On This Day in 2011, the World Lost One of Bob Dylan’s First Muses, Who Helped Inspire the Most Iconic (And Regretful) Songs of His Career

For a brief and innocent moment in his early 20s, the now-famously opaque and private Bob Dylan was so young and smitten with love that he featured his then-19-year-old girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, on an album cover that would become one of his most well-known and recognized: The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan from 1963. The young woman on the cover, hair blowing away from her face in the wind, wrapped tight in a green trench coat and clinging to an equally cold-looking Dylan, was artist and future teacher, Suze Rotolo.

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Rotolo was one of Dylan’s first muses when he was coming up in the New York City folk scene. His recollections of his first time seeing her paint a picture of a man desperately physically attracted to a girl he just met. But as their relationship deepened, so, too, did Rotolo’s influence on Dylan’s emotional and mental perspectives. A “red diaper baby” who grew into a social activist herself, many historians consider Rotolo to be one of the driving forces of Dylan’s shift to sociopolitical songwriting.

Dylan and Rotolo shared the kind of reckless, youthful, and naive love often reserved for one’s late teens and early twenties. And as most relationships at that time tend to do, it fractured irrevocably, sending each ex-lover down a far different path. Rotolo tried her best to distance herself from Dylan’s legacy in the decades that followed. Dylan, however, immortalized their relationship in song—multiple times.

Suze Rotolo Helped Inspire Some of Bob Dylan’s Most Iconic Songs

Many factors played into Bob Dylan and Suze Rotolo parting ways in the early 1960s: the increasing pressure of Dylan’s blossoming fame, his public affair with Joan Baez, a difficult abortion, a lengthy distance after Rotolo escaped the mounting tensions in New York City to study art in Italy, and Dylan’s growing sense of independence, to name only a few. It was a volatile time full of change, and Dylan’s temperament was at once a benefit and a hindrance to this kind of metamorphosis.

“Bob was charismatic,” Rotolo later recalled, per her obituary in The Guardian. “He was a beacon. A lighthouse. He was also a black hole. He required committed backup and protection I was unable to provide consistently, probably because I needed them myself.”

In many ways, Dylan was more forthcoming about his feelings toward Rotolo in his music than he was in real life. Interestingly, Rotolo didn’t even know Dylan’s real name was Robert Zimmerman until he dropped his wallet, and his draft card fell out. With this much distance between them, the relationship was almost doomed to fail. And from all those ups and downs, Dylan found great inspiration.

Rotolo inspired some of Dylan’s most iconic songs, including “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright”, “Boots of Spanish Leather”, Tomorrow Is a Long Time”, and “One Too Many Mornings”. Dylan also wrote “Ballad in Plain D” about Rotolo, something he would later come to regret. “I must have been a real schmuck to write that,” Dylan once said.

Rotolo died of lung cancer on February 25, 2011. She was 67 years old. Rotolo married filmmaker Enzo Bartoliocci and had a son, Luca. Rotolo was a lifelong New York City resident and prolific artist, satirist, and teacher at Parsons School of Design.

Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images