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TL;DR:

  • Bob Dylan had at least two wives.
  • Bob Dylan said marriage was not something he thought about not long before he got married.
  • The singer decided he couldn’t marry Joan Baez.
A black and white photo of Bob Dylan and his wife Sara Lownds walking together.
Sara Lownds | Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

When Bob Dylan was in his twenties, he said that he had never thought about marriage. In general, he said that he rarely thought about his future. That same fall, though, Dylan married his first wife, Sara Lownds. By some accounts, he put a good deal of consideration into why he should marry her and not Joan Baez.

Bob Dylan had at least two marriages

In 1965, Dylan married Lownds, an actor and model. Dylan adopted Lownds’ daughter from a previous marriage, Maria. He also had four other children with Lownds: Jesse, Anna, Sam, and Jakob. The couple divorced in 1977, when Lownds found Dylan at the breakfast table with another woman. 

In 1986, Dylan married his backup singer, Carolyn Dennis, after she gave birth to the couple’s only child, Desiree Gabrielle Dennis-Dylan. They kept their relationship and the birth of their daughter a secret. Most people did not know about it until well after their 1992 divorce.

Per the Independent, Dylan also paid alimony to Ruth Tyrangiel after a court declared her his common-law wife. His former girlfriend also claimed that Dylan had other secret marriages, including one to singer Clydie King. Dylan has not acknowledged these claims.

Bob Dylan said he rarely thought about marriage

In the fall of 1965, Dylan said that marriage was not something he put much thought into. In general, he said he didn’t often think about his future.

“No, I don’t think about those things,” he told Playboy, per the book Dylan on Dylan: Interviews and Encounters. “If I felt like buying anything, I’d buy it. What you’re asking me about is the future, my future. I’m the last person in the world to ask about my future.”

In November of that same year, however, evidently very shortly after this interview, Dylan married Lownds. If he didn’t consider marriage when looking to his very near future, Dylan said he did have some goals he hoped to achieve.

“I’d also like to start a cookbook magazine,” he said. “And I’ve always wanted to be a boxing referee. I want to referee a heavyweight championship fight. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine any fighter in his right mind recognizing me?”

He decided he couldn’t be with Joan Baez

Though Dylan was flippant about getting married in the interview with Playboy, those who knew him said he put more thought in than it may seem. He had ended a romantic relationship with Baez in 1965, the same year he married Lownds. Dylan’s tour manager Victor Maymudes shared what the musician had to say about his upcoming nuptials. 

“Bob’s desire to get married to Sara surprised me,” Maymudes wrote in his book Another Side of Bob Dylan: A Personal History on the Road and Off the Tracks. “I asked him about it. ‘Why Sara?! Why not Joan Baez?’ He responded with, ‘Because Sara will be home when I want her to be home, she’ll be there when I want her to be there, she’ll do it when I want her to do it. Joan won’t be there when I want her. She won’t do it when I want to do it.'”

A black and white picture of Joan Baez sitting next to Bob Dylan who plays a guitar.
Joan Baez and Bob Dylan | Rowland Scherman/Getty Images

Maymudes believed Dylan would have felt competitive with Baez, who also had a successful music career.

“I personally would have gone with Joan in a minute, but Bob didn’t want to compete with her,” Maymudes wrote. “If Bob was a king, Joan was a queen, and Bob didn’t want a queen. He wanted something simpler.”

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