f52 Baez Bows Out
It’s six decades since she catapulted to attention as a teenage folk star, and now Joan Baez is bringing down the curtain. Liz Thomson catches up with the story.
I
t’s a beautiful early summer’s day in Bristol, the first British date in phase two of Joan Baez’s Fare Thee Well tour that will bring down the curtain on a sixty-year
career. She’d notched up almost a score of concerts in March 2018, including in Britain and Ireland, then taken a month off back home in California. Two dates, at the Royal Albert Hall, the following week were to be a final goodbye – but such has been the demand for tickets, in the UK and beyond, that the farewells are continuing way into 2019. Whistle Down the Wind, her first studio album in a decade, debuted on the Billboard chart at number 18 and was nominated for a Grammy.
Will she finally play out with a gig at the Newport Folk Festival where, in 1959, a star was born when she took the stage as the unannounced guest of Bob Gibson, singing Virgin Mary and We Are Crossing Jordan River? “I’m not thinking that far ahead,” she says, as she contemplates a bowl of pea and mint soup with a side of cheese and crusty bread in the decidedly unglamorous backstage surroundings of the Colston Hall. Baez has been a frequent performer at Newport and, in 2009, she joined her old friend Judy Collins for a duet of Diamonds And Rust, deservedly her most acclaimed song and one without which no Joan Baez concert would be complete. A spot in 2019 would be the perfect curtain call.
I’ve followed Baez’s career since the late 1960s when I found Volume 2 in my sister’s record collection. I learned to play guitar from it – Barbara Allen, Banks Of The Ohio and Plaisir d’Amour already vaguely familiar to my 11-year-old ears. Soon I was hooked on her voice, exploring everything she’d ever recorded, and first saw her live in December 1971 at London’s Rainbow Theatre. Since then I’ve seen her scores of times, including two of the four concerts at New York’s Bottom Line – the Ring Them Bells sessions, the 1995 album that provided a career relaunch and which I reported for Mojo. I’ve been privileged to spend time with her over the last 40 years and in 1984 she entrusted me with a press call at Greenham Common, where women
Photo: Dana Tynan
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