The Ballad of Joan Baez

Joan Baez (b. 1941) is top of mind at the moment for all sorts of reasons: we saw her played by Monica Barbaro as a major character in the Bob Dylan bio-pic A Complete Unknown. And at the most recent Newport Folk Festival, my son powered her amp on an exercise bike. Probably in reaction to those events, I showed my other sonDon’t Look Back over the holidays, and Baez is woven all through that movie, though it was filmed roughly when her relationship with the troubled troubadour fizzled out. There’s also the recent documentary Joan Baez: I Am a Noise (2023), which generated headlines. And not ago, Baez penned a pointed and acerbic song about the “Nasty Man” who is about to go back into the White House which went viral with over a million hits.

Baez is half Mexican of course. Trump launched his 2016 Presidential campaign with a string of insults and lies about her people, and has never dropped the subject. Deporting millions of illegals remains one of his top policy objectives when he returns. Baez undoubtedly would have written the song anyway, whether she had a personal stake in the issue or not. She began her career (nearly 70 years ago) with broader commitment to the issues of peace, nonviolence, and Civil Rights. (She first heard Pete Seeger sing in 1955, first saw Martin Luther King speak in 1956, bought her first guitar in 1957, began performing professionally in 1958.) The roots of her commitment spring from religion. Her paternal grandfather converted from Catholicism to Methodism and was founder and Pastor of the First Spanish Methodist Church in Brooklyn. Her maternal grandfather was an Anglican priest with a congregation in Edinburgh, Scotland. When she was very young, her parents converted to Quakerism and that was the specific well from which her beliefs sprang. (Hilariously Baez shared a birthday with her antithesis Richard Nixon, who was also a Quaker. Now there’s a guy who slept through sermons!).

[As a sidebar: how did we get to this insane place where radical fundamentalists who neither espouse nor practice the actual teachings of Jesus have hijacked the name of Christianity? Non-Christians and apostates now commonly use the word as an epithet it’s become so warped and I can’t blame them, though they anger me by doing it. There are millions of Christians who BY DEFINITION oppose everything the Radical Right stands for, the hatred, the cruelty, the exclusion, the vindictiveness, the greed. But it’s a story that never gets told because (also by definition) to go around proclaiming yourself holy is to be the opposite. The squeaky wheel gets the publicity. Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming, already in progress –]

Baez’s father was a world class physicist whose specialty was x-ray technology as used in microscopes and telescopes. Albert Baez actually turned down lucrative defense department jobs on account of his Quaker principles. His work for the UN meant that the family lived abroad much of the time, in Europe and the Middle East, though the place where Joan and her two sisters spent most of their youth was San Francisco.

The family later moved to the Boston area, where her father taught at MIT and Joan briefly attended the University of Boston before being drawn into the exploding local folk scene which was as big as or bigger than the one in Greenwich Village at the time. From Boston and Cambridge it’s just a short hop south to Newport. She performed her first folk festival there in 1959. Her debut album, containing mostly traditional material, was released the following year and went to #20 on the charts. Meanwhile she conquered New York.

And this is roughly when Baez became an archetype. I’m not saying her type didn’t exist prior to that, but she ended up representing it, in the same way Elvis embodied all the greasers, and Devo represented all the nerds. The lithe, wispy poetess type, with long dark hair and soulful eyes. The beatnick chick dressed in black, the dancer in a Jules Feiffer cartoon. Joan Baez put a guitar in her hand, and thereafter all the hippie girls seemed cast from her mold as well. Joni Mitchell and Judy Collins and Mary Travers were obvious apples off of her tree, but when you extend it a little further, also Grace Slick and the girls in the Manson Family (which is surely among the factors that finally squelched the romanticization of that image).

Joan Baez was not unlike the older figures in folk music who became major cultural figures without having what we technically think of as hit songs. She is ASSOCIATED with certain songs, and non-exclusively at that, but her only top ten was her 1971 cover of “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”, which I wrote about at length here. This is followed in terms of chart performance, rather distantly by her original “Diamonds and Rust” (#35, 1975, about her relationship with Dylan), a 1971 cover of the Beatles’ “Let It Be” (#49), and a 1965 cover of Phil Ochs’ “There But for Fortune” (#50). But by contrast her albums were ALL best sellers. And we remember her from film clips: singing “We Shall Overcome” at the 1963 March on Washington, and her set at Woodstock in 1969. And her many, many Dylan covers, live and on record, which helped put him on the map, for Baez was already a big star long before he was. These include: “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”, “With God On Our Side”, “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”, “It Ain’t Me, Babe”, “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”, “Mama, You Been On My Mind” (which she changed to “Daddy”), and others. In 1968 she recorded Any Day Now, a double album consisting entirely of Dylan tunes

Slightly later, she also covered songs by Donovan, the Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, and other poppier pop stars. By then Dylan had gone electric (Newport, ’65), her sister and brother-in-law Richard and Mimi Fariña had also become folk stars (1965), Richard Fariña died in a motorcycle accident and Dylan faked one so he could drop out for a while (1966), and Don’t Look Back came out (1967). Then there was the insanity of 1968, and the 1969 incarceration of her husband David Harris for draft evasion. She was in Hanoi during the Christmas Bombings (1972)!

Amidst all that tumult and change, Baez was becoming an American institution. In 1967 she recorded a Christmas album, the first of her many collaborations with Peter Schickele, the one and only P.D.Q. Bach! The pair recorded songs that were used in the 1971 sci-fi film Silent Running! She went on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour,Playboy After Dark, and even The Donald O’Connor Show. She was a guest not only on David Frost and Dick Cavett’s talk shows, but also Merv! This was naturally around the time she released two of her most successful singles. This was her professional summit.

To say that Baez peaked in about 1971 is not to imply that the moment was followed by any sudden great dramatic fall. She never fell into obscurity or disappeared. To her, the phrase “Too Big To Fail” absolutely applies. Yet, I think you could say that the extent to which she was widely idolized and emulated slowly receded. Younger guns took her place. And ensuing generations grew less progressive and idealistic. And of course, tastes changed. I’ll cop right now to the fact that I never listen to Joan Baez records. I find her voice so pretty, her virtuosity so foregrounded, that it’s off-putting in a folk context. We all have many mini-Joan Baezes in our lives, who, when people are singing at some social gathering, pushes her way to the front of the group and lets loose the song-bird, and it’s like fingernails on a chalkboard because it’s done in the spirit of a body-building bully kicking sand in someone’s face on the beach. And she waits for everyone to say “You sing so well!” so that she can reply with mock surprise and false modesty, “Oh? Well thank you!” while clearly thinking to herself “Took you long enough!” There is a hilarious character like this in Paul Rust’s masterful tv show Love played by Briga Heelan. What are the very first words in Baez’s 1987 memoir A Voice to Sing With? “I was born gifted”. That is easy to make fun of.

In 1973 Baez was ruthlessly and savagely lampooned in the off-Broadway National Lampoon stage show Lemmings, in a song whose lyrics are unprintable. (The production was at the Village Gate, where I presented one of my first one act plays just about 20 years later. It is now the club le poisson rouge). Anyway, that takedown of Baez represents a HUGE cultural sea change. For an illustration of how the tide had turned: Baez’s sister Mimi Fariña had been a member of the San Francisco improv comedy troupe The Committee in 1967. Back then the political satire had been directed solely at reactionary forces in the country. But after the dust settled from ’68 and ’72, the culture had gotten cynical and nihilistic, and often mean just for the sake of meanness.

Baez has been as active as ever in the half century or more since the wind changed direction, doing what she always did, with many subsequent professional triumphs. But the social and political goals she always cites as her priority slipped farther and farther away from becoming a reality. Saturday Night Live, which sprang partially from Lemmings, launched in 1975, finding its legs just around the same time Dylan and Baez and company were touring with the Rolling Thunder Revue.SNL lost its satirical edge entirely by the Reagan era; and the Rolling Thunder Revue was strictly entertainment, with politicking almost entirely absent. People became disengaged. Now look where we are.