Boots Of Spanish Leather/Suze Rotolo

I heard her girlish voice introduce EmilyLou Harris on a YouTube video, but couldn't remember Nanci Griffith's name. In these times, I search the Internet to fill gaps in my memory. Remembering one of her albums was titled, "Other Voices, Other Rooms" I was off to the races. The track listing led me to a discussion of Bob Dylan's "Boots Of Spanish Leather".

There I learned the meaning behind a song I've known most of my life. Well, yes, I see now that the initial verses alternate between characters and the last three stanzas belong to the lover left behind. And knowing something about Suze Rotolo made it that much more poignant and embarrassing to see how much I missed.

(Aficionados of the era knew that it was Suze, a red diaper baby, who introduced Dylan to William Blake, Bertolt Brecht Arthur Rimbaud and certainly sparked his social conscience. Dylan obsessives know there is an instrumental named for her, Suze (The Cough Song). Suze's name pops up in David Massengill's concerts. I first heard her voice when she was interviewed on WNYC when she was interviewed about her memoir, "A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties". In an interview on WFUV's Words and Music from Studio A Steve Earle commented that he spends a lot of time turning German tourists in the right direction when they try to have their picture taken in the same spot as the cover for “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” album.)