home’, that bridge between the folk Dylan was leaving and the electrification that was to come with ‘Highway 61 Revisited’. I like Dylan’s version (he only recorded it once and it’s hard to find) but I like Joan Baez’s version more, I think – it has a clarity and purity that sends me right back to the beach at Pedregalejo whenever I hear it. Although thinking about it, I reckon the old record player we had access too was more than a bit crackly and degraded – my memories are probably better than the reality. Pedregalejo has changed beyond recognition too.

There are a couple of other Dylan songs on the album– ‘ Daddy, You Been On My Mind’, ‘ A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’ and ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’ – on both of which Baez has managed to stamp something of herself. Guthrie and Donovan too (she hadn’t started recording her own songs yet) and some less well known international songs. She also reaches back into the folk tradition with ‘Wild Mountain Thyme’ (titled here ‘Will you Go, Laddie, Go?’), the closing song at so many folk clubs I have known.

Musically, on this album Baez was doing what Dylan was doing, what Les Cousins was doing at this time: moving from the acoustic interpretation of folk music (and she was a superb finger-picking guitarist) to an electrified world.  On this album she was accompanied for the first time by session musician Bruce Langhorne’s electric guitar; rather subdued here, but less restrained on Dylan’s on ‘The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan’ and ‘Bringing It All Back Home’. BTW, Langhorne was the template for ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ insofar as he used to wander around Greenwich Village carrying a Turkish Drum with bells; he played on that track too.

Anyway, this is still for me an album with resonance and I am listening to it as I type these notes. More albums to follow.

TRACK LIST
Farewell, Angelina
Daddy, You Been On My Mind
It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue
Will You Go, Laddie, Go
Ranger’s Command
Colours
Satisfied Mind
The River In The Pines
Pauvre Ruteboeuf
Sagt Mir Wo Die Blumen Sind
A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall