Joan Baez
Joan Chandos Baez is an American singer, songwriter, musician, and activist. Her contemporary folk music often includes songs of protest and social justice. Baez has performed publicly for over 60 years, releasing more than 30 albums.
Baez is generally regarded as a folk singer, but her music has diversified since the counterculture era of the 1960s and encompasses genres such as folk rock, pop, country, and gospel music. She began her recording career in 1960 and achieved immediate success. Her first three albums, Joan Baez, Joan Baez, Vol. 2 and Joan Baez in Concert, all achieved gold record status. Although a songwriter herself, Baez generally interprets others' work, having recorded many traditional songs and songs written by the Allman Brothers Band, the Beatles, Jackson Browne, Leonard Cohen, Woody Guthrie, Violeta Parra, the Rolling Stones, Pete Seeger, Paul Simon, Stevie Wonder, Bob Marley, and many others. She was one of the first major artists to record songs by Bob Dylan in the early 1960s; Baez was already an internationally celebrated artist and did much to popularize his early songwriting efforts. Her tumultuous relationship with Dylan later became the subject of songs by each of them and generated much public speculation. On her later albums she has found success interpreting the work of more recent songwriters, including Ryan Adams, Josh Ritter, Steve Earle, Natalie Merchant, and Joe Henry.
Baez's songs include "Diamonds & Rust" and covers of Phil Ochs's "There but for Fortune" and the Band's "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down". She also recorded "Farewell, Angelina", "Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word", "Forever Young", "Here's to You", "Joe Hill", "Sweet Sir Galahad" and "We Shall Overcome". Baez performed fourteen songs at the 1969 Woodstock Festival and has displayed a lifelong commitment to political and social activism in the fields of nonviolence, civil rights, human rights, and the environment. Baez was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on April 7, 2017.
Early and personal life
Baez was born in the Staten Island borough of New York City on January 9, 1941. Her paternal grandfather Alberto Baez left the Catholic Church to become a Methodist minister and moved to the U.S. when her father was two years old. Her father Albert Baez was born in Puebla, Mexico, and grew up in Brooklyn, New York, where his father preached to and advocated for a Spanish-speaking congregation. Albert first considered becoming a minister but instead turned to the study of mathematics and physics and received his PhD from Stanford University in 1950. Albert was later credited as a co-inventor of the X-ray microscope. Joan's cousin John C. Baez is a mathematical physicist. Her mother Joan Chandos Baez, referred to as "Joan Senior" or "Big Joan", was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, the second daughter of an English Anglican priest who claimed to be descended from the Dukes of Chandos. Born on April 11, 1913, she died on April 20, 2013 aged 100.Baez was the second of three sisters, all of whom were political activists and musicians. The eldest was Pauline Thalia Baez Bryan, also known as Pauline Marden, and the youngest was Margarita Mimi Baez Fariña, who was better known as Mimi Fariña. The Baez family converted to Quakerism during Joan's early childhood, and she has continued to identify with the tradition, particularly in her commitment to pacifism and social issues. While growing up, Baez was subjected to racial slurs and discrimination because of her Mexican heritage. Consequently, she became involved in social causes early in her career. She declined to play in any white student venues that were segregated, which meant that when she toured the Southern states, she would play only at black colleges.
Owing to her father's work with UNESCO, their family moved many times, living in towns across the U.S. as well as in England, France, Switzerland, Spain, Canada, and the Middle East, including Iraq. Joan Baez became involved with a variety of social causes early in her career, including civil rights and nonviolence. Social justice, she stated in the PBS series American Masters, is the true core of her life, "looming larger than music". Baez spent much of her formative youth living in the San Francisco Bay area, where she graduated from Palo Alto High School in 1958. Here, Baez dated Michael New, a fellow student described as "Trinidad English" whom she met at her college in the late 1950s, and occasionally introduced as her husband. Baez committed her first act of civil disobedience by refusing to leave her Palo Alto High School classroom in Palo Alto, California for an air raid drill.
Baez remained close to her younger sister Mimi up until Mimi's death in 2001 and mentioned in the 2009 American Masters documentary that she had grown closer to her older sister Pauline in later years. Currently, Baez is a resident of Woodside, California, where she lived with her mother until the latter's death in 2013. She has said that her house has a backyard tree house in which she spends time meditating, writing, and "being close to nature". Since stepping down from the stage in 2019, she has devoted herself to portraiture. Responding to false assumptions that have been promoted about her, Baez stated in 2019 that she was not a vegetarian and had not been part of the second-wave feminist movement, remarking that her stardom shielded her from the everyday struggles of other women. She is the subject of the 2023 documentary Joan Baez: I Am a Noise in which she reflected on among other things her personal struggles, her political activism, and her personal and professional relationship with Bob Dylan. She also related that Mimi and she had struggled with depression and after years of therapy came to believe that they had been abused by their father. In her 2024 poetry collection When You See My Mother Ask Her to Dance, Joan Baez said that she has been diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder.
Music career
The opening line of Baez's memoir And a Voice to Sing With is "I was born gifted", referring to her singing voice, which she explained was given to her and for which she can take no credit. A friend of Joan's father gave her a ukulele. She learned four chords, which enabled her to play rhythm and blues, the music she was listening to at the time. Her parents, however, were fearful that the music would lead her into a life of drug addiction. When Baez was 13, her aunt took her to a concert by folk musician Pete Seeger, and Baez found herself strongly moved by his music. She soon began practicing the songs of his repertoire and performing them publicly. One of her earliest public performances was at a retreat in Saratoga, California, for a youth group from Temple Beth Jacob, a Redwood City, California, Jewish congregation. A few years later, in 1957, Baez bought her first Gibson acoustic guitar.College music scene in Massachusetts
After graduating from high school in 1958, Baez and her family moved from the San Francisco area to Boston, Massachusetts, after her father accepted a faculty position at MIT. At that time, it was in the center of the up-and-coming folk-music scene and she began performing near home in Boston and nearby Cambridge. She also performed in clubs and attended Boston University for about six weeks before she gave her first concert at the Club 47 in Cambridge. When designing the poster for the performance, Baez considered changing her performing name to either Rachel Sandperl, the surname of her longtime mentor Ira Sandperl, or Maria from the song "They Call the Wind Maria". She later opted against doing so, fearing that people would accuse her of changing her last name because it was Spanish. The audience consisted of her parents, sister Mimi, her boyfriend, and a few friends—a total of eight patrons. Baez was paid ten dollars before she was later asked back and began performing twice a week for $25 per show.A few months later, Baez and two other folk enthusiasts made plans to record an album in the cellar of a friend's house. The trio sang solos and duets and a family friend designed the album cover, which was released on Veritas Records that same year as Folksingers 'Round Harvard Square. Baez later met Bob Gibson and Odetta, who were at the time two of the most prominent vocalists singing folk and gospel music. Baez cites Odetta as a primary influence along with Marian Anderson and Pete Seeger. Gibson invited Baez to perform with him at the 1959 Newport Folk Festival, where they sang two duets, "Virgin Mary Had One Son" and "We Are Crossing Jordan River". The performance generated substantial praise for the "barefoot Madonna" with the otherworldly voice, and it was this appearance that led to Baez signing with Vanguard Records the following year, although Columbia Records tried to sign her first. Baez later claimed that she felt she would be given more artistic license at a more "low key" label. Baez's nickname at the time, "Madonna", has been attributed to her clear voice, long hair, and natural beauty, and to her role as "Earth Mother".
First albums and 1960s breakthrough
Her true professional career began at the inaugural Newport Folk Festival in 1959. After that appearance, she recorded her first album for Vanguard, Joan Baez. It was recorded in just four days in the ballroom of New York City's Manhattan Towers Hotel and was produced by Fred Hellerman of The Weavers, who produced many albums by folk artists. Its songs included traditional folk ballads, blues, and laments, including Child Ballads, sung to her own guitar accompaniment. The album also included "El Preso Numero Nueve", a song sung entirely in Spanish, which she would re-record in 1974 for inclusion on her Spanish-language album Gracias a la Vida. The album sold moderately well.File:JoanBaez1966-1a.jpg|thumb|left|200px|Ira Sandperl and Baez at the Frankfurt Easter March 1966
She made her New York concert debut on November 5, 1960, at the 92nd Street Y and on November 11, 1961, Baez played her first major New York concert at a sold-out performance at Town Hall. Robert Shelton, folk critic of the New York Times, praised the concert, saying, "That superb soprano voice, as lustrous and rich as old gold, flowed purely all evening with a wondrous ease. Her singing like a spool of satin." Years later when Baez thought back to that concert, she laughed, saying: "I remember in 1961 my manager sending me this newspaper in the mail read, 'Joan Baez Town Hall Concert, SRO.' I thought SRO meant 'sold right out.' I was so innocent of it all."
Her second release, Joan Baez, Vol. 2, went gold, as did Joan Baez in Concert, Part 1 and Joan Baez in Concert, Part 2. Like its immediate predecessor, Joan Baez, Vol. 2 contained strictly traditional material. Her two albums of live material, Joan Baez in Concert, Part 1 and its second counterpart were unique in that unlike most live albums, they contained only new songs rather than established favorites. It was Joan Baez in Concert, Part 2 that featured Baez's first-ever Dylan cover. From the early to the mid-1960s, Baez emerged at the forefront of the American roots revival, where she introduced her audiences to the then-unknown Bob Dylan and was emulated by artists such as Judy Collins, Emmylou Harris, Joni Mitchell, and Bonnie Raitt. On November 23, 1962, Baez appeared on the cover of Time Magazine—a rare honor then for a musician. Although primarily an album artist, several of Baez's singles have charted, the first being her 1965 cover of Phil Ochs' "There but for Fortune", which became a mid-level chart hit in the U.S. and Canada, and a top-ten single in the United Kingdom.
Baez added other instruments to her recordings on Farewell, Angelina, which features several Dylan songs interspersed with more traditional fare. Deciding to experiment with different styles, Baez turned to Peter Schickele, a classical music composer, who provided classical orchestration for her next three albums: Noël, Joan, and Baptism: A Journey Through Our Time. Noël was a Christmas album of traditional material, while Baptism was akin to a concept album, featuring Baez reading and singing poems written by celebrated poets such as James Joyce, Federico García Lorca, and Walt Whitman. Joan featured interpretations of work by contemporary composers, including John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Tim Hardin, Paul Simon, and Donovan.
In 1968, Baez traveled to Nashville, Tennessee, where a marathon recording session resulted in two albums. The first, Any Day Now, consists exclusively of Dylan covers. The other, the country-music-infused David's Album, was recorded for husband David Harris, a prominent anti-Vietnam War protester eventually imprisoned for draft resistance. Harris, a country music fan, turned Baez toward more complex country-rock influences beginning with David's Album. Later in 1968, Baez published her first memoir, Daybreak. In August 1969, her appearance at Woodstock in upstate New York raised her international musical and political profile, particularly after the successful release of the documentary film Woodstock.
Beginning in the late 1960s, Baez began writing many of her own songs, beginning with "Sweet Sir Galahad" and "A Song For David", both songs appearing on her 1970 One Day at a Time album; "Sweet Sir Galahad" was written about her sister Mimi's second marriage, while "A Song For David" was a tribute to Harris. One Day at a Time, like David's Album, featured a decidedly country sound. Baez's distinctive vocal style and political activism had a significant impact on American popular music. She was one of the first musicians to use her popularity as a vehicle for social protest, singing and marching for human rights and peace. Pete Seeger, Odetta, and decades-long friend Harry Belafonte were her early social justice advocate influences. Baez came to be considered the "most accomplished interpretive folksinger/songwriter of the 1960s". Her appeal extended far beyond the folk music audience. Of her fourteen Vanguard albums, thirteen made the top 100 of Billboard's mainstream pop chart, eleven made the top forty, eight made the top twenty, and four made the top ten.