The Book in 5 Sentences

1. On the whole a pretty sub par biography in general. There were some details that were unknown to me at the time, but all of the important ones were largely covered in the Dylan biographies. On the whole I was unimpressed. It did not delve into her guitar work very much (she is a guitarist of some renown, why not?) and spent too much time on the mundane aspects of her life. The direct Pete Seeger influence was interesting, as well as the fact that she was a national figure in this (rapidly growing) niche at 19 and 20 was mentioned, but largely underdocumented.

Summary + Notes

At his death in 1951, The New York Times reported that he had been a professor of English and drama at Hunter College in Manhattan, and in 1933 established a fellowship center in Mount Kisco, New York State, “an educational project for the promotion of peace.”

Back home, his wife saw his anxiety and suggested they seek guidance from the Quaker community. They went as a family, the girls staying for twenty minutes before being dispatched next door with all the other kids to Quaker Sunday school. Not surprisingly, Joanie found it tiresome, as would any child forced to sit in silence, but the Baezes attended regularly from then on. Joanie has never entirely left the ritual of Quaker Meeting behind and it’s clear from her own lifelong commitment to pacifism and nonviolence that, young as she was, the experience was a formative one.

The protest cemented her friendship with Ira Sandperl, a self-taught Gandhian scholar and advocate of nonviolent social change whom she’d met at the Quaker Meeting her father insisted “the girls” continue to attend. By day he worked at Kepler’s, the radical and intellectual bookshop that was to Menlo Park what Cody’s was to Berkeley, and City Lights to San Francisco. A Stanford dropout, he was often on campus, talking about peace and disarmament, and Joanie found in him a mentor and friend. In 1965, they would co-found the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence.

And it took, and I loved the music and I discovered that this man did what my family, in a sense, had done for many years which was, having become Quakers, fused everything with their politics. This was music and politics in a way I’d never known it but it was so natural to me, his music and what he did with his life, and I understood that very quickly. There was Harry Belafonte, Odetta and Pete. I listened to Pete’s music endlessly and heard the stories about him, and learned the songs, and followed him.

how the Baez women felt about upping and moving yet again is unknown. The lifestyle probably took its toll on Albert and Joan’s marriage, for by the end of the 1970s they were living apart and would divorce, though they remade their vows some thirty years later because Albert wanted to die a married man. Free-spirited and creative, Joanie might have been less anxious and insecure if she’d been able to settle in one place and make lasting friends, but she has said she was eventually afraid to make friends because she knew they’d be lost in the next move. She appears to have had no idea why she was enrolled at Boston University’s School of Fine and Applied Arts, only that no other school would take her.

Any drama was strictly personal, and pretty soon Joanie had flunked college.

Club 47, the coffeehouse with which Baez is forever associated, had opened its doors in January 1958, founded by Brandeis graduates Paula Kelly and Joyce Kalina and built from scratch, their aim to replicate a Paris café “where people would go listen to jazz, smoke cigarettes and talk a mile a minute,” explained Siggins.

What’s remarkable is just how fully formed the teenage Joan Baez was as a talent. Film footage discovered in a fridge during 36the making of the PBS documentary How Sweet the Sound captures a Club 47 performance from 1958. She is perched on a stool, ramrod-straight, half in shadow, her hair long and wavy, wearing a patterned dress and playing a mahogany Martin. She is singing the English ballad “Barbara Allen” exactly as it would appear on her second album three years later.

As with Bob Dylan, there are those who claim that she “stole” songs and made them her own to such an extent that it sounded as though other people were copying her. Such is the folk process, everyone learning from everyone else, yet there are some who claim that Baez stole not only Debbie Green’s songs but her identity. Green herself has firmly refuted this.

Kalina have recalled Joanie as being difficult to befriend, someone who could be “arrogant, rude, hysterical—she had stage fright half the time.” It would be decades before she attained a sense of inner peace, the result of “serious work,” and only in the second half of her career did she become truly comfortable onstage.

39Folksingers ’Round Harvard Square featured Baez with Bill Wood and Ted Alevizos, both of whom she has also cited as major influences. It was made in May 1959 at Fassett Recordings, located in a Beacon Hill brownstone.

Joanie descended the stage to “an exorbitant amount of fuss.” Wein thought her gift “immediately apparent. She was an exceedingly talented vocalist, the Sarah Vaughan of folk-singing,” he wrote in his memoir Myself Among Others. “Instantly she became not only the great discovery, but also the living symbol, of the first Newport Folk Festival.”

Grossman returned. He was just getting into artist management and he saw folk music as the next big thing, telling Shelton that “the American public is like Sleeping Beauty, waiting to be kissed awake by the prince of folk music,” a metaphor that Baez, whom Gibson thought “puritanical,” might not have appreciated.

Martin guitars, once available cheap in yard sales, were now much sought-after.

She was comfortable with Vanguard, who as it happened had the rights to record the Newport Folk Festival from its inception in 1959. Helped in large part by the success of Joan Baez, who at one point had three albums in the Top 10, the label would become pre-eminent in the field of what’s now called Americana.

Her decision made, Joanie returned home to Belmont, singing Tuesdays and Fridays at Club 47 for $25 a night, a princely sum in those days. By day she worked as a housemother in the kindergarten at Perkins School for the Blind, where Amelia Earhart had been a volunteer reader and Helen Keller a student.

Folksingers ’Round Harvard Square was released in January 1960 on Veritas Records.

The nineteen songs were laid down over three days, with “Mary Hamilton,” the long Scottish Child Ballad—from the nineteenth-century anthology of English and Scottish ballads identified by Francis James Child, a Boston-born polymath who became Harvard’s first Professor of English—that would become a staple of her repertoire, captured in one take.

Working with her was always delightful, on the road as well as in the studio or concert hall set-ups. Her voice, in all registers, was extremely microphone-friendly and did not require any electronic manipulations such as limiters or equalization. Joan required minimal editing, as most of her output was one-take versions.”

Joan Baez was released in time for Christmas 1960 and would spend sixty-four weeks on the Billboard chart, peaking at No. 20 and eventually being certified Gold. The singer was not yet twenty but her performance is remarkably assured.

But the folk revival was overwhelmingly white—and, despite a small group of high-profile older women, overwhelmingly male. As

There were more concerts with Pete Seeger, whose consummate ease as a performer was in stark contrast to her own anxieties.

Dylan’s first break came on April 11, 1961, when he was booked for his first professional gig, playing support to bluesman John 51Lee Hooker at Gerde’s. Baez had already heard his name which is presumably why she headed to West 4th Street that night. She noted that he carried “an undignified amount of baby fat,” wore a too-small jacket and seemed dwarfed by his guitar. His own songs were “original and refreshing if blunt and jagged” and she thought him “exceptional.” He finished his set and was brought to the table where she was seated with Michael. “The historic event of our meeting was under way,” she wrote a quarter-century later.

Nat Hentoff, who, writing in The Reporter of folk’s renaissance, suggested that, until Baez, “no one had appeared who could hold an audience by musical excellence alone.”

Scarcely four years had passed since her Club 47 debut, yet May 1962 found Baez giving a solo concert at Carnegie Hall.

The signing of the Civil Rights Act was two years away and Baez was one of the first major artists to embrace the black cause.

Time recommended three “other newcomers”: Bonnie Dobson, Judy Collins, and Carolyn Hester—all of them still active.

of detached madrigal singers performing calmly at court, and of saddened gypsies trying to charm death into leaving their Spanish caves.

was “uniquely and profoundly” her own. Yet for some traditionalists and their followers who’d been ploughing the folk furrow long before the 1960s revival, the Baez voice was too polished for folk music, which, in her hands, became something akin to art song.

Pete Seeger would not be invited to appear because of his left-wing views, even though a seven-year battle with the House Un-American Activities Committee had seen him vindicated. As a result, Baez refused to appear, as would The Greenbriar Boys, Tom Paxton, Barbara Dane, and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. Judy Collins and Theodore Bikel, having participated in earlier shows, refused future appearances.

“A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” a song written with fierce urgency the previous October as the world held its breath during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Baez’s

the Pacific Ocean just a short drive away in the Jaguar XK-E she’d bought on a whim with cash and which the IRS would later seize and sell to offset the taxes she was withholding in protest against Vietnam. (She has always said Dylan was a terrible driver, so he may not have been allowed behind the wheel of the silver sports car, of which neighbor Hunter S. Thompson was envious.)

She would open each concert and then introduce Dylan, who would play a half-dozen songs, and then they would sing together. It’s easy to forget that in the old analog world, few people would have known what was coming, and it’s fair to say that not every audience was ecstatic. Nevertheless, Baez—always loyal to a cause—persisted, enabling Dylan quickly to acquire an audience.

Thus, she was “no longer supporting my portion of the arms race” and was 69withholding the sixty percent of her income tax used for defense spending.

Dylan’s thoughts on the subject, if any, are unknown, though Baez had yet to understand he was not an activist.

In her memoir, Baez described Dylan as “turning out songs like ticker tape, and I was stealing them as fast as he wrote them.”

“the rich fruits of their singing collaborations. Joan always seemed, onstage, the earnest, worshipful one, overly so, in the presence of the Boy Genius, and Bob would sometimes lightly mock that earnestness, as he did between songs at the Philharmonic. But when singing together they were quite a pair, their harmony lines adding depth to the melodies, their sheer pleasure in each other’s company showing in their voices.”

Nat Hentoff, writing in The New Yorker, reported him as saying: “Those records I’ve already made, I’ll stand behind them, but some of that was jumping into the scene to be heard and a lot of it was because I didn’t see anybody else doing that kind of thing. Now a lot of people are doing finger-pointing songs. You know—pointing to all the things that are wrong. Me, I don’t want to write for people anymore. You know—be a spokesman.” Lest there be any doubt, he volunteered that he wasn’t going down South to hold any picket signs and, besides, “The NAACP is a bunch of old guys.”

The album is simultaneously milestone and stepping stone, for the tracks include folk songs (among them “The Wild Mountain Thyme,” often sung in duet with Dylan) and country (“A Satisfied Mind,” a song she helped put on the map), as well as Donovan’s “Colours.” (At Newport ’65, perhaps to irritate Dylan, she had invited Donovan to join her for a duet.)

Enrolling students were given an extensive reading list, prepared by Sandperl (Thoreau, Tolstoy, Huxley, Gandhi, Malcolm X all featured), and were required to learn meditation and the benefits of Quaker-style daily silence. Baez described them as “regular-looking, college-age people. Flower children, thank God, aren’t interested.”

According to Hudson, both Merton and the nurse shared an enthusiasm for Baez’s music, agreeing they would each listen to her recording of “Silver Dagger,” a song of unrequited love from her debut album, every day at 1.30am.

Within a few weeks, and on his wife’s twenty-first birthday, Fariña would die in a motorcycle spill in Carmel following the launch party for his novel. Would

Only when she was back home in California did she learn that the CIA had pressured the interpreter to mistranslate her political remarks. “If you don’t cooperate, you will have trouble in your work in the future,” The New York Times reported his being told.

On March 26, Baez and Harris married at New York’s St. Clement’s Episcopal Church, speaking Quaker wedding vows. The groom wore a dark three-piece suit and tie, walrus moustache, and whiskers, the bride a Grecian-style floor-length dress. Judy Collins sang.

I had no idea what to expect from motherhood. It’s a bit like getting old. You don’t know what it’s like until you get there.

At an intensely political event reflecting her recent trip to Hanoi, she publicized Amnesty from the stage and with leaflets.

Inspiration for the task arrived quite out of the blue—a phone call from “a booth in the Midwest.” As she recollected to Arthur Levy, Bob Dylan rang and read to her the entire text of “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts,” a lengthy and surreal song that would appear a few months later on Blood on the Tracks, still 104regarded as among his finest albums.

Dylan tried to persuade her to stay, talking already about a sort of never-ending tour on which they could all bring their kids. She

They would appear on the same stage in January 2010, as the newly elected President Obama and Michelle celebrated the music of the civil rights era at the White House. Not a word was exchanged.

In Washington, President Jimmy Carter promised to send the Seventh Fleet to rescue Boat People at sea.

Extraordinarily, Baez was not invited to participate in the making of “We Are the World.” When it came to 1985’s Live Aid, promoter Bill Graham, with whom she’d often worked, surely realized it would be rude not to include her, even if there had been fallout over the abortive Dylan and Santana tour. But she was granted only the 9am Philadelphia opening spot and given six minutes to perform. Introduced by Jack Nicholson, she declared: “Good morning, Children of the Eighties! This is your 119Woodstock, and it’s long overdue,” before singing “Amazing Grace” and (somewhat ironically) a couple of verses of “We Are the World.”

By 1979, Baez, too, was trying not to think about Vietnam. However, confronted with the evidence and two refugees who came to a study group at her California home to ask what had happened to all the Americans who had marched in solidarity with the Vietnamese, she could no longer stand aside. Her campaign for the Boat People brought opprobrium from the left, who felt she was letting the country off the hook over the war, and praise from the right, presidential candidate Ronald Reagan applauding her stand and noting that she’d finally “seen the light.”

As a teenager she made friends with members of the American Friends Service Committee, working with it down the years. Though she may now call it meditation, Baez routinely “keeps silence,” alert to “the still small voice” of God, whatever she may call him.

He wished to remind his fellow countrymen “that they are to be men first, and Americans only at a late and convenient hour.” Sentiments with which Joan Baez has always concurred.

Belafonte bankrolled the 1964 freedom summer, the year of Mississippi Burning, when three young activists were ambushed, tortured, and killed by the Ku Klux Klan, and in August that year flew into Greenwood, Mississippi with $70,000 in cash to support the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

Reactionary violence or revolutionary violence—a rubber-hose beating felt the same whoever administered it, she explained, 134not for the first time. “I believe in people, not systems.” To her, all life is sacred.

Less seriously, 32% of women admitted to having ironed their hair to get “the look.”

Only Joan Baez appeared to see protest, in whatever form, as a vocation.

Vanguard released a three-CD box set, Rare, Live & Classic, one third of the tracks previously unreleased. They included family tapes and tracks from the Grateful Dead sessions of spring 1982, the album planned and recorded at drummer Mickey Hart’s Novato ranch but never released.

The break between chest voice and head voice, a problem overcome with lessons and daily exercises, is evident. She can sing in one or the other or make a leap for a high note or two, but melodies that require her to proceed seamlessly across the range are becoming a problem. The slightest cold or sore throat will of course exacerbate it, as will tiredness, all enemies of the singer.

Bob Dylan talked of her “heart-stopping soprano” and a guitar style he tried and failed to master, saying she was “at the forefront of a new dynamic in American music.”

Technique improves stamina but, as with the rest of the body, the years take their toll: The vocal cord fibers thin and stiffen and the larynx cartilage hardens, with the result that the voice becomes less stable, the top notes less reliable.

Her guitar playing has been taken for granted but it has always been rather sophisticated, a self-contained combination of rhythm and lead, Baez often picking out lines that either harmonized with her voice or were in counterpoint to it, while bass notes supported a song’s harmonic architecture.

Baez made one of her first New York City appearances with Earl Scruggs, and on The Earl Scruggs Revue Anniversary Special (CBS, 1975) she duets with Johnny Cash on “Gospel Ship,” and is joined by Leonard Cohen and Buffy Sainte-Marie on “Passing Through” (when she sings a verse in Dylan’s voice).

By the 1970s, her confidence as a speaker, and her eloquence, are rather remarkable. Discussing Vietnam, human rights, and nonviolence, she gives the combative arch-conservative William F Buckley a run for his money on Firing Line (1979).

NO DIRECTION HOME: BOB DYLAN (Martin Scorsese, 2005) Mesmerizing documentary of Dylan’s Greenwich Village years, 1961-65. Baez talks and sings from her California kitchen.