In 1965, 25-year-old Judy Collins released a new single written by a songwriter who was rapidly changing the course of popular music: Bob Dylan.
The song was “I’ll Keep It With Mine,” a tender composition Dylan had written the previous year. Collins later revealed in the liner notes to her 1993 Dylan tribute album Just Like a Woman that Dylan told her he had written the song for her.
Curiously, while Dylan would record “I’ll Keep It With Mine” himself more than once, he never released it on one of his regular studio albums. Even more surprisingly, he has never performed the song live.
Dylan first recorded a piano-and-vocal demo of “I’ll Keep It With Mine” in June 1964 for his music publisher, M. Witmark & Sons. That recording would remain officially unreleased for decades, eventually appearing on 2010’s The Bootleg Series Vol. 9: The Witmark Demos: 1962–1964.
Collins got there much sooner.
Already an established presence in the folk world, she released her version as a single on Elektra Records in 1965, becoming the first artist to release a recording of “I’ll Keep It With Mine.”
Dylan, meanwhile, continued experimenting with the song.
During the January 1965 sessions for Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan recorded another solo piano version of “I’ll Keep It With Mine,” then known by the working title “Bank Account Blues.” That performance was eventually released on the 1985 retrospective Biograph.
He returned to the song yet again during the early sessions for Blonde on Blonde in 1966.
A full-band rehearsal from January 1966 was later released on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3. Musicians also worked through a series of instrumental takes during the Nashville sessions for Blonde on Blonde, although Dylan wasn’t present for those recordings. When he arrived, attention shifted elsewhere, and “I’ll Keep It With Mine” never made the album.
Despite all that studio attention, Dylan never took the song onto the concert stage.
Rolling Stone later placed “I’ll Keep It With Mine” at No. 41 on its ranking of the 100 greatest Bob Dylan songs, describing it as a “ballad of friendship” and praising Dylan’s “sweet, plaintive vocal.”
Filmmaker Cameron Crowe was even more effusive about Dylan’s stripped-down performance.
“It’s hypnotic—just Dylan and piano,” Crowe told Rolling Stone, adding that Dylan’s vocal was “kind of heroic.”
What Dylan left largely tucked away, other artists embraced.
Nico recorded “I’ll Keep It With Mine” for her influential 1967 debut album Chelsea Girl, while Fairport Convention included its interpretation on 1969’s What We Did on Our Holidays. Marianne Faithfull later recorded the song for 1987’s Strange Weather.
Susanna Hoffs also tackled it for the 1984 Rainy Day project, an album devoted to covers of songs from the 1960s. Critic Everett True later singled out Hoffs’ performance for extraordinary praise, calling one moment in her vocal “perhaps the sultriest moment committed to vinyl.”
As for why Dylan kept returning to “I’ll Keep It With Mine” without ever giving it a conventional release of his own, he offered a characteristically simple explanation when discussing his shelved recordings with Rolling Stone.
“Maybe it didn’t sound like a record to me,” Dylan said.
But he seemed perfectly content with the song finding an audience without him.
“If people like it, they like it.”
Related: ’60s Rock Legend, From the Band Behind Bob Dylan’s First No. 1 Hit, Turns 82