Matrices of ‘Love and Theft’: Joan Baez Imitates Bob Dylan

Abstract

This article uses Joan Baez's impersonations of Bob Dylan from the mid-1960s to the beginning of the twenty-first century as performances where multiple fields of complementary discourse converge. The article is organized in three parts. The first part addresses the musical details of Baez's acts of mimicry and their uncanny ability to summon Dylan's predecessors. The second considers mimicry in the context of identity, specifically race and asymmetrical power relations in the history of American popular music. The third and final section analyses her imitations in the context of gender and reproductive labour, focusing on the way various media have shaped her persona and her relationship to Dylan. The article engages critical theoretical work informed by psychoanalysis, post-colonial theory, and Marxist feminism.

Introduction: ‘Two grand, Johnny’

Women are forced to work for capital through the individuals they ‘love’. Women's love is in the end the confirmation of both men's and their own negation as individuals. Nowadays, the only possible way of reproducing oneself or others, as individuals and not as commodities, is to dam this stream of capitalist ‘love’ – a ‘love’ which masks the macabre face of exploitation – and transform relationships between men and women, destroying men's mediatory role as the representatives of state and capital in relation to women.¹

I want to start this article with two different scenes from two separate Bob Dylan films. The first is from D. A. Pennebaker's Dont Look Back, released in 1967, which captures some of Dylan's UK tour in 1965. I am interested specifically in the scene where tour promoter Tito Burns and Dylan's manager Albert Grossman barter with the BBC and Granada Studios over a Dylan exclusive. ‘Two grand, Johnny’ says Burns to the BBC. This moment is enthralling for Burns's slick charisma, Grossman's impassiveness, and the way the two men work smoke and mirrors to deceive the television centres into increasing their offers. What is particularly exciting is Dylan's place in the exchange as a commodity whose value appears to need little explanation or qualification. ‘Just tell him [Stewart at Granada Studios] that this is the call he's been waiting for regarding Bob Dylan, and he'll be there like a shot’, says Burns.² The second scene is from Martin Scorsese's 2005 documentary, No Direction Home. It is an interview with Joan Baez where she impersonates Dylan while recalling his response to her analysis of one of his songs. She mimics perfectly his voice, laugh, and mannerisms:

That's pretty fucking good. You know, a bunch of years from now, all these people, all these assholes, they're gonna be writing about all this shit I write. I don't know where the fuck it comes from, I don't know what the fuck it's about, and they're gonna write about what it's about.³

Both of these film scenes can be read as interrelated sites of exchange. In the first, Dylan-as-commodity is up for auction, his economic value is made clear (‘Two grand, Johnny’). In the second, Baez conveys Dylan's awareness of his own cultural value; in ‘a bunch of years from now’ people will be writing about his work. Dylan's arrogance is striking in part because Baez was crucial to his success. Baez's success as a folk singer preceded Dylan's, with three gold-selling albums in the early 1960s and an appearance in November 1962 on the cover of Time magazine. As one of leading performers of the early 1960s folk revival, Baez facilitated Dylan's rise by introducing him to her audience. The way Dylan's voice emanates from Baez's body in her impersonation highlights the fact that Dylan's value as an economic and cultural commodity derives from his own abilities as an imitator and his reliance on others. Dylan is nested in Baez, and Dylan is known for his imitation of other singers – including Woody Guthrie, Robert Johnson, Leadbelly, Odetta, Frank Sinatra, Dave Van Ronk, Hank Williams, and others – not to mention his myriad poetic influences.⁴ Baez's imitation of the imitator (Dylan) therefore elucidates slippages in property, persona, and identity that are redolent of – though certainly not identical to – Eric Lott's analyses of blackface minstrelsy insofar as they engage a complex discourse of ‘love and theft’.⁵

Lott's central argument is that white opportunists ‘imitated’ Black culture as a way to satisfy two simultaneous ‘needs’. The first is what Lott refers to as ‘theft’: to defile, profit, appropriate, expropriate, and steal from Black men and Black culture. The second is what Lott refers to as ‘love’: to inhabit and get closer to Black men and Black culture in a way that was ‘safe’ or permissible for whites, and in a way that satisfied a complex of libidinal urges. It is important, I think, not to interpret Lott's ‘love’ as sentimental; from my own reading, Lott does not suggest a bi-directional, mutual affinity between white and Black Americans. Rather, ‘love’ in this context is attraction, fascination, fetishization, and a complex of desire and anxiety around miscegenation that is repeatedly stoked and repressed by the assertion of white supremacy. But while Lott analyses the theft of Black culture in nineteenth-century America as an expression of white-male homoerotic desire rooted in an anxiety about miscegenation, in our Dylan footage, the themes of ‘love and theft’ are animated rather differently. Baez thieves a voice from Dylan and he in turn thieves the voices of others; and the two musicians were at one time, if not lovers, then apparently friends. The two scenes thus invite us to consider the idea of exchange, a narrative of ‘love and theft’ that is undergirded by their histories as performers, their relationship to each other but also, and crucially, particular kinds of gendered and racial capital.

My aim in this article is therefore to use Baez's imitations of Dylan – and there are several – as performances, or sites, where multiple fields of complementary discourse converge. The article comprises three sections. The first addresses her acts of mimicry and their uncanny ability to summon distant bodies or the ghosts thereof. The second considers mimicry in the context of identity, specifically race and asymmetrical power relations in the history of American popular music. The third and final section analyses her imitations in the context of gender and reproductive labour, focusing on the way various media shaped Baez's persona and her relationship to Dylan. In addition to Lott's ‘love and theft’, this article pursues ideas developed by Judith Butler, Homi K. Bhabha, Leopaldina Fortunati, Brandon LaBelle, and several others; I use their work heuristically to examine the singing and impersonating mouth as a focal point in the circulation of economic and cultural capital, and as a performative chamber that narrates stories of gendered and racial power, and intimacy in popular music.

‘Hearing a Voice I'd Known’⁶

My first encounter with Baez's vocal impersonations of Dylan was in No Direction Home. The richness of this impersonation is almost inexhaustible. It has the potential to animate seemingly endless debates about the uncanny, gender, authenticity, identity, ‘love and theft’, intimacy, friendship, performance, and listening. From Baez's recollection, Dylan knows his songs are good and he's aware of their potential cultural value. The words ‘all these assholes’ and the fact that said ‘assholes’ are writing indicate he's referring to cultural gatekeepers such as critics, journalists, and academics. Dylan is also recollected as having said, perhaps in false modesty, that he doesn't know where his songs come from nor what they mean – ‘I don't know where the fuck it comes from, I don't know what the fuck it's about.’

On the question of origin, of where his songs ‘come from’, Baez's ‘Dylan’ obscures his musical and literary influences with an old-fashioned idea, that of the heroic creative genius whose ideas spring ex nihilo.⁷ His apparent defensiveness here (a kind of ‘I don't know, don't ask me’) can be linked to the particular point in Dylan's career that Baez is recalling. The mid-1960s were for Dylan characterized by ambivalent feelings towards protest song and the urban folk revival, about being repeatedly asked about his role as ‘spokesperson’ or ‘voice of a generation’, and his turn at this time to increasingly opaque and surreal lyrics.⁸ Such ambivalent feelings and his change in lyric style also partly explain his reluctance to discuss whether his songs are ‘about’ anything. And indeed, on this question of meaning, Dylan is in many respects right to say that he doesn't know what his songs are about; we've long since set aside the notion of a single authorial textual ‘meaning’ (even if/when the author has a specific ‘meaning’ in mind).⁹

For these three reasons, then – ambivalence about protest song and the folk scene, his new turn to lyric opaqueness, and the fact that meaning was always already up for grabs – we recognize and understand Dylan's derision of the idea that a song might be ‘about’ anything or ‘from’ anywhere. However, since Baez's impersonation is quite perfect, she undoes his eager disavowal of both origin and meaning by reminding us of the centrality of mimicry in the creative process. Musical works seldom emerge out of nowhere nor are they the work of a genius in isolation; rather, artists are embedded in creative networks and an artist's ‘work’ might be better understood in the context of multiple or distributed authorship. I shall return to this point towards the end of the article, since it relates in significant ways to the gendered politics of (creative) labour.¹⁰

Beyond the interview in No Direction Home, Baez's impressions of Dylan extend to sung impersonations rather than just spoken ones, and these can be heard in her studio recordings and live performances. A notable imitation that appears on one of her solo albums is her version of Dylan's ‘Simple Twist of Fate’ on her 1975 album Diamonds & Rust. In his review of this album in June 1975, Bob Woffinden at the NME wrote:

The argument against [this cover of ‘Simple Twist of Fate’], of course, is that she has turned one of Dylan's most emotionally gripping songs of late into just another rock song, and it's a view with which I can sympathise. Especially as it's given added weight by the inclusion of Joan's party-piece – a fond but pointless imitation of Dylan's husky vocals; there's no doubt this gambit trivialises the song still further. It's even more redundant because Joan has also used the device (which she's used in performance for many years, and fair enough) on ‘Passing Through’ from The Earl Scruggs Revue's Anniversary Special – Volume One.¹¹

What is interesting here is the way Woffinden describes Baez's imitation on ‘Simple Twist of Fate’ as her ‘party-piece’, as ‘fond but pointless’, and as something that ‘trivialises’ what he hears as one of Dylan's ‘most emotionally gripping songs’. The phrase ‘party-piece’ suggests that her vocal imitation of Dylan is a trick or act that Baez quite regularly wheels out and, as we'll see, this is indeed the case. But as for ‘fond but pointless’ and ‘trivialising’, Woffinden is only half right. Furthermore, his dismissive review is typical of the kind of sexism that characterized rock criticism of the era. As we'll see later on, such sexism becomes more apparent in his discussion of other tracks on Diamonds & Rust and his references to Joni Mitchell.¹² Baez's decision to switch into Dylan's voice for the fourth verse of ‘Simple Twist of Fate’ does indeed poke fun at Dylan. The fourth verse beginning ‘He woke up, the room was bare’ is the starkest and most bachelor-ish of the six in the song. Unlike the other verses, there are few nouns, no extra characters, no lights or colours; it is just the narrator alone with his thoughts. The verse is stone cold in its affect and dismissive of the Other/her, too; he tells himself he doesn't care and feels only an ‘emptiness’ to which he just cannot ‘relate’. Baez's vocal imitation in this context therefore comes as a mocking imposition, an intrusion on the narrator's brooding solitude. Baez is having fun where fun doesn't belong by stealing the stage (‘theft’) and diffusing the verse's introspective angst.¹³ For this reason, then, Baez does ‘trivialise’ this verse if not the whole song. But I would query Woffinden's description of the imitation as both ‘fond’ and a ‘party-piece’. Her imitation-as-intrusion is playful (‘fond’) but it's also a subtle critique of the lone bachelor and, by extension, the lone creator. By imposing herself in the scene, she reminds us that musical creativity is dispersed and collective, embedded in social networks, and in personal connections.

This critique via imitation is evident in Baez's more recent performances. In live concerts from both 2009 and 2011, Baez sings a few lines from ‘Don't Think Twice (It's Alright)’ in Dylan's voice. But, like in ‘Simple Twist of Fate’, her choice of which verse to sing is marked. During a performance at Santa Monica Pier in July 2009, for example, the audience can be heard singing along with Baez to the lyrics from the final verse of ‘Don't Think Twice (It's Alright)’. With Baez, the audience sings, ‘So long honey babe / Where I'm bound, I can't tell’, but they switch to excited – even nervous – laughter when Baez sings ‘Goodbye's too good a word babe’ in a thin, nasally Dylan.¹⁴ That her impersonation of Dylan continues to the end of the song, intoning the words ‘I ain't sayin’ you treated me unkind’ in his voice, is not without irony given the infamous dissolution of the Baez/Dylan relationship, some of which is captured rather painfully in Pennebaker's Dont Look Back. Indeed, it is difficult not to infer bitterness in Baez's decision to change voice at this particular moment in the song. Baez conjures Dylan in order to sing ‘I ain't sayin’ you treated me unkind’ which can be heard as ‘I ain't saying [Dylan] treated me unkind’. This is a bitterness or irony that the audience clearly ‘gets’, because they're laughing along, albeit nervously.¹⁵

Contrary to Woffinden's review, then, Baez's impersonations of Dylan in studio recordings such as ‘Simple Twist of Fate’ and in live performances of recent years can be heard as more than simply ‘party-pieces’. Rather, these imitations operate on a number of levels and they are intertextual insofar as they affirm the rootedness of popular musicians in networks where ideas, property, and emotions are shared, stolen, and stirred. Baez's imitations are striking because of: (1) her skills as an imitator and thus the shock of the uncanny, of hearing ‘Dylan's voice’ seemingly out of nowhere; (2) the way she highlights the eccentricity of Dylan's own singing style; (3) the way her imitation invites the audience to share the ‘joke’ of the cruel-seeming dissolution of the Baez/Dylan relationship; and (4) perhaps more profoundly, the idea that Baez is resisting Dylan in these performances, particularly his claim (as reanimated by her) that he doesn't know where his ideas ‘come from’. Rather than position herself as a genius in isolation or disavow her influences, Baez's impersonations summon her social, artistic, and musical milieu by vocally summoning Dylan. Baez's music ‘comes from’ her, but it also comes from Dylan, from other musicians, from audiences, and it seems Baez does not view this network with the same kind of hostility or paranoia about encroachment (‘theft’) as Dylan's attitude towards ‘all these assholes’ and their ‘writing about what it's about’.

Baez's imitations of Dylan appear to pre-date these performances, thus confirming Woffinden's observation that she imitated Dylan quite regularly. In what appears to be a performance from the early or mid-1960s, Baez impersonates Dylan by singing the first two lines of the Child ballad ‘Mary Hamilton’ in his voice. In this performance, we hear Baez say to the audience, ‘I'll tell you what I'll do, I'll do Bobby Dylan singing Joan Baez, OK?’ She then impersonates Dylan singing the opening of ‘Mary Hamilton’, a song that appears on her solo album Joan Baez (1960) and one that Dylan hasn't recorded. She sings the opening lines: ‘Word is to the kitchen gone / And word is to the hall / And word is up to madam the Queen / And that's the worst of all.’ The performance is striking for its resemblance to Dylan in terms of timbre, pronunciation, stress, phrasing, rhythm, and pitch. But it also summons more voices that those of just Dylan.

Baez imitates Dylan's nasal timbre and the pronunciation of certain vowels. The word ‘word’, for example, begins with a vowel sound that is more akin to the ‘e’ in ‘well’ or ‘wed’, and the word ‘hall’ becomes ‘hal’. Baez also elongates vowels, particularly at the very beginning of the performance. And in fact, the elongation of the vowels in the words ‘word’, ‘-chen’, and ‘gone’ is not dissimilar to the way Dylan elongates the vowels in his performance – or imitation of – Hank Williams's song ‘So Lonesome I Could Cry’ in Dont Look Back.¹⁶ In addition to mimicking Dylan's timbre, pronunciation, and the approach to vowel length (which animates a broadly country-style sound perhaps taken from Williams), Baez mimics Dylan's characteristic way of phrasing, specifically his approach to timing and temporal flexibility. Where Baez's studio version of ‘Mary Hamilton’ is fingerpicked in semiquavers in 6/8, in her Dylan version, she retains the 6/8 time signature but strums quavers grouped in threes. This change from finger picking in semiquavers to downward strumming in quavers allows her to ‘mess with’ the song's rhythmic organization in the way that Dylan would. In her impersonation, she begins with a kind of pickup measure in a free 6/8 (‘Word is to’) then changes to steady-ish quavers grouped in threes for three bars (‘the kitchen gone’, etc.), but then at the words ‘And word is up to madam the queen’ she groups the quavers irregularly. Counting the quavers in the guitar accompaniment, Baez performs something that sounds more like 5/8 + 4/8 + 2/8 and then 6/8 to finish before repeatedly and speedily strumming the tonic chord at the end.¹⁷ Like the extending of the vowel sounds discussed previously, such experimentation with metric irregularity is another Dylan characteristic that has its roots elsewhere. Dylan often created metrically irregular phrases that varied from one performance to the next in a way that was redolent of Dylan's country blues and old-time influences, such as those heard on the Harry Smith Anthology of American Music.¹⁸ In this performance, Baez expertly mimics this metric irregularity and thus animates Dylan's predecessors in a way that suggests Dylan did know ‘where the fuck’ his music came from.

In addition to capturing these nuances of Dylan's vocal timbre, pronunciation, rhythm, and phrasing, Baez hones what Dylan does with melody and vocal style, particularly around the time of The Times They Are A-Changin’ (1964). For example, in the first line of Baez's version of ‘Mary Hamilton’ on Joan Baez, she sings more or less one pitch per syllable (with the exception of the first ‘to’, which ascends, and ‘and’, which descends); her version is thus very sing-able. But in her impersonation of Dylan, the melody is more melismatic; she sweeps down in the first syllable ‘word’, which becomes conjoined in terms of both melody and enunciation with the ‘is’ that then shares its pitch with ‘to’. Baez also incorporates Dylan's characteristic alternation between: (1) strongly accented words that are approached by upward slides in pitch (glissandi) and then left with downward slides, giving the effect of a kind of lapping, forward motion where the melodic pitches sound as though at the top of peaks; and (2) more stable pitches. The lapping glissando effect can be heard on the lyrics ‘word’, ‘kit-chen’, ‘queen’, ‘that's’, and ‘worst’, and the more stable pitches occur on the lyrics ‘gone’, ‘hall’, and ‘all’ – the vowels of which are all homogenized and sung so as to share the same ‘a’ sound. While Dylan may have borrowed his vowel elongation from Williams and country music, his very distinctive sweeps up to and down away from pitches (the peaks, hills, or laps in the pitch) are strongly redolent of the vocal style of the African American gospel/R&B artist Sister Rosetta Tharpe. A clear example of her employing this vocal technique can be heard on her performance of ‘Can't No Grave Hold My Body Down’ on her album Gospel Train, released on Mercury Records in 1956.¹⁹ In addition to singing Dylan-style melismas and Tharpe-esque slides, Baez also copies Dylan's rushed, monotonous chant style at ‘And word is up to madam the Queen’, which is performed in a way that is redolent of ‘A finger fired the trigger to his name’, in the Dylan song ‘Only a Pawn in their Game’.²⁰

In his meditation on Dylan's melodies, Keith Negus suggests that Dylan has ‘very sing-able and memorable melodies’ that are capable of drawing an audience in ‘using the well-developed rhetoric of the popular song form’. Elsewhere, Negus provides evidence of audiences singing along to Dylan songs, thus supporting this idea that his songs are indeed very sing-able.²¹ But while it might be possible to sing along with Dylan and his use of the established rhetoric of popular song, it is really quite difficult to sing like Dylan. One can sing the melodies in Dylan songs but capturing his nuances of pitch, timbre, and metre is difficult. Indeed, reflecting on these melodic idiosyncrasies, Negus suggests that ‘Dylan's various vocal inflections, bluesy slides, microtonal shifts of pitch, and irregular rhythms and phrasing’ make his songs difficult to notate or transcribe.²² But could we hear Baez's imitations, her performances as Dylan as both a transcription and an analysis? Her ‘Bobby-Dylan-singing-Joan-Baez’ (i.e., her performance of Dylan singing ‘Mary Hamilton’) isn't of course notated, but it is a transcription in the way a folk or jazz musician might transcribe (i.e., learn but not notate or write down) an entire tune or an improvisation by a virtuosic soloist.

In her performances as Dylan, Baez's voice excites us since we recognize it as Dylan. Dylan's body is implied and yet it doesn't appear; Baez has a way of rendering him simultaneously present and absent. It is the very in-between-ness of Baez-as-Dylan, as neither presence nor absence, that animates Baez's subtle critique and elevates her impersonations to a form of analysis that poses puzzling questions. To paraphrase Brandon LaBelle, not only do her impersonations ‘promise’ Dylan or ‘haunt’ us the listeners with his presence,²³ but Baez creates a kind of aural, funhouse-hall-of-mirrors effect: she is Baez ‘doing’ Dylan who in turn is ‘doing’ country and African American styles. Her imitations are analytic because they draw our attention to the fact that Dylan's irregular singing style is unusual but not totally inimitable and because, as Aldon Lynn Nielsen notes, Dylan's ‘affectations’ are not his own, ‘[t]hey are not the idiosyncratic vocal inflections for which he has been alternately praised and damned; rather they seem drawn from a persistent repertoire of white stylings of blackness that were common currency on the folk circuit then’.²⁴

It seems significant, too, that Baez should choose ‘Mary Hamilton’ in order to play at being Dylan, since this is not an ‘original’ composition but rather a folk song/Child ballad with pointed gender relations. ‘Mary Hamilton’ is the tale of a chambermaid who is publicly hung for bearing and then drowning the king's illegitimate child. In Baez's performance of the song on Joan Baez, Mary Hamilton travels to her fate (the gallows) in white robes, as the virginal bride, a figure of innocence. The townswomen weep and cry out in sympathy, ‘Alack and alas for thee’, and Mary Hamilton laments that her dedication to and work for the queen (washing her feet, tying gold in her hair) has brought her no protection or pardon. Enter the king in the final moments, who arrives to offer some kind of (perhaps temporary) pardon, only to be dismissed from the gallows by Hamilton herself when she sings to him: ‘For if you'd a mind to save my life / You'd never have shamed me here.’ As a tale about the exploitation of women's labour and the female body, and about Mary's impossible double bind (as someone shamed for bearing and/or shamed for murdering her child), ‘Mary Hamilton’ fits well, if uncomfortably, in our analysis of Baez's textual relationship to Dylan, and the commodity-exchange of musical artistry. Baez's imitations of Dylan – in speech, in ‘Simple Twist of Fate’, in ‘Don't Think Twice’, and in ‘Mary Hamilton’ – are not simply acts of mimicry or ‘party-pieces’ but they're analyses insofar as Baez brings to life Dylan's (perhaps jokingly or anxiously disavowed) predecessors, she foregrounds the embeddedness of creative work in collective labour and relationships, and, obliquely via ‘Mary Hamilton’, she draws our attention to the historical gender inequities, the disposability of women and the inconsequentiality of their labour, and the fact our heroine pays for the crimes of the king. It is ironic, in fact, that Dylan failed to hear the politics in this song, once chiding Baez for ‘[s]till singing about Mary Hamilton’ rather than ‘steppin’ out’ and directly into the protest struggle.²⁵

Matrilineal Lineages of ‘Love and Theft’

If Baez's impersonations of Dylan are analyses of his abilities as an imitator and of the collective work of music, they are also analyses of the junction where the ever-vanishing impression of presence (or identity) meets the circulation of capital and commodities; the junction of ontology and materialism, if you will. We can unlock this idea by engaging two complementary discourses: on the one hand, a Butlerian approach, which contemplates the elusiveness of origins and originality; and, on the other, the racial politics of mimicry in popular music. According to friends, biographers, scholars, and Dylan himself, Dylan was a talented imitator. Dylan's friend the Irish folk singer Liam Clancy compared him to blotting paper: ‘He soaked everything up. He had this immense curiosity; he was totally blank, and ready to suck up everything that came within his range.’²⁶ Reflecting on his acquisition of an established musical rhetoric, Dylan comes to similar conclusions, describing himself as someone who ‘had a very agile mind’ and who ‘could learn a song by hearing it maybe once or twice’.²⁷

Using a Butlerian frame to interrogate Dylan's imitative abilities, we begin to feel the effect of the instability of his artistic persona, which has long been the intrigue of journalists and scholars,²⁸ and its place in a continuum of ever-receding origins. As Butler writes:

‘imitation’ carries the meaning of ‘derivative’ or ‘secondary’, a copy of an origin which is itself the ground of all copies, but which is itself a copy of nothing. Logically, this notion of an ‘origin’ is suspect, for how can something operate as an origin if there is no secondary consequences which retrospectively confirm the originality of that origin?²⁹

Put simply, and repurposed for Baez/Dylan: Baez (‘secondary’) imitates Dylan (‘origin’) who in turn is/was imitating country, blues, old-time, and R&B musicians as well as Beat Generation poets, symbolists, and the macabre lyrics of Child ballads and songs on the Harry Smith Anthology (‘origins’) to create songs and voices of apparently obscure origin – ‘I don't know where the fuck it comes from.’³⁰ In other words, Baez is a ‘secondary consequence’ that ‘retrospectively confirms’ Dylan as origin, who in turn is a secondary consequence that confirms the Tharpe, Williams, Guthrie, blues, old-time, and Beat poets as origins, and so on and so forth to an ever-vanishing point of origin. Butler suggests therefore, ‘imitation does not copy that which is prior, but produces and inverts the very terms of priority and derivativeness’.³¹ Again, more simply, origin is an effect of (or is contingent on) imitation.

But this is just one puzzle Baez presents in her imitation of Dylan and, I should clarify, Butler's questioning of origins is part of her much larger project that aims to trouble the priority of heterosexuality and the characterization of homosexuality as a poor imitation of heterosexuality. So, we might also say that where origins demand to be troubled in order to destabilize hierarchies, they also demand to be reinstated in order to recognize the work of the disempowered. Thus as a counterpoint to Butler, we might understand Baez's imitations and the entanglements of origin and originality in light of Lott's ‘love and theft’ in his work on American blackface minstrelsy,³² Homi K. Bhabha's exploration of mimicry as an in-between space of resistance in the context of colonial relations, and Matthew D. Morrison's more recent proposal of ‘Blacksound’, a concept and methodology that:

seeks not to erase other ethnic and racial groups from the process of popular music making in the United States, but rather to put blackness – as the aesthetic basis of American popular music since its founding in blackface – at the center of considering what is at stake as varied communities engage in popular music making on their own terms and in relation to one another within society's complex and often unequal structures.³³

A well-known depiction of Dylan as an index of others is Todd Haynes's 2007 film I'm Not There, where different actors depict different Dylans.³⁴ That two of these Dylans are played by an African American boy (Marcus Carl Franklin) and white woman (Cate Blanchett), and some of the soundtrack's covers are sung by white women, animates both race and gender impersonation in Dylan's bricolage persona, and in some respects brings us back to Baez – Dylan is (or can be) a woman. It is worth noting, furthermore, that the Dylan Blanchett performs in I'm Not There (he of the 1965 UK tour, known as ‘Jude Quinn’ in the film) was described at the time by the singer Marianne Faithful as ‘so typically young America’ and as someone whose ‘[e]very other word is “man,” just like in the James Baldwin books’.³⁵ Faithful's allusion to Baldwin suggests Blanchett's – and therefore Baez's – performance of mid-1960s Dylan is not only gender drag but also an assumption of his minstrelsy. But while Haynes casts a Black boy and white women in the role(s) of Dylan, no Black men or women play Dylan, and no Black women perform on the film's majority-white soundtrack.³⁶ This is significant to the extent that Dylan and other writers acknowledge his borrowing from African American women, just as we heard Baez doing Tharpe-via-Dylan in the preceding example.³⁷

Drawing more from LaBelle, we might therefore hear Baez's imitations of Dylan and, by association, her (mimetic) mouth as a performative chamber that: ‘delivers an epistemology founded on processes and experiences of ingestion and incorporation, emanation and expulsion, attachment and loss: a series of knowledge paths defined by this orifice and its generative and volatile movements’.³⁸ The specific ‘epistemology’ Baez's mouth delivers in her imitation of Dylan takes us from the world of their friendship and the act of borrowing all the way to Lott's ‘love and theft’. Baez assumes Dylan's body or voice, which itself has assumed the voices of multiple others through process of ‘ingestion and incorporation, emanation and expulsion, attachment and loss’. In addition to thinking of the mouth in this way, with its unique ‘knowledge paths’ and its discourse of ‘ingestion and incorporation’, LaBelle also suggests the mouth ‘may figure alongside considerations of the gendered or racial body, as a performative chamber fully wed to identity and its social conditioning’.³⁹ Indeed, Baez's imitation of Dylan delivers an epistemology with histories of asymmetrical race and gender relations as its core or even at its ‘origin’. Her impersonation delineates the attachment to and loss of sounds shared privately (in the context of their relationship), but also the ‘love and theft’ of what Morrison refers to as the ‘Blacksound’ at the foundation of American popular music.⁴⁰

I suggest, then, Baez's imitations invite us to consider not only mimicry and gender relations but also what Farah Jasmine Griffin refers to as the (Black) ‘matrilineal lineages’ in Dylan's work in a way that momentarily troubles the ever-vanishing notion of ‘origin’ as an effect of imitation in Butler's terms. This is one of multiple ways we can engage the specifically Black matrilineal lineage (or ‘origin’) in Dylan via his connection to Tharpe but also Odetta – one of several black women's voices missing from Haynes's film.⁴¹ According to Dylan biographer Clinton Heylin, Dylan ‘attributed his conversion’ from rock ’n’ roll to folk to Odetta:

a classically trained singer who began singing in Broadway productions in the late forties before arriving at her real roots in 1956 with her powerful debut for the Tradition label, Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues. Whatever the immediate significance of his new name, the metamorphosis into ‘Bob Dylan’ began with the purchase of the first Tradition album by this husky full-throated maîtresse of folk.⁴²

One of the most obvious examples of Dylan's debt to Odetta is the similarity between Dylan's ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ (1963) and ‘No More Auction Block’, which was recorded by Odetta during a performance at Carnegie Hall in 1960. Dylan recorded a performance of ‘No More Auction Block’, as heard on The Bootleg Series, Vol 1, which strengthens the idea Dylan borrowed from Odetta.⁴³ But not only does this debt to Odetta reinforce the idea that Blacksound underscores Dylan's music but also, more pointedly, ‘No More Auction Block’ explicitly invokes slavery.⁴⁴ Thus, the connotations of ‘No More Auction Block’ root Dylan's music in the originary moment of American popular music: chattel slavery, and the theft- and imitation of Black art by the white performer. The parallel or connection between this particular instance of Blacksound in popular music and slavery as an originary site is striking and worth considering: the auction block is a platform that whites (i.e., property holders) can use to come into the possession of Black people (as property); ‘No More Auction Block’ is a text through which a white singer can possess or ingest Black music. To draw from the work of Saidiya Hartman, this history invites us to consider the ‘pleasure engendered by the embrace of [African American] pain’ in the context of empathic identification; that is, the pleasure of the white performer who inhabits the song of the auction block, but does not embody its legacy. This is especially the case since, if I may paraphrase Hartman, the very effect of song can be to dissipate and dissimulate the terrors of slavery. And indeed, we have evidence of this as shown earlier: Heylin's suggestion that Odetta ‘arrived at her real roots’ in the mid-1950s when she abandoned classical singing and Broadway in favour of ballads and blues seems not only to essentialize Odetta's musical practice and overlook histories of Black art song and Broadway but also appears to insist that Black performers should repeat and return to spectacles of suffering in musical form, in the form of the blues music and spirituals in this instance.⁴⁵

Therefore, a ‘love and theft’-type discourse underpins Dylan's relationship to Black music insofar as it echoes through Dylan's imitation of Black singers such as Odetta (‘love’), and his eventual and resulting economic and cultural value depicted by the BBC-Granada auction in Dont Look Back (‘theft’).⁴⁶ Baez's mimicry thus engages the very fact that both she and Dylan are mimics (like all musicians) and his economic and cultural value (‘Two grand, Johnny’) owes in part to African American female voices and to the originary auction block. It is for this additional reason that her impersonations might be understood as a mode of transcription, analysis, and an allusion to matrilineal lineages. Furthermore, the material conditions of slavery and the realities of racial oppression reinstate the importance of ‘origin’ in a way that troubles Butler's upending thereof. Processes of artistic legitimation as well as material and symbolic valorization are supported by and have roots in histories of gender and racial inequality.⁴⁷

Thus, Baez's imitation of Dylan raises the puzzling meeting point of the unequal valorization of historical (musical) labour and the material relations of gender and race, as well as the ontological impossibility or vanishing point of an origin. In the context of the Baez/Dylan conundrum, furthermore, this act of mimicry does some important things to identity.⁴⁸ Since she assumes ‘Bob Dylan’ in performance, she rearticulates or even, as Bhabha suggests, ‘menaces’, the whole notion of his identity and alienates it from its essence. In throwing Dylan back at Dylan (origin as an effect of imitation), Baez troubles his identity by illuminating the following: that mimicry is essential to musical performance and musical creation, and thus essences (or even origins) are illusory. And yet origin stories have a politics and power relation. Artistic and musical accomplishment must therefore co-exist with and is born of this complex matrix of power.⁴⁹

Matrices, Matriarchs, and the Politics of Reproduction

As I suggested previously, there are a number of ways of analysing the creative process in music as collaborative and distributed. With reference to the ‘creative systems’ model employed by Paul Thompson,⁵⁰ we might understand Dylan's songwriting ‘domain’ as something that is populated by myriad imitations and influences, so much so that his lyrics participate in the folk-lyric tradition as new configurations of familiar images or phrases.⁵¹ We know from documentary evidence that Dylan's ‘domain acquisition’ (his accumulation of this knowledge about songwriting and popular song) owes largely to his appetite for listening to music.⁵² To take this further, the idea of ‘domain acquisition’ (and those very words) evokes a striking parallel to Bhabha's theorization of colonialism and the acts of mimicry performed by the colonized. In other words, imitation can be considered a mode of ‘domain acquisition’, and the ingestion and repetition of somebody else's performance highlight the move-ability, malleability, non-essence, and fragility of both identity and creative work, as well as the power relations and kinds of subjugation discussed previously.

But as Thompson and McIntyre note, the idea of the ‘field’ in the creative system model is just as integral to a musician's work as the ‘domain’. The field is a necessary space that is populated by interlocutors who have the capacity to influence the domain. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi writes:

No matter how gifted a person is, he or she has no chance to achieve anything creative unless the right conditions are provided by the field … it is possible to single out seven major elements in the social milieu that help make creative contributions possible: training, expectations, resources, recognition, hope, opportunity and reward. Some of these are direct responsibilities of the field, others depend on the broader social system.⁵³

It is this ‘social system’ or, indeed, the whole idea of ‘socialisation’ in the field that I am most interested in for this final section, and I wonder if we can in fact re-frame what these authors refer to as the ‘field’ and conceive of it as more of a matrix. The liminal zone of repetition and difference that is occupied by our succession of performers (Dylan, Baez, Williams, Tharpe, Odetta, etc.) and that produces Dylan's non-essential ‘identity’ (and perhaps all popular music identities) might be thought of as a network of artists whose ideas and material pass back and forth, between and across. That this network is characterized by ongoing processes of repetition and difference is furthermore elucidated with recordings such as Odetta Sings Dylan (1965) where Odetta covers Dylan, and the continued reworking, revising, reinvention, plagiarism, and ‘theft’ at the heart of the folk music tradition.⁵⁴ Indeed, creativity in the folk revival specifically was grounded in social networks. The acquisition of skills, knowledge, and repertoire in this scene was based directly on the recordings of other musicians. Dave Van Ronk said of the Anthology of American Music, for example, which comprised songs performed by country blues and so-called hillbilly musicians from the 1920s and 1930s, that it was like the ‘bible’ to the Greenwich Village folk scene and that all participants know all the words to every song.⁵⁵

But I am interested in thinking of the field as more of a ‘matrix’ specifically to account first for its complexity, second for its implied power dynamics, and third for the word's etymological link to the mother and the womb. The creative matrix might thus be understood not only as a complex of culture, history, and sociality but also as a heuristic device that as scholars we can employ in order to consider physical intimacy, nurture, and care work (that is often both gendered and racialized) as part of the creative process. This creative matrix (or mother) might be gendered in function, furthermore, but need not always imply a heteronormative or hetero-reproductive mode of relations.

To go back to Baez's imitation of Dylan, then, and to see it through the lens of an originary or even maternal matrix, we might say that a good or uncanny imitation requires not only skills as a mimic, which Baez has,⁵⁶ but also intimacy. To imitate somebody well requires a good ear (for listening), familiarity (with the mannerisms of a particular person), and an ability to pay attention to detail. All of these qualities – listening, familiarity, and attention – suggest not only respect and support but also encompass literal and emotional closeness. Following the ‘knowledge path’ delivered by Baez through imitation, then, we wend our way towards a story of ‘love and theft’ and originary Blacksound but – via the kind of break in the fourth wall that imitation enacts – we also peer into the Baez/Dylan relationship. Her impression in the interview (‘That's pretty fucking good’) functions as an aural flashback to their relationship of the early mid-1960s and, as ‘ingestion and incorporation’, it implies processes of care (‘attachment and loss’) at the fraught juncture of labour and freewill. All this is in addition to problematizing the essence of Dylan and summoning the ghosts in the hall of mirrors.

There are different documents we can turn to get a sense of Baez's relationship to and with Dylan. These include, but certainly aren't limited to, biographies of both musicians, particularly David Hajdu's Positively 4th Street and Baez's autobiography And a Voice to Sing With,⁵⁷ as well as first-hand accounts from their peers, and in songs and films that include Scorsese's more recent semi-fictionalized account of the Rolling Thunder Revue and Pennebaker's Dont Look Back. This last film is well known for its depiction of Dylan's poor treatment of Baez and her representation as a kind of nuisance or hanger-on. Scenes that are particularly cruel include comments from Dylan's road buddy and fellow musician Bob Neuwirth, who tells Baez she ‘fagged out a long time ago’, makes fun of her appearance, and jokes with Dylan that ‘she has one of those see-through blouses where you don't even wanna’. In other scenes, Baez seems to deliberately assume the role of nuisance and hanger-on. On a car journey with Dylan and John Mayall, dressed in an awkward-looking cowboy hat, Baez bitterly sings lines from ‘It's All Over Now, Baby Blue’ with a curled lip and snarl.⁵⁸ The tension in these scenes is supported by an anecdote told by Marianne Faithful to the NME when she met Baez, Dylan, and their entourage in May 1965. According to Faithful, Baez ‘insisted on singing her high vibrato version of “Here Comes the Night” and “Go Now,” which Dylan complained about. He hates her voice and tells her so. At one point he held up a bottle as she sang a high note, and drawled, “Break that!” She just laughed.’⁵⁹

It is striking that Dylan attacks Baez's voice here and, we might infer, its power and its capacity to make its (unwanted) presence known as we heard in ‘Simple Twist of Fate’. Indeed, as we'll see, Baez's voice and body become the locus of a more sustained project to contain Baez's artistry even outside the context of Dylan. About these experiences on the UK tour in 1965, Baez herself has said: ‘The tour in England was hell. There's not really much else to say’ and ‘It was really demoralising and I was letting myself be demoralized by him not asking me on stage with him. It was just a very unhappy time.’⁶⁰ And Dylan's cruelty or, more generously, his awkwardness in Dont Look Back is all the more striking given the role that Baez played in facilitating his career, which she alludes to when she says she was disappointed that he was ‘not asking [her] on stage with him’.

Her role as facilitator in Dylan's career is well documented in Hajdu's Positively 4th Street, which describes how Baez would often give her own concerts over to Dylan, much to the disappointment of the audience.⁶¹ In fact, what emerges from Hajdu's depiction of the pair is an image of Dylan as an opportunist and of Baez as someone willing to listen, nurture, and support. Several of Hajdu's portraits of the young Dylan wandering into the Village emphasize his insecurity, his waif-like-ness, and they are often quite unflattering.⁶² According to Hajdu, the writer and musician Richard Fariña once said to Dylan: ‘what you need to do, man, is hook up with Joan Baez’ and ‘you need somebody like her to do your songs. She's your ticket, man. All you need to do, man, is start screwing Joan Baez.’⁶³ Similarly, the singer-songwriter Paul Simon told Keith Altham (features editor at NME) in July 1965 that Joan Baez was ‘probably the only folk singer to have happened naturally’ and that Dylan's success could be attributed to Grossman's publicity work but also, ‘Dylan made sure he got with the right people. People like Joan Baez. I remember Joan took him on a concert in Forest Hills. He sang two numbers at the end of the concert and got booed off stage.’⁶⁴

We can therefore use this biographical information and these stories from Faithful and Simon to put pressure on the power dynamics of the creative matrix and to open debates about Csikszentmihalyi's notion of ‘socialization’ in the production of music. What emerges when we apply such pressure is an important connection between Dylan-the-waif (as painted by Hajdu) or the opportunist (as encouraged by Fariña and noted by Simon) and what Baez herself describes as her ‘mother’ instincts towards Dylan. She says in No Direction Home, for example, that ‘Bob looked like a ragamuffin, probably one of the things I found so appealing about him. He'd bring out the mother instinct in a woman who thought her mother instinct was dead.’⁶⁵ For Baez, this mother instinct is connected to her role as facilitator:

He would come out on the stage and people didn't want to hear that. I mean, they were there to hear the pristine little Virgin Mary, and then she had one song and out he came. And I was like Miss Dove saying, ‘Now you listen.’ It didn't take long before people got it, that he was pretty damn special.⁶⁶

In this extract she mocks herself as a kind of kindergarten teacher (Miss Dove), perhaps with reference to the 1955 film Good Morning, Miss Dove. She also alludes to the public perception of her as the doting mother (the Virgin Mary) who is willing to sacrifice both herself and her music for a greater cause, notably the Civil Rights and anti-war movements in which she was an active participant.⁶⁷ Indeed, early music press commentaries on Baez's music suggest the figure of the Virgin Mary – a benevolent, bare-footed woman in modest dress.⁶⁸ When we first ‘meet’ Baez in Scorsese's No Direction Home, she's dressed in white, performing the song ‘Virgin Mary’, and thus stabilising and reinforcing this image of her as pure and mother-like.⁶⁹ Notably, this is a song that was recorded by Odetta and several times by Carolyn Hester, on whose third album Dylan played harmonica in 1961 for Columbia Records in what is widely considered to be his first ‘big break’.⁷⁰ The image of Baez as the Virgin Mary is thus a powerful one that has recurred since the beginning of her career at least up until Scorsese's No Direction Home. It owes in part to her modest appearance (no makeup, bare feet), her repertoire (‘Virgin Mary’), her role as leader in song and non-violent protest in the Civil Rights movement, and the clear and penetrating timbre of her voice, which is almost without the noise or ‘interferences’ of the body in song (i.e., the rough sound of the throat). We are reminded, too, of Mary Hamilton, who's labour and dedication brought her no pardon as she was taken to the gallows in her ‘robes of white’. And finally, the image of Baez as the ‘pristine Virgin Mary’ has the capacity to cite other women including Odetta (the origin of the conversion to folk) and Hester (another facilitator in Dylan's recording career).

Baez's roles as both the Virgin Mary and Miss Dove can be related to my larger argument about the creative matrix in two ways: first, in the context of the Baez/Dylan relationship; and second, in the much broader, more foundational context of Blacksound. Looking first at the Baez/Dylan relationship: in mid-September 1963, Dylan stayed with Baez at Carmel Heights on the west coast of the United States and, according to Hajdu, ‘Their daily life was constructed around Bob, so he could write’ and ‘Though a model for independent women, Joan seemed to feel obligated to assume a subordinate role, supporting her man, at home.’ Baez cooked, made coffee, provided wine, and Hajdu writes, ‘In Joan, Bob found unqualified support for his literary experimentation.’⁷¹

But Baez was not the only woman who has been described as a mother figure to Dylan. Prior to meeting Baez, several other women and friends supported him, and the figure of the mother appears in descriptions of these people as well. According to Heylin, Dylan's girlfriend from his teenage years, Bonnie Beecher, took Dylan ‘under her wing’, and Beecher says, ‘No one would let him even play for dinner. I ended up shoplifting for him, stealing food from my sorority house.’⁷² Such was the mothering that Dylan received from different women that, according to Heylin, it ‘became something of a running joke among his male friends in Minneapolis’. ‘During his first few months in New York, Dylan made considerable use of the maternal instincts he seemed to engender in otherwise sane women’, a skill that he had refined in Minneapolis.⁷³ According to Clancy, ‘Dylan had this image of the lost waif, and all the girls wanted to mother him – he made out like a bandit!’⁷⁴ Heylin tells us of the different people supporting Dylan and his musical endeavours despite the fact that Dylan seldom tuned his guitar in the early days and audience members often walked out of his gigs.⁷⁵

Thus, even prior to Baez, it seems Dylan had a knack of securing mother-like figures willing to steal for him, look after him, and provide an audience for him, whether that was by lending their own ear(s) or persuading the ears of others like Baez's ‘Miss Dove’. It seems yet more significant that some of Dylan's ‘mothers’ and girlfriends had links to or relationships with folk music, the music to which he converted after hearing Odetta. Both Baez and Beecher were folk music enthusiasts as were some of Dylan's other female friends, such as Ellen Baker and Carla Rotolo, sister of Suze (his girlfriend on the cover of The Freewheelin’, 1963). Baker's father had an extensive folk music record collection that Dylan explored and Rotolo worked for anthropologist-musicologist Alan Lomax. According to Heylin, ‘Carla was more of a fan of Dylan's music than her sister. She regularly sang his praises to [Robert] Shelton and, along with Sybil Weinberger, tried to tout Dylan's crude audition tape around the record labels.’⁷⁶ Dylan has since recognized the importance of Lomax but failed to mention Carla in the formation of his artistic identity, in his ‘domain acquisition’, and her role in the ‘field’ or matrix: ‘Through the years Dylan has continued to acknowledge the debt he owed to Lomax, if not Carla, only recently referring to Alan as “one of those who unlocked the secrets of this kind of music.”’⁷⁷ But in Rotolo's words: ‘He spent most of his time listening to my records, days and nights.’⁷⁸

Taken together, then, we might think of Beecher, Baker, the Rotolo sisters, and the Baez sisters (Joan and Mimi) as systems of nurturing or, indeed, matrices that contributed to Dylan's ‘domain acquisition’ insofar as they helped to facilitate Dylan's socialization into the ‘field’ – they stole for him, cooked for him, touted his tape around, introduced him to others, and lent record collections (i.e., their cultural capital).⁷⁹ Such systems of nurture allowed Dylan to further his social status as a performer and also to learn the mechanisms and criteria for him to be afforded the status of creator and artist.

But we can deepen this analysis yet further. The facilitating role played by these women, particularly Baez who gave him her audience, is important for the way it links to discourses on different kinds of labour and the value thereof.⁸⁰ Listening – doing it oneself and encouraging others to do so, like ‘Miss Dove’ – is an action that sits at the intersection between friendship and labour, labour and freewill, and at the complex juncture of ‘care’. Baez's skills as both listener and (music) analyst are illuminated in her imitations of Dylan. As I suggested, good imitations require an ability to listen to and for detail, and borrowing from LaBelle, we might think of imitations as ‘ingestion and incorporation, emanation and expulsion’. They are also an analysis – or performance – of the ‘attachment and loss’ of friendship (or a relationship) as well as an analysis of the ‘attachment and loss’ of a particular moment in their music-making careers. In assuming his voice, Baez assumes a proximity to him and her imitation enacts closeness or intimacy. Since she is speaking in his voice or he is speaking from her body, her performance makes the two individuals momentarily unindividuated and, in turn, redolent of the hall of mirrors effect. A similar process is mobilized in Daphne A. Brooks and Gayle Wald's analysis of Odetta's covers of Dylan on Odetta Sings Dylan of 1965 as a ‘kiss’: ‘Dylan's words on Odetta's tongue and in Odetta's mouth. His songs passing through her body with each exhalation.’⁸¹

Baez's appearance as both the Virgin Mary and the mimic extend beyond that particular performing and personal relationship with Dylan, and this next and final example effectively draws attention to what soon appears to be a rather asphyxiating discourse of motherhood and desexualization for and around Baez, and importantly brings us back to questions of race. In 1980, Baez appeared as a celebrity guest on an episode of the family-friendly puppet television programme the Muppet Show where she performed some imitations (of Marlon Brando and a questionable impersonation of Gandhi) and her original composition ‘Honest Lullaby’ from her 1979 album of the same name.⁸² Dressed (perhaps by the programme's production team) in a kind of Little House on the Prairie outfit with floral dress and apron, she performs ‘Honest Lullaby’ to a muppet who is going to sleep. Notably, her performance of the song starts at the second verse, ‘Yellow, brown, and black and white / Our Father bless us all tonight.’ Choosing to begin singing here rather than at the start of the song ensures that the lyric content is family friendly because the first verse has the most sexual lyrics. Thus, since there is no first verse, there are no references to painted lips, padded bras, and ‘vernal equinoxes’ hidden in faded jeans. But not all sexual content is banished. Baez retains the lines about ‘[lusting] after football heroes’ and preserving her virginity. Thus the song's worldliness jars with the lullaby genre in a way that suggests a kind of ambivalence about motherhood – she was after all, before Dylan, a woman whose mother instinct was ‘dead’. Overall, however, Baez appears in this scene from the Muppet Show as a benevolent mother figure, desexualized both by the way she is dressed and in the censoring of the song's first verse. The song maintains its coming-of-age narrative but skips over the some of the teenage years, and Baez's references to both racial equality and God reinforce her status as one of several ‘mothers’ of the Civil Rights movement.

This Muppet Show performance of ‘Honest Lullaby’ is thus noteworthy for two reasons. First, the framing of Baez as a ‘mother’, specifically in the context of Civil Rights, raises an interesting comparison between the kind of racialized maternal work Baez performs and that which is performed by African American female singers. Second, the Muppet Show appearance is in many ways a culmination of a sustained and complex process of fixing Baez's position as a desexualized mother figure that overshadows her agency as a creator and innovator. I elaborate on this suggestion towards the very end. But first, regarding the first issue, it is interesting to consider Baez's work as a pacifist ‘school-marm’ of the Civil Rights movement⁸³ in light of what Griffin writes about Black female singers in the context of US memorial events and spectacle. Griffin draws our attention to the symbolic significance of the Black female voice in American culture, specifically how Black female singers often perform the role of mother, of healer, and of unifier. She notes how Black women's voices are used to symbolize coming-together-ness and equality at major events such as sports games, and yet these women (and the communities they are supposed to represent) do not have access to the privileges that white Americans have. Griffin writes that ‘the spectacle of [the singing Black woman] invokes a figure that can make no claims on the family unity’, and she is a person who ‘heals and nurtures [the family] but has no rights or privileges within it – more mammy than mother’.⁸⁴ The Black female voice is thus strategically deployed to provide an impression or illusion of equality that belies the daily racial injustices experienced by African Americans in the United States.

But unlike the female Blacksound of the Civil Rights movement – Marian Anderson, Mahalia Jackson, Odetta, Abbey Lincoln, Nina Simone, and Mavis Staples (a former lover of Dylan) – Baez's ‘mothering’ is such that she may have had access to the privileges that white Americans have, although this is perhaps another ambivalence given her Mexican American background.⁸⁵ Furthermore, the absence of body in Baez's voice in some ways makes her the antithesis of what Griffin notes about Simone; where Simone at times ‘embodies’ a song and does not not deny her body ‘in an effort to mimic an out-of-body spiritual transcendence’, Baez's timbre has no audible body.⁸⁶ Two racialized stories of symbolic motherhood thus emerge: first, what Griffin refers to as the ‘matrilineal lineage of’ the Black woman's voice as ‘source’ or origin (we think of Tharpe and Odetta discussed previously);⁸⁷ and second, Baez as the timbrally ‘pristine’ white (passing) Virgin Mary. Indeed, the other performances such as the Muppet Show add to this description in complex ways. Baez also sings her 1971 hit, ‘The Night they Drove Old Dixie Down’ (originally recorded by the Band), with its allusions to nostalgia and perhaps even sympathy for the Confederacy, and ‘Will the Circle Be Unbroken’ is a song associated with both Black and white gospel singers.

Further underscoring such discursive binaries in Dylan's matrilineal lineage is the problematic elision of blackness with sexuality and whiteness with a lack thereof. With specific reference to the kind of minstrelsy performed by white British blues performer Mick Jagger, Judith Ann Peraino argues, ‘As we have seen with Elvis (or, indeed, not seen), [the] question of colorations – of “being” white but “having” blackness – is foundational to the discourse of early rock ’n’ roll, and it was foundational to the Rolling Stones nearly a decade later.’⁸⁸ On the distinction between ‘having’ and ‘being’ here, Peraino is referring to ideas derived from psychoanalytic and postcolonial theory. In the public imagination – or, indeed, the white hetero-patriarchy – the Black figure inhabits a paradoxical position of ‘extreme sexual potency’ (as both threat and desire, Lott's definition of fetishistic ‘love’) and ‘feminization or castration’ (Lott's ‘theft’) by the very nature of having been fixed, subjugated and contained, and rendered without agency in this very fantasy.⁸⁹ Thus, ‘having’ and ‘being’ in Peraino's analysis refer to the idea of ‘having’ blackness as a kind of power and cultural cachet, but ‘being’ Black as a position of disempowerment. The white blues masquerade of Elvis, Jagger, and possibly even Dylan (although his relation to blackness is more remote than the other two) takes the best of both worlds; they ‘have’ cultural blackness but they don't experience the disempowerment of ‘being’ Black.⁹⁰

But the discourse around Baez creates an image of someone who ‘has’ neither sexuality nor Dylan's (masculine) ‘blackness’. Note the way an undeniable theme of desexualization of runs throughout all the materials I have unearthed on Baez: Mary Hamilton is both punished and used for sex, the Virgin Mary hasn't had sex, Neuwirth and Dylan don't want to see through Baez's see-through blouse, Baez is ‘Miss Dove’ and dismissed as a pacifist ‘school marm’ by journalists, and the Muppet Show casts her in the role of mother and cuts the sexual lyrics from the opening of ‘Honest Lullaby’. Baez's casting as ‘mother’ seems ambivalent, even thrust upon her – her mother instinct was ‘dead’ after all. The sense of a ‘dead’ or ambivalent motherhood is heard in one of the most bizarre songs on Baez's Diamonds & Rust, ‘Children and All That Jazz’. In the review discussed previously, in which Woffinden questioned Baez's ‘fond but pointless’ imitation, the same critic writes disparagingly about this particular song. He suggests that it belongs to ‘that nauseating genre of superior Women's Institute songs which sounds its most sublime expression in Joni Mitchell's Ladies of the Canyon. It's mostly a list of names and anecdotes about kids that mothers exchange with each other.’⁹¹ Baez herself has said that the lyrics are more or less meaningless, and that the song was rather an opportunity to feature the improvisation work of jazz pianist Hampton Hawes.⁹²

And so what does this protracted desexualization of Baez and her role as (ambivalent) mother do in the context of the debate around musical creativity and in relation to the creative system, its domain and field or matrix? In many ways, this ambivalent motherhood and desexualization distracts from her agency as a creator and innovator. Not only is Baez's value as ‘woman’ questioned (Dylan and Neuwirth don't to want to see through her see-through blouse) but also she has not met an important demand of rock criticism – the writing one's own songs. In an interview with the NME in the same year as the UK tour, in August 1965, Baez talks to Alan Smith about this very issue, focusing specifically her voice. Baez describes her voice as something that ‘enables [her] to sing some of the songs that Bobby Dylan has written. I can't write music myself – which is too bad – but I've just enough brains to know that what I write isn't good. That's why I sing a lot of Bobby's songs.’⁹³ This self-deprecating statement is in many ways an example of the extent to which Baez was complicit through her own (aesthetic) choices in the creation of this Virgin Mary persona, one she laughs at as an older woman looking back (at ‘the pristine little Virgin Mary’). Her comments to the NME prioritize creating from scratch and assume that interpreting someone else's material is perhaps less important and/or inferior. But as we have seen, the distinction between creating and mimicry is not exactly clear, and all songs and performances might be considered ‘archives’ of particular material – aesthetic and affective relations that are not simply depository in nature but ‘dispositive’ for production.⁹⁴ Baez therefore authors through mimicry as much as she authors work that seemingly springs ex nihilo.

The protracted desexualization of Baez and her role as ambivalent mother also draws our attention to the variety of unequal roles in the creative system, regarding domain acquisition and the matrix. Women such as Baez not only create music but also perform reproductive labour in order to nurture, support, and sustain the creative musical labour of others. Baez's imitations therefore engage questions of reproduction, ‘reproductive work’, or even a feminist economics – that is, ‘the complex of activities and relations by which our life and labor are daily reconstituted’.⁹⁵ Writing in the mid-1980s in her work on housework and female-associated labour, Leopaldina Fortunati suggests that the relationship between production and reproduction might be understood ‘as a photograph printed back to front, as mirror image of the process of commodity production’. In other words (and in Marxist-influenced and patriarchal terms for now), the male worker's capacity for work (or labour-power) is daily reconstituted by the female houseworker's labour, which takes both material (e.g., cooking, ironing, bedmaking) and non-material (e.g., affection, sex) forms.⁹⁶ One of the aims of this article, then, is to highlight the varied roles in Dylan's ‘field’ of interlocutors or, indeed, facilitators, and to think of Baez's imitation of Dylan as an analysis – or staging of – the power dynamics in their (or indeed any) creative relationship.

Fortunati's ‘photograph printed back to front’ can be applied in an interesting way to the Baez/Dylan case. If we thus paraphrase: ‘What image does the process [of facilitation] conjure up? As has already been said, it presents itself as a photograph printed back to front, as mirror image of the process of [creativity].’⁹⁷ In Fortunati's terms, then, Baez produces for her own reproduction as an individual: she was more successful than Dylan at first and has a successful solo career as a songwriter and performer. But she also produces or produced for his reproduction as someone capable of producing commodities of high economic and cultural value: she gave Dylan her audience, listened to his songs, sang with him, and cooked for him while he wrote.

I am interested, then, in denaturalizing some of Baez's labour as listener, carer, and facilitator in order to understand this as being part of the creative matrix. This suggestion is perhaps unusual for two reasons. First, the idea of denaturalizing something such as ‘care’ and repositioning it as labour and as part of the creative system challenges our assumptions and idealizations about things such as ‘love’ and motherhood.⁹⁸ Second, mothers have historically been maligned in rock discourse. Indeed, the distance between the idea of the mother and the idea of rock music is so great that Norma Coates describes the words ‘moms and rock’ as ‘a commonsense, oxymoronic juxtaposition’ and the ‘common sense message delivered is that moms protect from rock; they do not themselves rock’.⁹⁹ It is not only mothers but also related characters and roles in reproductive labour such as the figure of the ‘housewife’, maligned in historic music press discourse as anathema to the greatness anti-commercial rock music.¹⁰⁰

But crucially, thinking more about the role of ‘care’ and socialization in the creative system or matrix is one of several ways to unlock women's and differently gendered contributions to histories of music, to the constitution of the canon, and even alternative ways of ‘knowing’ and doing music.¹⁰¹ Thus, the figure of the romantic artist – the ramblin’, gamblin’ Guthrie-style bum, the ‘vagabond’ or the macho folk persona whose metaphorical home is the road¹⁰² – is easily and productively unravelled with attention to the complexity and the inequality that comprises the creative matrix. Understanding artistic artefacts as not only networked but also the products of (hidden) nurture, stability, facilitation, and exploitation could present ways to think through the variously gendered and racialized economies of popular music.

Thus, in the first instance, Baez/Dylan offers a productive example of the way female-associated labour undergirds the spectre of white-male originality. But, going further, there's something specific and unique about Baez's acts of direct and knowing mimicry as it maps onto an intimate, real-life relationship.¹⁰³ Baez's imitations of Dylan are more than simply a thesis on the important of influence, copying or even exploitation to acquire musical ‘chops’ or public acclaim (as in the case of somebody such as Elvis and Big Mama Thornton, for example). Rather, her imitations are tears in the fabric that usually separates public musical personae from their private spheres. When we listen to Baez imitate Dylan, it's as though we're eavesdropping on (our fantasy of) their private relationship.

The ‘creative matrix’ might thus be used as a heuristic tool to analyse popular music's intimacies as they pertain specifically to gender and unequal power relations. As a mode of analysis, the matrix attends not only to gendered or racialized power imbalances but also to certain intimacies as forms of musicking, which can include domesticity, listening, sex, and parenting.¹⁰⁴ The matrix, in this context, thus takes into account the social, cultural, and historical conditions regarding the ‘birth’ of a musical work while crucially encouraging us to feel around the limits of what constitutes specifically musical labour. What is so striking and productive about Baez/Dylan is that she (Baez) puts music and au/oral exchange at the centre of their particular intimacy.

Conclusion: Creative Matrices, or ‘a photograph printed back to front’

As I indicated at the beginning, the origins of this article were Baez's imitations of Dylan, but I was also interested in LaBelle's work The Lexicon of the Mouth and in lines of inquiry that might prompt new avenues for analysis, unlock debates about the power dynamics of creative matrices, and dismantle and disperse the monolithic male creator. From LaBelle, I was interested in two interconnected proposals: (1) that ‘the acoustical’ can be ‘a specific paradigm, a type of knowledge structure from which understandings of social life, bodily identities, and cultural practices can be considered and brought into dialogue’ (my emphasis); and (2) the idea that there is such a thing as a ‘listening subject’.¹⁰⁵ While musicology, popular music studies, and sound studies certainly engage the acoustical as a type of knowledge structure, I was interested in a potentially unique kind of knowledge structure produced or associated with the role or position of listener, with the listening subject. Baez's imitations of Dylan are about listening, and the knowledge structure she produces is one that engages themes of friendship, history, attachment, and loss. Her imitations invite us to consider the economy of creativity, of what passes through, to, and from the mouth and ears, and of listening as agency and listening as a reproductive act, rather than listening as a passive activity. Her impressions of Dylan analyse and stage the power dynamics in their creative relationship, and they draw our attention to the fact that Dylan and Baez were both imitators: the words she recalls or performs, and her adeptness at reanimating them as he would, highlight aspects of property, persona, and identity.

While we know that Dylan borrowed from many other musicians, many of whom were African American, and we know from biographical sources that Baez was a facilitator, her impressions are unique as analyses because they bring these two discourses together, as well as provoking an uncanny effect of identity and temporal slippage. I posit Baez's impression of Dylan as analyses because they ask important (implicit) questions. But Baez's imitations also necessarily engage popular music's originary site of primitive accumulation. The circulation (or exchange) of popular songs and culture is via the ‘performative chamber’ of the mouth, which as LaBelle writes is ‘a cavity by which to capture additional voices’¹⁰⁶ and as Lott details in Love and Theft is a cavity that the white performer uses to profit from fantasies about blackness.¹⁰⁷ Black ‘voices’ or Blacksound are stolen for the minstrel show from a place of white supremacist avarice, longing, and lust. Baez re-captures Dylan's many borrowed voices (which include Black and minstrel repertoire), and asserts her role in the matrix, alongside others, as an originary facilitator of his career.

I will close with two scenes from two Bob Dylan films. Coming back to the scene in Dont Look Back with Burns and Grossman, we understand the auctioning of Dylan to the highest bidder (BBC or Granada), and his value-as-commodity and his cultural status as something that is contingent on matrices of power that involves not only Baez as mother but also a matrilineal lineage of Blacksound. We can turn as well to Scorsese's more recent account of the Rolling Thunder Revue, and specifically the part of the tour when Baez not only impersonates Dylan vocally but also physically, in appearance and mannerisms. She assumes his clothes, physical features, gestures, and voice, and describes both the experience and the privilege:

One time I got all dressed up as Bob, which I would do periodically. Put these little beard markings all over and then have a moustache on, and then I put his hat on and some white face. I walked over when nobody was really paying attention, and I'd be Bob. And there was this table of like food and catering and coffee, and Louie was there and I said [mimicking Dylan], ‘hey, so gimme some coffee.’ And people got me some coffee like that! ‘Do you want this? Do you want this? Do you want milk? Do you want sugar?’ And I just had a cigarette in my hand going like that [pretends to smoke], and they treated me the way they treated Bob. ‘Do you want this? Do you want that? What can we do?’ It was amazing. It was amazing. Until I said something like [in her own voice], ‘Oh for Christ's sake, Louie.’¹⁰⁸

By dressing up as ‘Dylan’ on the Rolling Thunder Revue (complete with white face paint) Baez inhabits and has access to special treatment and to the deference of others; she is able to experience what it is like to have his value. Like her other imitations of Dylan across her career, she not only inhabits and experiences his value but she analyses it, too. Baez's ‘theft’ of Dylan's voice not only asserts the extent to which she ‘loved’ him into existence – in Fortunati's terms – but also conjures the other actors and hidden voices and the often-unequal roles they have played in the creative matrix, while illuminating the underexplored musical ‘work’ of listening and intimacy.