In 2011, Rolling Stone magazine ranked Dylan’s version of the song at #232 in their list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.
In the album notes of his 1985 compilation, Biograph, Dylan claimed that he wrote the lyrics of this song in Kansas City on Thanksgiving Day, November 25, 1965, while on tour. However, after listening to the recording session tapes of Dylan at work on this song in the Nashville studio, historian Sean Wilentz has written that Dylan improvised the lyrics in the studio, by singing “disconnected lines and semi-gibberish”.
Dylan was initially unsure what the person described in the song does that is just like a woman, rejecting “shakes”, “wakes”, and “makes mistakes”. The improvisational spirit extends to the band attempting, in their fourth take, a “weird, double-time version”, somewhere between Jamaican ska and Bo Diddley.
Clinton Heylin has analysed successive drafts of the song from the so-called Blonde On Blonde papers, papers that Heylin believes were either left behind by Dylan or stolen from his Nashville hotel room. The first draft has a complete first verse, a single couplet from the second verse, and another couplet from the third verse. There is no trace of the chorus of the song. In successive drafts, Dylan added sporadic lines to these verses, without ever writing out the chorus.
This leads Heylin to speculate that Dylan was writing the words while Al Kooper played the tune over and over on the piano in the hotel room, and the chorus was a “last-minute formulation in the studio”. Kooper has explained that he would play piano for Dylan in his hotel room, to aid the song-writing process, and then would teach the tunes to the studio musicians at the recording sessions.
The song features a lilting melody, backed by delicately picked nylon-string guitar and piano instrumentation, resulting in arguably the most commercial track on the album.
The musicians backing Dylan on the track include Charlie McCoy, Joseph A. Souter Jr., and Wayne Moss on guitar, Henry Strzelecki on bass, Hargus “Pig” Robbins on piano, Al Kooper on organ and Kenny Buttrey on drums. Although Dylan’s regular guitar sideman, Robbie Robertson, was present at the recording session, he did not play on the song.
This exploration of female wiles and feminine vulnerability was widely rumored—”not least by her acquaintances among Andy Warhol’s Factory retinue”—to be about Edie Sedgwick. The reference to Baby’s penchant for “fog, amphetamine and pearls” suggests Sedgwick or some similar debutante, according to Heylin. “
Just Like a Woman” has also been rumored to have been written about Dylan’s relationship with fellow folk singer Joan Baez. In particular, it has been suggested that the lines “Please don’t let on that you knew me when/I was hungry and it was your world” may refer to the early days of their relationship, when Baez was more famous than Dylan.
Discussing whether the biographical basis of this song is important, literary critic Christopher Ricks has argued, “Everyone can understand the feelings and the relationship described in the song, so why does it matter if Dylan wrote it with one woman in mind?”
Visits: 50