Bob Dylan

[Joe]

When he was living with Joan Baez she said he would write in the mornings from the time he got up, chugging coffee, then switch to red wine around 1:00 pm, edit a bit, and knock off around two. This was 1963/4 or so.
He wrote prodigously, one song/poem after another. This was quite a departure because up until this time (with a few exceptions) folk singers were litterally that: they sang traditional folk songs. Songs by Wooody Gunthrie, Pete Seeger, and songs that went back to early Americana that were discovered by musicologist Alan Lomax in the 1930's as part of a WPA Arts Project.
Joan Baez got her start singing primarily old English and Irish ballads within the Cambridge MA scene which was emerging simultaneously with the Greenich Village scene.
She was an activist, but not an intellectual. A family joke in the Baez household was that anyone who gave her a book as a present didn't know her very well. Joan did not write much either, like most of the people performing then she was an, 'interpretative troubour.'
Joan got her first hit of an original song, "Love Is Just A Four Letter Word," by fishing it out of Dylan's trash can. Which she did each day when he was napping in the afternoons. He liked it, but could not remember writing it.