"It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" is a song written and performed by Bob Dylan and featured on his Bringing It All Back Home album, released on March 22, 1965, by Columbia Records. The song was recorded on January 15, 1965, with Dylan's acoustic guitar and harmonica and William E. Lee's bass guitar the only instrumentation. The lyrics were heavily influenced by Symbolist poetry and bid farewell to the titular "Baby Blue". There has been much speculation about the real life identity of "Baby Blue", with possibilities including Joan Baez, David Blue, Paul Clayton, Dylan's folk music audience, and even Dylan himself.
"It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" has been covered by Them, Baez and the Byrds. Them's version, released in 1966, influenced garage bands during the mid-1960s, and Beck later sampled it for his 1996 single "Jack-Ass". The Byrds recorded the song twice in 1965 as a possible follow-up single to "Mr. Tambourine Man" and "All I Really Want to Do", but neither recording was released in that form. The Byrds did release a 1969 recording of the song on their Ballad of Easy Rider album.
Bob Dylan's version Composition and recording Bob Dylan most likely wrote "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" in January 1965. The master take of the song was recorded on January 15, 1965, during the sessions for the Bringing It All Back Home album and was produced by Tom Wilson. The track was recorded on the same day Dylan recorded the other three songs on side 2 of the album: "Mr. Tambourine Man", "Gates of Eden" and "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)". Dylan had been playing those other songs live for some time, allowing them to evolve before recording of the album commenced. For "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue", however, Dylan wanted to record the song before he became too familiar with it. There were at least two studio recordings prior to the one that was released on the album. Dylan recorded a solo acoustic version on January 13, 1965, and a semi-electric version on January 14.
The version of the song on the album is sparsely arranged with Dylan accompanying himself on acoustic guitar and harmonica, with William E. Lee playing bass guitar. Author Clinton Heylin states that the song is another of Dylan's go out in the real world' songs, like "To Ramona", though less conciliatory – the tone is crueler and more demanding." As well as being the final track on Bringing It All Back Home, "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" was also the final song to be recorded for the album.
Bill Janovitz of AllMusic describes the music as beautiful, with folk guitar chord changes and a somber melody, while the chorus, with its line "and it's all over now, Baby Blue" has a heartbreaking quality to it. Like other Dylan songs of the period, such as "Chimes of Freedom" and "Mr. Tambourine Man", the lyrics of "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" bear the strong influence of Symbolist poets such as Arthur Rimbaud. Lines such as "take what you have gathered from coincidence" reflect the I Ching philosophy that coincidence represents more than mere chance. The song was described by Q magazine as, "The most toxic of strummed kiss-offs, with not a snowball's chance in hell of reconciliation." Dylan, later describing the song, said that "I had carried that song around in my head for a long time and I remember that when I was writing it, I'd remembered a Gene Vincent song. It had always been one of my favorites, Baby Blue... 'When first I met my baby/she said how do you do/she looked into my eyes and said/my name is Baby Blue.' It was one of the songs I used to sing back in high school. Of course, I was singing about a different Baby Blue."
Identity of "Baby Blue" Dylan's two previous albums, The Times They Are A-Changin' and Another Side of Bob Dylan both ended with a farewell song, "Restless Farewell" and "It Ain't Me, Babe" respectively. "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" concludes Bringing It All Back Home in consistent fashion. Much speculation has surrounded who or what the "Baby Blue" to whom Dylan is singing farewell is. Although Dylan himself has remained mute on the subject, Dylan scholars believe that it is probably an amalgam of personalities within Dylan's social orbit. One person who has been regarded as the subject of the song is folk singer Joan Baez. Dylan and Baez were still in a relationship and were planning to tour together, but Dylan may have already been planning to leave the relationship. Another possibility is a singer-songwriter named David Blue. A friend or acquaintance of Dylan's from his days in New York City's Greenwich Village, Blue is pictured on the cover of Dylan and the Band's The Basement Tapes album wearing a trench coat. Yet another possibility is Dylan's one-time friend, folk singer Paul Clayton. Although Clayton had been Dylan's friend throughout 1964, and had accompanied Dylan on the road trip across the United States on which "Chimes of Freedom" and "Mr. Tambourine Man" were written, by 1965 he may have become more devoted to Dylan than Dylan was comfortable with, and Clayton's use of amphetamines may have made him difficult to be around. However, author Paul Williams, in his book Performing Artist: Book One 1960–1973, counters that "Dylan may have been thinking of a particular person as he wrote it, but not necessarily", adding that the song has such a natural, flowing structure to it, that it could "easily have finished writing itself before Dylan got around to thinking about who 'Baby Blue' was." According to the lyrics, any candidate was either female or gay: "Your lover ... has taken all his blankets ..".
Another interpretation of the song is that it is directed at Dylan's folk music audience. The song was written at a time when he was moving away from the folk protest movement musically and, as such, can be seen as a farewell to his days as an acoustic guitar-playing protest singer. Dylan's choice of performing "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" as his last acoustic song at the infamous Newport Folk Festival of 1965, after having had his electric set met with boos, is often used as evidence to support this theory. That particular performance of the song is included in Murray Lerner's film The Other Side of the Mirror.
Yet another interpretation is that Dylan is directing the farewell to himself, particularly his acoustic performer self. The opening line "You must leave now" can be a command, similar to the line "Go away from my window" that opens "It Ain't Me, Babe". But it can also be an imperative, meaning just that it is necessary that you leave. And the song is as much about new beginnings as it is about endings. The song not only notes the requirement that Baby Blue leave, but also includes the hope that Baby Blue will move forward, in lines such as "Strike another match, go start anew".
Alternatively, the vagabond and "stepping stones" referenced in the song have been interpreted as Dylan's folk audience whom he needs to leave behind. He would also be telling himself to "Forget the dead you've left, they will not follow you." Others to whom he may be saying farewell in the song are any of the women he had known, the political left or to the illusions of his youth.
Legacy
In addition to appearing on the Bringing It All Back Home album, "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" was also included on the compilation albums Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits Vol. II (1971), The Essential Bob Dylan (2000), Dylan (2007), and the UK version of Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits (1967). Dylan played the song for Donovan in his hotel room during his May 1965 tour of England in a scene shown in the 1967 D. A. Pennebaker documentary Dont Look Back. The first studio take of the song, recorded on January 13, 1965, was released in 2005 on The Bootleg Series Vol. 7: No Direction Home, the soundtrack to Martin Scorsese's documentary No Direction Home, and again in 2015 on the 6-disc and 18-disc versions of The Bootleg Series Vol. 12: The Cutting Edge 1965–1966.
As of December 2024, Dylan had performed the song live 588 times. A live version from Dylan's May 17, 1966, concert in Manchester, England (popularly but mistakenly known as the Royal Albert Hall concert) was released in 1985 on Dylan's box set Biograph and subsequently included on The Bootleg Series Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live 1966, The "Royal Albert Hall" Concert. A live version from December 1975, recorded during the first Rolling Thunder Revue tour, is contained on The Bootleg Series Vol. 5: Bob Dylan Live 1975, The Rolling Thunder Revue (2002) and The Rolling Thunder Revue: The 1975 Live Recordings (2019).
In a 2005 readers' poll reported in Mojo, "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" was listed as the number 10 all-time best Bob Dylan song, and a similar poll of artists ranked the song number 7. In 2002, Uncut listed it as the number 11 all-time best Bob Dylan song.
Them version
The Belfast band Them (featuring Van Morrison) recorded a cover of "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" that was first released on their album, Them Again, in January 1966 in the UK and April 1966 in the U.S. The song was subsequently issued as a single (b/w "I'm Gonna Dress in Black") in the Netherlands during October 1966 but failed to reach the Dutch Singles Chart. It was released as a single in Germany, first entering the charts in February 1974 and peaking at number 13, during a chart stay of 14 weeks.
Morrison recalled his first encounter with Dylan's music in an interview in 2000: "I think I heard [The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan] in a record shop in Smith Street. And I just thought it was just incredible that this guy's not singing about 'moon in June' and he's getting away with it... The subject matter wasn't pop songs, ya know, and I thought this kind of opens the whole thing up." Morrison's record producer at the time, Bert Berns, encouraged him to find models for his songs, so he bought Dylan's Bringing It All Back Home album in March 1965. One of the songs on the album held a unique fascination for Morrison and he soon started performing "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" in small clubs and pubs as a solo artist (without Them).
Producer Tommy Scott was conscious of the importance of Dylan's music on the current pop scene and was eager for Morrison to cover "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" during the 1965 sessions for Them's second LP. After a failed, preliminary attempt to record the track with session pianist Phil Coulter at Regent Sound studios in London, Scott reconsidered his approach to the song. Scott recalled in interview that "The number wasn't going down, Van wasn't sure. Then the guys said he didn't fancy it and thought it was cheap because I'd tried to go after the "Here Comes the Night" tempo." The band returned to the song during a later session at Decca's recording studios. Scott decided to rearrange the song's musical backing, incorporating a distinctive recurring blues riff and piano work from Them's keyboard player, Peter Bardens, resulting in a finished recording that the band were satisfied with. The song featured one of Morrison's most expressive vocals and included subtle changes to Dylan's lyrics; instead of singing "Forget the dead you've left" Morrison alters the line to "Forget the debts you've left".