Suze (the muse) Rotolo

He had been working on the second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, and he had a Columbia photographer [Don Hunstein] take a picture of him and Suze, walking arm and arm along West Fourth Street. [It was actually Jones Street.] “The cover’s the most important part of the album,” he told friends as he passed around advance printings of the album jacket. It shook up everyone. “She was the envy of every folk singer’s chick in the Village,” Terri Thai says. “It was a big ego trip being on a record jacket.” Some friends believe Dylan was deliberately trying to affect Suze’s ego, “to give her some of the taste of what he was getting, and to make his hold on her a little tighter,” one of them says.

Dylan, An Intimate Biography, by Anthony Scaduto, 1973, p. 157

One of the more important women in the history of music wasn’t a musician. Suze Rotolo is gone. I was fascinated by her when I read Anthony Scaduto’s Dylan biography in high school. She wasn’t a great beauty, but she was the right girl at the right time for Bob Dylan, and her influence was significant. But it’s curious how many of Dylan’s greatest non-protest songs from that period, and into his time with Joan Baez, seem to have an almost negative attitude towards women.

This is a great outtake shot from the photo session for the cover of Freewheelin’. I found it on old fashion is lovely fashion.