53 f


were camped out in protest against the government’s plans to install cruise mis- siles. She was a legend without a label and although many people were asking, “Joan who?” the visit received widespread media coverage, in Britain and beyond – an indication of the respect accorded her as a spokeswoman on political issues.


Civil rights, human rights, Vietnam, Latin America, Standing Rock: these and many other concerns have always been as important to Baez as her music. From the outset – indeed, long before her name was known even around Harvard Square – humanitarian concerns were a key ele- ment in her life and they fitted well with folk music. Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger had long ago proved that. But by the 1980s, the public’s taste in music had changed. So too had the preoccupations of young people who enthusiastically embraced the Me-Decade. As she acknowl- edged in her memoir, And A Voice To Sing With, Baez spent a long time in the wilder- ness. “The Seventies and Eighties were the years of silence and ashes,” she told me in 1990. It required all her spiritual reserves “simply to get through a concert, because I didn’t understand why I was bothering.” European youth engaged somewhat and inspired two songs,Warriors Of The Sun and Children Of The Eighties, released on albums that sank almost without trace. At Live Aid in July 1985, she was offered the consolation prize of one song at 9am, the Philadelphia opening. Introduced by Jack Nicholson, she sang Amazing Grace, segueing into an a cappella snatch of We Are The World, though she was not on the record. She told the crowd, “this is your Woodstock and it’s long overdue.”


Now all her albums have been re-mas- tered and re-released and Baez has found a new audience, thanks in part to her men- toring of young talent: Sharon Shannon, Sinead Lohan, Dar Williams, the Indigo Girls and Mary Chapin Carpenter, all now established artists in their own right, are among those who have shared stages with her and all have recognised how much she has taught them, musically and practically, about life as a troubadour. Songwriters such as David Massengill, Richard Shindell, Diana Jones and Zoe Mulford regard her covering of their work as a benediction, as way back when did a new kid on the Greenwich Village block named Bob Dylan. “Young folk singer types are always appreciative of whatever it was I did, sometimes through their parents,” Baez says now, between sips of soup. “I’ve had an influence on their lives, and generally that means politically as well as musically.”


Whistle Down The Wind closes the cir- cle begun with Joan Baez, released in late 1960. Reviewing that first album in the Harvard Crimson, student John R Adler, now a distinguished neurosurgeon, wrote: “Joan Baez will not be a great big seller. English ballads are pretty esoteric stuff to most buyers. But the record is of undeni- able quality, and has some stunning moments. It proves what many have been mumbling into their coffee for some time: that Joan Baez can be, if she wants, the very best in her field.” In fact, the album spent three years in the US charts and was


certified gold. In 2015, it was deemed “cul- turally, historically, and aesthetically signif- icant” by the Library of Congress and selected for inclusion in the National Recording Registry.


As music historian Arthur Levy points out in his liner notes to the re-release, the album is a “deceptively simple song cycle” drawing on numbers from the folk, coun- try and bluegrass traditions, among them All My Trials, a lullaby from the Bahamas, and El Preso Numero Nuevo, a tipping of the hat to Baez’s paternal Mexican her- itage which still has a place in her stage repertoire. Mary Hamilton and Henry Mar- tin were the first two of many Child Bal- lads she would record, the former a Scot- tish-Irish ballad that surely pleased her mother, also named Joan, who was descended from the Dukes of Chandos (Chandos being passed down the family as a middle name).


Joan Baez and the mighty handful of folk albums that followed it – including two albums recorded live on campuses in the American South, where Baez was the first white artist to insist on integrated audiences – had a significant influence on


her fingertips, which show more paint than thickened skin. But at 78, she is fit: “Shit happens and you stiffen and get knobby, but it’s all right. That’s why I have Dirk [Powell] here. I don’t want to do any gym- nastics on the guitar. I just keep it simple.”


In fact, her guitar playing has always been pretty nifty: a solo performer for so many years, she is perforce a skilled instru- mentalist, her intricate guitar work effec- tively providing both lead and rhythm. Over the last 25 years she’s worked with various small bands and settled on Powell, who plays pretty much anything stringed as well as piano, with her son Gabriel Harris on per- cussion. Grace Stumberg, her guitar tech, adds bluesy vocal harmonies and gets a spot of her own as she builds a solo career.


As to the voice, which the late New


York Times critic Robert Shelton famously described as “an achingly pure soprano”, one which once conquered the coloratura heights of the Villa-Lobos Aria from Bachi- anas Brasileiras No 5, it’s now a warm, smoky alto – deep topaz rather than bright-white diamond, and in its way more expressive, weathered by age and experi- ence. Those early recordings are dramatic, to be sure, but Baez often relied on the ethereal beauty of her voice to carry a song from which she remained clinically detached. She’s now musically and emo- tionally engaged.


1960s Joan


young musicians in America and beyond, and not just on obvious folk revivalists like Fairport Convention and Pentangle. Robert Plant and Jimmy Page first heard Babe I’m Gonna Leave You on In Concert, for example. The two In Concert albums are the ultimate in “unplugged” and while folk purists may regard them as too polished, folk song as art song if you like, they remain milestones of recording histo- ry. (A decade later, Judas Priest would record Diamonds & Rust!)


D


oes she ever listen to her back catalogue? “Rarely, unless there’s some reason. I might run into something when I’m trawling and I’m in awe of the


early voice though I take no credit for it” – by which she means she sees it as “a gift”, her only task its use and maintenance. And maintenance has become ever harder, as happens in older age. “When I asked my first vocal coach when it would be time to quit, he said your voice will tell you, and it’s been telling me. It’s these lengthy tours – they’re tough and I tend to treat everything as if I’m 35 years old.” She would like to be able to emerge from retirement for the occasional one-off but admits that once back home and painting (her new preoccu- pation) the weeks of daily exercises and prep may be less appealing. And as the most amateur picker knows, the calluses go, the fingers soften. “I was home until two nights ago,” Baez explains as I examine


Baez admits that it took time for her to acknowledge that what she calls her “old Joanie voice” was gone forever and for a few years in the early part of this cen- tury concerts felt uncomfortable – for the audience and, one sensed, for performer. “It was difficult,” she agrees. “For instance, I didn’t make an album for ten years – it took me that long to accept it, embrace it actually. I like the noises that came out on this album.”


I remind her that when we talked in 1990, on the back of Speaking Of Dreams, before her “third act” reinvention with Ring The Bells on manager Mark Spector’s watch, she thought she had “maybe 10 years” left but in retrospect we can see the Baez career was only at mid-point. She wanted, she told me then, to be able to do “some big tours, including Eastern Europe” (the Wall had just come down) and she wanted, when the time came, to bow out on a high, at a moment of her own choos- ing. Understandably, she did not want to fizzle, to fade away. That tickets for Fare Thee Well sold out within hours and that the tour has been extended is ample demonstration that she got her wish.


Though she bravely ventured into Sarajevo to sing for a city under siege, these past thirty years have been less overt- ly political, both albums and concerts rebal- anced in favour of pure music, the long raps that characterised her Seventies’ gigs dropped in favour of well-chosen songs (Guthrie’s Deportees and Dylan’s With God On Our Side as eloquent and contemporary today as when they were written) or jokes. Surprisingly, since Baez has form in this arena, there were walkouts at some Bush- era American concerts. Recently, she and the band have taken a knee (to Jimi Hen- drix’s Star Spangled Banner) after the final encore, a gesture which brought the house


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88  |  Page 89  |  Page 90  |  Page 91  |  Page 92  |  Page 93  |  Page 94  |  Page 95  |  Page 96  |  Page 97  |  Page 98  |  Page 99  |  Page 100  |  Page 101  |  Page 102  |  Page 103  |  Page 104  |  Page 105  |  Page 106  |  Page 107  |  Page 108  |  Page 109  |  Page 110  |  Page 111  |  Page 112  |  Page 113  |  Page 114  |  Page 115  |  Page 116  |  Page 117  |  Page 118  |  Page 119  |  Page 120  |  Page 121  |  Page 122  |  Page 123  |  Page 124  |  Page 125  |  Page 126  |  Page 127  |  Page 128  |  Page 129  |  Page 130  |  Page 131  |  Page 132  |  Page 133  |  Page 134  |  Page 135  |  Page 136  |  Page 137  |  Page 138  |  Page 139  |  Page 140  |  Page 141  |  Page 142  |  Page 143  |  Page 144  |  Page 145  |  Page 146  |  Page 147  |  Page 148