Joan Baez
Also known as: Joan Chandos Baez
Birth: 1941
Occupation: Musician, Singer, Composer, Activist
Source: American Decades. Gale Research, 1998.
Updated: 10/06/2008
Music and Social Activism
For decades, Joan Baez's songs have been as much about music as social activism. Through many years of performance, writing, and speaking out, Baez's voice symbolized an individual's power to effect change. She was born in Staten Island, New York, January 9, 1941, the daughter of Dr. Albert Baez, a physicist. Baez's autobiography, And a Voice to Sing With, details her childhood in the academic milieu of Ithaca, New York, and in Bagdad, Redlands, and Palo Alto, California, where she attended high school and began to play the guitar. After relocating to the Boston area, where her father had joined the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she attended Boston University and began to perform professionally at small clubs, such as Tulla's Coffee Grinder. Her two years of apprenticeship in the Boston area brought her to the attention of Bob Gibson, who invited her to participate in the 1959 Newport Folk Festival.
Symbol of the Folk Revival
Baez began a long association with Vanguard Records, then America's foremost folk label, in 1960 with her album Joan Baez. The record brought acclaim and invitations to perform in folk clubs and concert halls throughout the college circuit and in major cities. She soon became a symbol of the folk revival and was even featured on the cover of Time magazine. Her singing, as Robert Shelton declared in a 1960 review of an early concert in the New York Times, was marked by "a soprano voice, surprisingly never trained, that has a purity, penetrating clarity and control that not a few art singers would envy. With seeming effortlessness, Miss Baez produced a purling, spun-gold tone particularly suited to the lyric Anglo-American songs and ballads that made up most of her program." The phrase, "achingly pure soprano," cited often by critics over the last 25 years, also dates from this first concert tour. She has denied the importance of the "purity" of her voice in interviews throughout her long career. In a 1963 article by Nat Hentoff, for example, she praised interpretation over mere quality: "I think of a rural folk singer--Doc Watson's mother--whose voice might not seem beautiful to some people. But her voice has a straightness, an honesty, a purity. On the other hand, a voice may have all the tone quality and all the vibrato you could ask for, and yet it'll sound so bland that it has no beauty at all." Baez's voice, her songs, guitar style, and even her long flowing hair set a pattern for a generation of young folk singers and balladeers. The hair was cut in 1968, and the soprano darkened and mellowed, but her early folk influences never faded.
Nonviolent Protest
Early in her career, Baez became noted for her refusal to perform in segregated arenas and concert halls--a decision that led her to limit the Southern part of her tours to black colleges. Raised as a Quaker, she also refused to pay that part of her Federal Income Tax which, the Society of Friends believed, was used for military spending. Part of her income from performing and recording went to found the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence (now called the Resource Center for Nonviolence) in Carmel Valley, California. Her social activism also led to her support for the civil rights movement and its voting rights protests, as well as anti-war events around the world. She was arrested and jailed for nonviolently protesting the Vietnam-era draft, along with her husband, David Harris, who spent much of their marriage in jail. Her focus throughout her life has been on nonviolent protest as a means of ending war, war-related industries and national budgets, and discrimination. She began working with Amnesty International in 1972 and Humanitas since its founding in 1979.
Public Criticism
Although many of her fans supported her causes, Baez's activities were often criticized publically by others. Her parodied but recognizable image was included in Al Capp's "Li'l Abner" comic strip as "Joanie Phonie" in 1967. The same year, she was denied permission to perform in Constitution Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution, a move that reminded many of the group's refusal to allow black soprano Marian Anderson to perform at the venue thirty years earlier. Consequently, she performed at the nearby Washington Monument before a crowd of 30,000. Perhaps Baez's most controversial activity was her participation in a tour of North Vietnam in 1972, which produced the album Where Are You, My Son?.
Widespread Audience
For a decade, the almost continuous concert tours and recordings brought Baez and her message to an ever wider audience. In a 1979 joint interview with Judy Collins, she told the New York Times that performance and the message are interrelated: "The concert becomes a context of its own, and that's what's beautiful about being able to stand up there--that I can say what I want, put the songs where I want them and, hopefully, give people an evening of beautiful music as well." She appeared at hundreds of college campuses, Carnegie Hall, major concert halls, and outdoor festivals. Baez was one of only four musical acts that participated in both Woodstock, the defining event of the late 1960s music scene, and in LiveAid, the 1985 international rock concert to raise money for African famine relief. Both events reached a global audience--Woodstock became a film from Warner Brothers; LiveAid was broadcast on worldwide television. Many of Baez's solo tours were also filmed as documentaries, among them, the Rolling Thunder Revue (with Bob Dylan, 1975) and Live Europe '83, which produced a French television film and an award-winning album of the same name. A 1970 documentary, "Carry It On" covers her life at the time of Harris' arrest and includes 13 songs performed in concert.
The Dylan Connection
The folk revival of the 1960s brought widespread attention to traditional folk forms and to the young folksingers who were writing new music, most notably, Baez and Bob Dylan. The two performed together often at the start of their careers, as in her 1963 Forest Hills Music Festival concert in New York at which she devoted half of the program to Dylan songs, sung by him, by her, and as duets. The New York Times review of that summer concert praised her programming decision: "To have her so closely align herself with Mr. Dylan's charismatic poetry resulted in an unforgettable evening." They also toured together in the mid-1970s. Her performance of his "Blowin' in the Wind," was included on the Grammy Award presentations of 1983 as an example of music with a message. Other Dylan songs, such as "That's Allright" and "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall," remained in her repertory after they stopped touring together.
Mixed Genres
Baez was criticized at the onset of her career for mixing her musical messages and not limiting herself to music on a specific theme or genre. She defended herself against these pigeonholing attempts to Nat Hentoff in the November 1963 HiFi/Stereo Review: "[The historical] aspect of folk music has always been so secondary with me. It's as if there were a mysterious string in me. If something I hear plucks that string, then I'll sing that song. It can be funny or serious, or it can be in another language. I can't analyze what qualities a song must have to do that to me." This versatility became a major selling point in her later career. Baez's albums, like her concert appearances, always mixed genres, including new songs (often about her son, Gabriel), American spirituals, Scottish hymns, and protest statements from different cultures. She made recordings of folk songs paired with country-and-western numbers, as on David's Album, which featured "Carry It On," as well as her popular cut of "Green Grass of Home." Ballads and anthems, both contemporary and standard, became some of her frequent numbers, from Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne," and Lennon/McCartney's "Imagine" and "Long and Winding Road" to Julie London's "Cry Me a River." In addition, Baez regularly pulled material from a wide range of genres, from reggae songs like 1983's "Warriors of the Sun" to Latin American non-salsa styles and African rhythms.
Diversity in Music
A 1977 Village Voice feature suggested that this diversity had rescued Baez's career, along with her willingness to cover mainstream popular music. On her 1987 album Recently and during the tour to promote it, her repertory included, according to the New York Times, "a spare, moving rendition of Dire Straits' pacifist hymn, 'Brothers in Arms', a version of the Marian Anderson staple, 'Let Us Break Bread Together,' that finds the singer buoyed by a gospel chorus, and two equally strong renditions of songs evoking the agony of South Africa: Peter Gabriel's elegiac incantation 'Biko' and John Clegg's passionate 'Asimbonanga.'"
Richer Voice
Baez's "achingly pure soprano" deepened into a "richer, more dramatic" and fluid alto. A New York Times review of a 1983 concert praised her rendition of the spiritual "Swing Low Sweet Chariot": "Her rendition swept through two octaves with an authority and passion that few other singers could hope to muster."
Her Voice is Her Conscience
The dual role of Joan Baez as a performer and as, in the words of Rolling Stone's John Grissim, Jr., "as a purveyor of an enjoined social consciousness and responsibility," gave her a place in American music that supports her activism. Like Pete Seeger and the folk singers of the earlier generation, her voice became her conscience. But for Baez, like Marian Anderson, the quality of her vocal production brought authority to her message.
UPDATES
September 9, 2008: Baez' album, Day After Tomorrow, was released. Source: Allmusic.com, September 27, 2008.
FURTHER READINGS
- Baez, Joan, And a Voice to Sing With, (Summit Books, 1987).
- Boston Globe, (8 March 1996; 19 March 1996).
- Chicago Tribune, (29 February 1996).
SOURCE CITATION
"Joan Baez." American Decades. Gale Research, 1998.
Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Gale, 2009.
http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC