Eternal Encore: Alan Jackson Officiates Bob Dylan and Joan Baez’s Long-Awaited Union – A Folk-Rock Fairytale Sealed in Santa Fe After 60 Years of Symphonic SilenceBy Sarah Whitaker | October 6, 2025

The desert wind whispered through the adobe arches of a tiny Santa Fe chapel on a breezy October afternoon in 2025, carrying the faint scent of piñon pine and possibility. Inside, under a canopy of wildflowers—sunflowers nodding like old friends, cosmos blooming in defiant pinks—the air hummed with a melody older than memory. Bob Dylan, 84, his trademark curls now threaded with silver, took the weathered hand of Joan Baez, 84, her raven mane streaked with the same unyielding grace. After more than six decades of stolen glances across festival stages, cryptic letters lost to time, and songs that ached with what-ifs, the two titans of American folk were finally wed. Presiding over this historic hush? None other than country legend Alan Jackson, whose steady drawl cut through the emotion like a steel  guitar‘s sigh: “Love, like a good song, never fades—it just waits for the right moment to be sung again.”

No paparazzi perimeter, no velvet ropes—just a circle of souls who’d woven the fabric of music’s golden age. Paul McCartney, 83, strummed “Let It Be” on an  acoustic guitar worn smooth from Liverpool nights, his voice a tender tremor that brought the chapel’s wooden beams to silent witness. Steven Tyler, 77, the Aerosmith frontman whose scarves once fluttered like battle flags, delivered a bespoke rock ballad—”Threads of Dust and Dreams”—his raspy wail cracking on the chorus, tears carving trails through kohl-lined eyes. And when Dylan, in that gravelly whisper that’s haunted generations, leaned into the mic and murmured, “I wrote my first song for you… and now I’ll sing my last for you,” Baez held him close, her fingers tracing the lines on his face like Braille on a forbidden verse. Tears of joy shimmered in her eyes, refracting the stained-glass light into rainbows that danced across the aisle. It was a love story etched in melody, sealed in time—and blessed by music’s truest hearts.

Theirs was a romance reborn from the ashes of the ’60s, a decade when folk’s fire burned brightest against the Vietnam haze. Dylan and Baez first collided at the 1961 Newport Folk Festival, she the luminous ingénue with a voice like cathedral bells, he the scruffy savant scribbling anthems on napkins. By 1963, they were inseparable: harmonizing “Blowin’ in the Wind” at the March on Washington, where Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech echoed their shared dream of a world remade in song. Their Newport duets—”With God on Our Side,” “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”—crackled with chemistry, her soprano soaring over his laconic drawl like a kite on a prairie gust. Offstage? Stolen weekends in Greenwich Village basements, where Dylan penned fragments of “Visions of Johanna” inspired by her silhouette against rain-streaked windows. Baez, ever the activist, dragged him to Selma marches; he, the elusive poet, slipped her cryptic notes: “The times they are a-changin’—but you, darlin’, are timeless.”

Yet, fame’s fickle finger pulled them apart. Dylan’s electric pivot at Newport ’65—plugging in with the Butterfield Blues Band, drawing boos from purists like Baez herself—ignited a schism. “It felt like betrayal,” she’d later confess in her 1987 memoir And a Voice to Sing With, her pen dripping with the pain of a love electrocuted. By 1965, he’d married Sara Lownds, a secret ceremony that shattered Baez’s world; she channeled the ache into “Diamonds and Rust,” her 1975 masterpiece that peeled back their passion layer by lacerating layer: “You bursted in the door and handed me a notebook / Dinner’s in the kitchen and it’s still steaming.” Dylan, ever the sphinx, responded obliquely in Blood on the Tracks (1975), tracks like “Tangled Up in Blue” weaving her ghost through tangled timelines. Decades of distance followed: her activism in Amnesty International tours, his Nobel Prize in 2016 for literature that bent like a reed in the wind. They reunited sporadically—1980s benefit gigs, a 2021 Rolling Stone sit-down where Dylan quipped, “Joan? She’s the one who taught me to sing with soul”—but the embers smoldered, unspoken.

Whispers of reconciliation bubbled in 2024, post-Baez’s farewell tour and Dylan’s Rough and Rowdy Ways meditations on mortality. A mutual friend—Judy Collins, 86, the silver-voiced siren who’d harmonized with both—played Cupid at a low-key Carmel dinner: Dylan, cane in hand, toasting Baez with a rare vintage, “To rust that shines eternal.” By spring 2025, they were inseparable again: weekend retreats to Dylan’s Malibu aerie, where he’d strum prototypes from an unfinished album, Echoes of the Sixties, her harmonies breathing life into lines like “Sixty years a ghost, now flesh and bone.” Baez, in a Vanity Fair profile that July, hinted at the thaw: “Bob’s always been my unfinished verse. Turns out, we had one more chorus.” The wedding? Planned in secrecy, a vow to let love’s finale unfold off the grid—until Jackson’s involvement leaked the lore.

Enter Alan Jackson, the Georgia-bred troubadour whose twang has timelessly bridged Dylan’s folk roots and Baez’s protest poetry. At 66, Jackson—fresh from his CMT-fueled farewell tour, Last Call: One More for the Road—had long admired the duo. His 1996 cover of Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice” on The Greatest Man I Never Knew was a heartfelt homage; Baez’s “Diamonds and Rust” had soundtracked his 1990 wedding to Denise, high school sweethearts who’d weathered separations and storms. The pair reached out in August, post a serendipitous encounter at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival: Dylan, spotting Jackson’s cane, quipped, “Brother, we both got the devil in our legs—but the songs keep walkin’.” Over post-set whiskeys, the ask came: “Alan, you’ve got the voice of forever. Will you stand with us?” Jackson, ever the humble hitmaker, agreed without hesitation. “It ain’t about me,” he drawled in a post-ceremony note to fans. “It’s their harmony—after all these bars, finally in tune.”

The chapel, a 19th-century adobe gem tucked in Santa Fe’s Canyon Road arts district, was transformed into a living lyric sheet. Wildflowers from a local co-op—gathered by Baez herself at dawn, her hands steady despite the arthritis—draped the pews: lavender for loyalty, roses for the red of revolution. No orchestra, just intimates: McCartney, who’d penned “Golden Slumbers” in ’69 as a lullaby for Baez’s activism-weary nights; Tyler, whose Aerosmith epic “Dream On” echoed Dylan’s raw reinvention; Judy Collins, tears flowing as she clutched a dog-eared copy of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. Dylan’s children—Jakob, Anna, and Jesse—stood sentinel, Jakob’s Wallflowers whisper adding a modern murmur. Baez’s son, Gabriel Harris, from her ’60s marriage to draft resister David Harris, walked her down the aisle to a stripped-down “House of the Rising Sun,” her simple white linen gown flowing like a protest banner in the breeze.

Jackson’s officiation was poetry in motion—or rather, in measured words. Ordained online years prior for a family wedding, he stood at the altar in a crisp white shirt and bolo tie, cane propped like a scepter. His vows, penned on yellow legal pad, wove their tapestry: “Bob, you’ve tangled the blues into truths that set us free. Joan, your voice rose like a river against the tide, carrying us all. Sixty years? That’s not separation—it’s the slow burn of a ballad building to its bridge.” As rings—simple gold bands engraved with “The times they are a-changin'”—slid into place, Jackson’s voice swelled: “By the grace of God, the state of New Mexico, and the ghosts of Greenwich Village, I pronounce you husband and wife. Now, darlin’s—kiss like the world’s waitin’ on the encore.”

The kiss? A hush fell, then erupted into cheers—McCartney’s “Hey Jude” fading into Tyler’s “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing,” adapted with lines like “Sixty winters, one spring—our forever’s just begun.” Post-vows, the feast spilled into the courtyard: New Mexican fare—green chile enchiladas, posole steaming under string lights—washed down with pinot from Dylan’s Minnesota vineyard. Stories swirled like smoke from a mesquite fire: Baez recounting their ’64 motorcycle mishap, Dylan nursing her sprain in a Woodstock cabin; Dylan teasing her ’75 Rolling Thunder Revue reunion, where “Diamonds and Rust” dueted them back to breathlessness. Jackson, seated between them, shared his own longevity: “Denise and me? Thirty-seven years. Love’s the long cut—no fade-outs.”

The night deepened with song: a Dylan-Baez medley—”It Ain’t Me Babe” into “Farewell, Angelina”—their voices entwined, frailer but fierce, drawing gasps from guests who’d feared this harmony lost. McCartney joined for “Yesterday,” Tyler belted “Walk This Way” as a waltz, Jackson closing with “Remember When,” his baritone a benediction. As stars wheeled overhead, Dylan pulled Baez aside under a saguaro’s shadow: “The last song? For you, Joanie. Our coda.” Whispers say it’s a tender folk waltz, Silver Threads, set for a 2026 release—proceeds to Amnesty, their shared crusade.

Reactions? A symphony of awe. X lit up with #DylanBaezForever, 5 million posts in hours: Billie Eilish tweeting “Legends loving louder than ever 💔🎸”; Taylor Swift posting a throwback of Baez’s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” captioned “Timeless duet.” Music Row mourned the myth’s end, but celebrated its bloom: NPR’s Ann Powers dubbed it “Folk’s Final Frontier—proof anthems age like fine whine.” Jackson’s fans flooded his site: “Alan’s grace got ’em hitched—country’s gift to the canon.”

For Dylan and Baez, it’s epilogue etched in eternity. At 84, health’s horizon hazes—Dylan’s Parkinson’s whispers, Baez’s vocal cords corded by time—but their union defies the dusk. “Sixty years was the overture,” Baez told The New Yorker in a leaked excerpt. “This? The symphony.” Jackson, back on his farm with cane and  guitar, reflected to Billboard: “Witnessin’ that? Humblin’. Love’s the greatest hit—no charts needed.”

In Santa Fe’s starlit silence, a chapter closes, a chorus begins. Bob Dylan and Joan Baez didn’t just wed; they wove the ’60s into forever—a folk-rock fairytale where longing yields to legacy. And with Alan Jackson’s blessing? It’s sealed in song, sung at last.