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She Belongs to Me

"She Belongs to Me"
Subterranean Homesick Blues cover.jpg
Single by Bob Dylan
from the album Bringing It All Back Home
A-side "Subterranean Homesick Blues"
Released March 22, 1965
Recorded January 14, 1965, Columbia Recording Studios, New York City
Genre Folk rock, blues rock
Length 2:50
Label Columbia Records
Writer(s) Bob Dylan
Producer(s) Tom Wilson
Bob Dylan singles chronology
"The Times They Are a-Changin'"
(1965)
"Subterranean Homesick Blues" / "She Belongs to Me"
(1965)
"Maggie's Farm"
(1965)
Bringing It All Back Home track listing

"She Belongs to Me" is a song by Bob Dylan, and was first released as the second track on his 1965 album Bringing It All Back Home. It was one of the first anti-love songs and one of Dylan's first of many songs that describe a "witchy woman". The song may be about a former girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, or fellow folk singer Joan Baez, contemporary siren Nico, or Sara Lownds, the woman that Dylan would wed in November 1965.

The version of the song that appears on Bringing It All Back Home was recorded on the afternoon of January 14, 1965 and produced by Tom Wilson. Dylan performed it with the rock band that accompanied him on the songs on side one of the album, with Bruce Langhorne playing the electric guitar.

Different versions of the song were recorded during the January 1965 sessions for Bringing It All Back Home. Like the other love song on side one, "Love Minus Zero/No Limit", "She Belongs to Me" had been recorded on January 13, 1965, in acoustic versions. An outtake featuring Dylan, Langhorne, and bassist Bill Lee—stated in the liner notes to have been recorded on January 14, but which Dylan scholar Clinton Heylin dates to January 13 — was released in 2005 on The Bootleg Series Vol. 7: No Direction Home: The Soundtrack. The January 13 recordings and a first take from January 14 were released on the 6-disc and 18-disc versions of The Bootleg Series Vol. 12: The Cutting Edge 1965–1966 in 2015. (The song was also recorded with just guitars and bass on the evening of January 14, an uncirculated version.)

The title of the song is ironic. The singer clearly belongs to the woman described in the song, and that woman belongs to no one, as suggested by the lyric "She's nobody's child, the law can't touch her at all." The lyrics describe how the woman cuts her man down to size but leaves him proud to serve her, as he "bow[s] down to her on Sunday" and "salute[s] her when her birthday comes." Other lines celebrate the woman's assertiveness and moral conviction as the singer's tone alternates between devotion and contempt. The lyrics may refer to Suze Rotolo, Dylan's girlfriend from July 1961 to early 1964, an artist who became pregnant in 1963 by Dylan and had an abortion. Their relationship failed to survive the abortion, Dylan's affair with Joan Baez and the hostility of the Rotolo family. Suze moved into her sister's apartment in August 1963. She and Dylan broke up in 1964, in circumstances which Dylan described in his "Ballad in Plain D". Twenty years later, he apologized for the song, saying, "I must have been a real schmuck to write that. I look back at that particular one and say, of all the songs I've written, maybe I could have left that alone." Some of the lyrics appear to refer to Dylan's former lover, folk singer Joan Baez, particularly the line about the woman wearing an "Egyptian ring", since Dylan had given Baez such a ring.


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Wikipedia

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