“It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” is a Bob Dylan song, written in early 1965 and recorded that January for the album Bringing It All Back Home. It closes that record, and it continued a pattern in Dylan’s work: his two previous albums had each ended with a song of farewell.
The lyric is an enigmatic leave-taking, addressed to a “Baby Blue” who is urged to strike another match and start anew while the singer moves on. Dylan said the song had been in his head a long time and that the name owed something to an old Gene Vincent record he loved. Its blend of tenderness and finality has made it one of his most-covered songs.
The Country Gentlemen, among the most adventurous bluegrass bands of the 1960s in their choice of material, recorded it on their 1968 album The Traveler and Other Favorites. Their version is part of a long tradition of bluegrass acts reaching into the Dylan songbook and finding that his plain, ballad-rooted writing fits the music well.
