Originally issued on A&M Records in 1975, Diamonds & Rust is Joan Baez’s biggest selling album and marked a change of direction; it gave her songs of the heart and politics an unashamedly commercial veneer, returning her to the US Top 20 for the first time in four years – This re-issue, released to mark the album’s 50th anniversary, faithfully replicates the original A&M UK release and is pressed on 180g vinyl.
If people were unaware of the significance of Joan Baez to western culture, her portrayal in the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown (played by Monica Barbaro) underlines how central she was to the popularisation of folk music in the early 1960s. And it is her decade-previous relationship with Dylan that hovers joyously over Diamonds & Rust. The title track is about a thinly disguised ex-lover who calls up out of the blue; it remains one of her most loved songs in a 65-year-career. There’s a playful cover of “Simple Twist Of Fate” from Dylan’s then just released Blood On The Tracks, complete with impersonation in a later verse; and “Winds Of The Old Days”, written in response to Dylan touring again after a lengthy hiatus.
Diamonds & Rust is a perfect, sunshine-drenched album of west-coast folk-tinged rock, full of star session players. It could almost have been a signal to all the recent comers on her patch – many of them friends and colleagues, Joni Mitchell, Carole King, Maria Muldaur – that Baez was here first and was sweetly reasserting her authority. Just listen to her mastery on “Children & All That Jazz”, her cover of Stevie Wonder’s “Never Thought You’d Leave In Summer” and the poignant closing medley of “I Dream Of Jeannie/Danny Boy”.
