Joan Baez - Biography
By J Poet
Joan Baez has one of the most recognizable voices in American popular music; a clear, pure soprano that seems to rise from some timeless core of heartfelt wisdom, giving every note she sings a vibrant authenticity most artists can only dream of. Her body of work, from her first albums of traditional material, to her mid-career outings as a singer/songwriter, to her early 2000 collections highlighting the work of other like minded songwriters, is marked by a deep concern for the human condition and a compassionate social consciousness.
Baez has been making music, and speaking her mind, ever since she exploded on the folk music scene as the special guest of Bob Gibson at the 1959 Newport Folk Festival, performances documented on the currently out of print album Newport Folk Festival (Vanguard, 1959). Her interpretations of the classic Child Ballads on her early albums – Joan Baez (Vanguard 1960), Joan Baez, Vol 2 (Vanguard 1961), Joan Baez in Concert (Vanguard 1963) - gave the folk revival some of its most authentic moments and she used her early fame to champion the work of then mavericks like Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs. Farewell, Angelina (Vanguard 1965) contains some of the best Dylan covers ever recorded and her all Dylan album, Any Day Now (Vanguard, 1968) still retains its power after four decades. Her restless creativity led her to record country, blues, Celtic, folk rock, pop and Latin music, as well as her semi-classical Christmas album, Noel (Vanguard, 1966). She’s sold millions of albums, garnered six Grammy nominations and an armload of gold records and become an internationally famous singer and human rights activist, singing to integrated audiences in the South in 1962, refusing to pay her taxes as a protest against the Vietnam War, performing in Nicaragua during Reagan’s Contra War and championing Amnesty International and other human rights organizations. She continues to be active in the fight for economic justice, ecological sanity, gay and lesbian rights and the anti-Death penalty movement.
Baez was born in 1941, and due to her father’s traveling, grew up in Baghdad, Iraq and Palo Alto, California. She started playing guitar at 15, and made a demo that went nowhere. The family moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1958 and Baez became a regular at Club 47, ground zero for Boston area folkies. At a gig at Chicago’s Gate of Horn she meets Bob Gibson, leading to her guest shot at his Newport Folk Festival set and her contract with Vanguard Records.
Her singing and activism during the 60s is well documented. She invited Bob Dylan to tour with her, setting the stage for his success, protested against the Vietnam War in in favor of Civil Rights and founded the Institute For The Study Of Nonviolence in Carmel Valley. In 1970 she appears at the Woodstock Festival in between and after releases eight more Vanguard albums including the folk/poetry concept piece Baptism (Vanguard, 1968), David’s Album (1969), the country flavored One Day At A Time (Vanguard, 1970) and Blessed Are…(1971) which spawns her first pop hit, a cover of The Band’s “The Night They Drive Old Dixie Down.”
After 15 years of singing other peoples songs, Baez started writing, and after a move to A&M Records, reinvented herself as a pop/jazz singer/songwriter. Her best album from this period is the classic Diamonds and Rust (A&M 1975). The album went gold and the title track, a wrenching exposition of her relationship with Bob Dylan, gave her another Top 40 hit.
In the 80s and 90s Baez continued to be politically active, while recording less regularly making albums that combined folk, pop and mellow jazz in their arrangements. Stand out include Recently (Gold castle, 1988), Play Me Backwards (Virgin, 1992) a meditation on the journey from girlhood to motherhood and the looming death of a parent, and Gone From Danger (Guardian, 1997). Rare, Live and Classic, a boxed retrospective, is issued on Vanguard in 1993. At the beginning of the new century, Baez tries musical theater with successful runs (2001, 2002, 2003, 2005) in San Francisco’s camp cabaret review Teatro ZinZanni. She also returned to her folk roots with Dark Chords on a Big Guitar (Koch, 2003) and Bowery Songs (Koch 2005) albums that explored the work of contemporary songwriters such as Gillian Welch, Greg Brown, Caitlin Cary and Steve Earle, but nary a Baez tune among them.
“I have not written a song myself in 10 years,” Baez Women Who Rock magazine in 2003. “I stopped writing because I quit doing things that we’re difficult. A long time ago, after I’d recorded my first original songs for Vanguard, Maynard Solomon, one of the label owners, who was a classical music person, said ‘You’re writing the same song over and over.’ The chord progressions were the same, but done well enough to disguise it, at least from myself. That made me write “Children and All that Jazz’ which didn’t follow any pattern. Somebody once said that at a certain point in time, all the songs will have been written, but we’re not there yet and I’m grateful to the songwriters, ‘cause without them I’d stop singing.”
After five decades of performing, Baez’s singing has mellowed and deepened. Those shimmering high notes that were so unbelievable in her youth have been replaced by a solid, mid range soulfulness that continues to make the songs she sings come alive with the dark, joyful beauty that’s always been her trademark. Baez is also a fine guitar player with an understated technique that can disguise her mastery of phrasing, intonation and melodic invention.
Today, Baez sums up her long career philosophically: “When I listen to my old (Vanguard) albums, the sorrow in my voice and my love of the underdog really stands out. I wanted to be the voice of people who couldn’t or didn’t know how to speak for themselves, politically or otherwise. On one level, it was like listening to somebody else and I’m stunned by the voice, because I don’t have it anymore. I have a voice that sounds like a woman that’s lived as long as I have. I’m floored by the sound [of my younger self] and saddened by the fact that I was that sad but proud I used the voice so well.”