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TechnoratiAge has not wearied Joan Baez, the queen of protest, but it’s calmed her down ... a bit
Perhaps the company she keeps has maintained her youth. Day After Tomorrow, her new album, is produced by the much younger country singer Steve Earle and it features songs by her favourite songwriters, including the British singer Thea Gilmore, who is half her age.
![[Joan Baez, the queen of America’s folk scene in the Sixties, says she has ’never really been a songwriter’ (Source: TimesOnline)]](http://www.commondreams.org/files/article_images/baez.jpg "baez.jpg")
"Steve's so like me in a lot of ways," says Baez, who holds herself in a poised way that has a tinge of therapy about it (she underwent a lot of it in the Eighties) and reveals an awareness of her status as a diva, albeit one that would rather see the poor clothed and fed than swathe herself in diamonds. "We share the same beliefs, although he's so left of me that I call him Mr Pinko, and there's something about his gruffness and my voice that gels."
Baez is a good advertisement for not getting caught up in stardom. Born to a liberal Quaker family in 1941, she'd already lived in France, Italy and Iraq by the time her Mexican father, a physicist who worked for Unesco, and Scottish mother settled down in Boston when she was 17. It was only a year later that she was thrust into fame after a triumphant appearance at the 1959 Newport Folk Festival. Her first album was already out by the time a young, hungry and extremely ambitious Bob Dylan hit Greenwich Village in 1961.
For a brief moment in the early Sixties Dylan and Baez were the king and queen of the folk movement, the perfect couple to lead the young of America towards a new consciousness. But while Baez stuck to cover versions and causes, Dylan took off on a poetic journey all his own, hitching on the coat-tails of Baez's fame and then leaving her behind to become the foremost songwriter of the 20th century.
"I've never really been a songwriter," Baez says of the path she's taken. "Steve Earle wrote a song for me called I Am a Wanderer that expresses a sentiment I relate to far better than anything I could write."
These days, the warbling falsetto that Baez brought to We Shall Overcome and Babe I'm Gonna Leave You in the Sixties has been deepened by age, but she's still using the songs to get across her core messages of pacifism, social responsibility and, for the first time, party allegiance, saying of her endorsement of Barack Obama: "For years I chose not to engage in party politics. At this time, however, changing that posture feels like the responsible thing to do."
Her strident sincerity is something that doesn't always sit well with audiences as radical politics fall in and out of fashion. "After 9/11 nobody wanted to hear anything bad about America," says Baez, growing animated as she enters into political territory. "Nobody loves a war better than the President, and a few years ago it got to the point where if I said anything I truly believed about the Iraq war or global warming during a concert, people would get up and leave. That's fine with me. Actually, it's a badge of honour."
Baez is used to hostility. One senses that she thrives on it. At school in California she upset teachers by refusing to leave class during a bomb drill, reasoning that if the school was to be nuked, running outside would hardly do anyone much good. Later, as a teenage folk singer she would stop singing and glower at anyone who dared to talk during one of her performances. She and her first husband, David Harris, served jail sentences for their resistance to the Vietnam War (he refused the draft; she refused to pay a portion of her taxes to the war effort). It's no surprise that the rebirth of her career coincided with an increasing dissatisfaction with the Bush presidency and its foreign policy.
"Little by little it became clear that Bush was bizarre - and dangerous," she says. "I would do concerts where I would see people in the audience sitting with their arms crossed, looking angry as I said: ‘I was right 40 years ago and I am right now!' and throw my fist in the air. Now they're listening. Bush's great trick is to suggest that to go against him is to be unpatriotic. Slowly people realised that."
Baez acknowledges that, to her generation at least, she eternally represents the Sixties protest movement. "I'm a part of history," she says with calm resignation. "I represent so much before I've even opened my mouth. But I was more active when I was young, and it's only now that I'm spending time with my family."
Like so many of her contemporaries, Baez put bringing her message of peace to the world before raising kids. When she was divorced from Harris in 1972 their son Gabe went to live with his father, and it's only recently that she has become close to him. "I live with my mother, who is 95, I have a four-year-old grandchild, and it's a turning for me. It's confusing, too - am I really allowed to hang around the home and look after my mom?
"I don't regret what I did in the Sixties, but you can't stay on the biting edge of radicalism all your life. My core beliefs of non-violence haven't changed, but my lifestyle has."
Baez accepts that the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement gave her a purpose, and that when they came to an end she was left floundering. "It's natural," she says with a shrug. "The Vietnamese developed all sorts of neuroses and phobias after the war ended because they were no longer spending every day in the heightened state that comes with not knowing if you're going to be killed or not. When the war ended a lot of us lost direction. I certainly did."
It's also taken Baez a long time to relax and actually enjoy herself. She was, by her own admission, "far too neurotic" to appreciate early fame, and her image as an overly earnest Virgin Mary figure worked against her as the concerned citizenship of the counterculture gave way to hippy experimentation in the late Sixties. "I had this great fear of going commercial. As a result of becoming well-known at such a young age I was afraid of the wider world. But I did also have deeply held beliefs that I clung on to tenaciously. The big event was meeting Martin Luther King in 1956 at a Quaker seminar. That pretty much shaped the direction my life took."
In 1963 Baez was given the job of driving King and Jesse Jackson from an airport to a march. "They laughed all the time and told racist jokes about themselves, and I realised that nobody could see that side of them. They had to be seen as serious, and I related to that. We got to a restaurant and I asked them: ‘Don't you have a big march to organise?' They said: ‘We just have.' You get a public image that you have to live up to but your private reality is often very different."
After years of being written off as an unsmiling anachronism, Joan Baez is relevant once more. She thrives on political and economic tension - such as now. "At times of great uncertainty music and politics are fused," she says. "I would never have sung We Shall Overcome to an American audience during the Eighties because it would have been a nostalgia trip. Now it's appropriate again because it's relevant. I'm happiest when that happens."
36 Comments so far
Show AllI don't believe Joan served any time for her war tax resistance however she did serve time in other civil disobedience actions, such as "Stop the Draft Week" in 1967 where she and other demonstrators sat in front of the Oakland Induction Center as part of a nationwide protest to the Vietnam War.
The Democratic Party should have paid Bob Dylan to perform at the convention between the group of retired Generals and Obama when he gave the big speech.
I'll be damned, here comes your ghost again
But that's not unusual
It's just that the moon is full
And you decided to call
And here I sit, hand on the telephone
Hearing the voice I'd known
A couple of light years ago
Headed straight for a fall
But we both know what memories can bring
They bring Diamonds and Rust
Yes we both know what memories can bring
They bring Diamonds and Rust
Now I see you standing with brown leaves
all around and snow in your hair
Now we're smiling out the window of
the crummy hotel over Washington
Square
Our breath comes in white clouds,
mingles and hangs in the air
Speaking strictly for me we both
could've died then and there
But we both know what memories can bring
They bring Diamonds and Rust
Yes we both know what memories can bring
They bring Diamonds and Rust
Diamonds, Diamonds and Rust
Diamonds, Diamonds and Rust
Diamonds, Diamonds and Rust
Diamonds, Diamonds and Rust
I've always loved Joan, but it's so sad to see her putting her hopes on Barack Obama after he pledged to switch troops from Iraq to Afghanistan and to, roughly, "drill for more natural gas resources, safely harness nuclear power, promote clean coal and biofuels.
Nataural gas means more digging and drilling, mostly on foreign soil, and death to the Northern Cheyenne here in our own country. They are surrounded by 500 natural gas wells and just lost a case that will mean 500 more moving in, right onto their reservation.
There is no clean coal, as the Hopi and Navajo Black Mesa Water Coalition will tell you, and the Desert Rock Power Plant on the Navajo Reservation, an EPA permitted "clearn coal" project will west 5000 square feet of water a year until that arrt of the Four Corners becomes completely uninhabitable.
There is no safe way of harnessing nuclear power, and the nuclear waste building up in dry cask storage is reaching such crisis proportions that every nuclear power plant in the world should be turned off immediately, but instead we are building more and foisting them off on the overexploited world, often in exchange for uranium mines.
And bio-fuels are probably the biggest cause of starvation in the world today, especially in Africa. Isn't it ironic, then, that Barack Obama is half African? --Annie Garrison
Bring America Back !!!!
Okay, after the 2nd reading I found some relevance to Joan Baez and
the core of what we Progs (rhymes with Frogs) do in this Blog !
Blogger 'cruxpuppy' echos the "but why Baez" , geeze !
I guess her recent album "Day After Tomorrow" has some rendition
of We Shall Overcome, and some kind of endorsement of Obama==but
I have to defer to those who have listened to it's lyrics & music ??
I was thinking perhaps Joan sang last week at the Denver Rock Concert,
but I don't think she did, or I missed that part ! If she has some of
that spunk and fight left, we would welcome her direct Voice, even
singing Voice to support our push to get the Obama campaign to back up
their promises and verbal vows with real actions, not just nice words !
For Example, The Dixie Chicks stood up and backed up their claim
of disgrace that KIng George Bush was from their home state of Texas !
They took many lumps from the Neocons, forced to cancel many of their
contracted tour performances being called traitorous enemies of the state !
They suffered enormously !! Joan Baez said people walked out of her
performances due to her stance on 9/11 ??
The Dixie Chicks are now modern American Heroins in most quarters of
the Nation and the World !! They knew a Traitor when they saw one !
And their song==="NOT READY TO MAKE NICE", casts it in musical stone !
I would like it better, understand this article better, if Joan Baez
would stand up, like the Dixie Chicks, and affirmatively let us know
where she stands NOW==as opposed to the 60's sit-in's==about 9/11;
about Torture; about Mainstream Media War Cheerleaders; about
John McCain's favorite song "BOMB-IRAN", you know the old Beachboys
song bombiran, bombiran !!!
Then, Joan Baez, I would once again be after you for your autograph !
Just to clarify... The Dixie Chicks were wrong about GWB being from Texas.
He ain't.
Born in CT, like his daddy and granddaddy (Senator Prescott Bush). He went to prep school there and later to Yale.
Joan and people like her always have been and always will be right. The proof of this is in the abuse she gets from the far right.
"Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne."---James Russell Lowell
Baez has often been courageous and had moments of brilliance, but anyone who supports Obama is a traitor to the cause of universal justice, which will only arise out of proletarian socialist revolution. No matter how its proponents try, there is no way to erase capitalism's inevitable march toward poverty and war. Even if the fakir Obama momentarily sets things better, a new GWB is always in the wings, and will rise like a demon phoenix in the fullness of time. It is not a matter of individual character, it is a matter of a dysfunctional economic system that endlessly fosters monsters.
That's it in a nutshell.
Well said, Red!!!!!!!
I remember sitting near the front row of a Joan Baez concert at the Auditorium in Chicago in the seventies, (when she started to go electric?) when a friend of my parents yelled out to her to turn down her amplifier. She responded by telling him to turn down his hearing aid.
My mom received a new Joan Baez album from me for her birthday every year from 1970 to 1985. I have fond memories of sitting with my family next to the hi-fi listening to that pure voice of unremitted bliss. I might not like some of her political stances but I can still love her warbling.
Point of reference. In 1956 when Joan was suppossedly driving MLK Jr and Jesse Jackson to a Quaker meeting, both she and Jesse Jackson would have been 15. JJ would have been a freshman at Sterling High School in Greenville South Carolina where he graduated from in the class of 1959. Baez did not graduate from Palo Alto HIgh School in California until 1958.
Martin Luther King Jr. was up to his ears in the Montgomery AL Bus Boycott which didn't officially end until December 1956 and is considered the very beginning of his famous career as a Civil rights leader. Further, his conviction about non-violence began in 1959 after a visit to the family of Mohandas Ghandi in India (facilitated by the Friends Service Committee of the Quaker church).
Since neither Baez nor Jackson would have been old enough to drive, and King had not yet become such a profound convert to the strategy of non-violence until three years later, it seems highly unlikely that they were where they were doing what Baez claimed they were suppossedly doing in 1956. If it wasn't a typo on the part of the story's writer, it speaks to either some fabrication or confusion on Baez's part.
Poet
You mis-read the article..........she drove the two in 1963.
As for patriotic it is the Joan Baez types that are patriotic....patriotism comes from the ability to speak up when you know that your government is wrong and praise your government when it is right.
The 9/11 Commission was a mission to "Whitewash" politicians from blame. Sandy Berger stole documents from the National Archives and then destroyed them. What did he need to hide?
The Invasion of Iraq was based on forged and fabricated documents and yet no one has brought those people to justice.
"The big event was meeting Martin Luther King in 1956 at a Quaker seminar. That pretty much shaped the direction my life took." AND
"In 1963 Baez was given the job of driving King and Jesse Jackson from an airport to a march."
meeting but not driving mlk at 15 in '56.
driving mlk at 22.
careful with those rash judgements....
~~z
*** ****** ***
"Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are anger and courage; anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not remain the way they are."
I generally liked Joan Baez, until January 1991. Joan was one of several activists who were asked to lead a large (250,000 +) march and rally in San Francisco. There, I approached her and offered her my Palestinian kiffiya (checkered head-dress/scarf) that is a symbol of resistance (which is what the march and rally was). She refused it saying "it's loaded". And how was it loaded -- that it represented resistance to Israel's occupation of Palestine? Of course.
This incident left a bitter taste in me: that some who call themselves progressives maybe so except when it comes to Palestine and Israel's brutal and racist policies.
moral of story -- don't pick other people's battles for them
Joan Baez is part of the genetic heritage of this country's social consciousness. We're lucky to still have her.
Dylan was/is different. He is a poet and a songwriter and resents being considered anything more.
I am not that thrilled about a number of Obama's stances, but he might give us a chance or two to just start picking up some of the sCRAP that has been shoved outa the back of the truck that has been careening down the highway for the past 8 years.
It seems pretty obvious that he is the better choice but what is the likelihood that he will get in? Isn't the "fix" already in? Now, honed to perfection, the fraudsters are just kicking back and waiting.
Remember how we thought there would be such a rebellion in 2004 that the fraud would be overwhelmed?
But lets just suppose he gets in. If we just kick back, if we just leave it to Obama, I don't think we shall overcome someday.
Alphalpha
Joan, you WERE right then and you ARE right now - truth doesn't cut its jacket to fit the fashions of the day; truth just is. Thanks for continuing to be for and with the truth, and for being who you are - and thanks to zimmie for articulating it so nicely.
Thanks Javier.,,Obama is ultimately more of the same. Big deal if he can sway the youth. Youth can also be duped as we all know from experience.Haven't people had enough of corporate rule? Or are we all just having too much fun playing politics?
Crux...You hit the nail on the head...Wake up my friends.Take action,Take a chance, get hurt a little.Do it for Democracy and for your grandkids,,,,,Vote Nader.
Funny how the writer avoids the political circus of today. What's Joan's take on Obama? Does she endorse the war on terror, as Obama does, the attack on the Constitution, as Obama does by default because he won't condemn the Patriot Act, the milcom act, the attack on posse comitatis, and so on. What would Joan say about the Imperial Presidency that Obama is lusting after, a presidency far more imperial than it was under Johnson or Nixon? This article is contrived in such a way to suggest that she supports Obama, whether that is the case or not.
www.renovationpress.com. WYSIWYG
i always thought Tiny Tim was the greatest. "Tip-toe-through-the-tulips"
Will Hodgkinson repeats the ridiculous notion that Bob Dylan is the "foremost songwriter of the 20th century." What uninformed nonsense! Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington was unquestionably the "foremost" American songwriter of the 20th century, and Cole Porter was not far behind him. I don't deny that Dylan was (and is) a great songwriter, but "the foremost"? Get some perspective.
Baez' has a nickname amongst concert-goers, Groan. She confirmed that nickname when she sang Tears for Fears' "Shout" on the Amnesty International "Conspiracy of Hope" Tour (which was headlined by U2 and included Peter Gabriel and Lou Reed) in 1986. Her heart is generally in the right place, but sometimes the action produces winces.
I never was a huge Joan Baez fan, but I admired her spunk. That she's a Barack Obama supporter doesn't surprise me, but I wonder why, at her age, she can't see that he's a corporatist just like the other politicians we're allowed to choose from.
Maybe like so many realistic radicals, she knows exactly what Obama is all about...not the end-all and be-all, not perfect, but a huge improvement over what we're had and over the alternative. You and your ilk, you egotistically kid yourself that you understand something that people like her don't. You're being self-righteous and self-flattering. If you're 14, that's okay...experience might teach you about REALITY. But if you're an adult, then its pathetic that people like you can't understand that you don't have some better analysis than people like her. The likes of you with your vanity-driven drivel about Obama being like the rest can only accomplish one thing: give the election to a dangerous fascist. Of course Obama is not going to bring about radical change, but just that he took a principled stand against the debacle in Iraq and that he's mobilized so many young people with his clear, well-articulated vision means he's a big improvement. Try to grow up a bit and be realistic.
No, You grow up.
You and the rest of America have to reach out and catch the edge of the cliff that that you just jumped off and is whizzing by. Reaching out just a bit, in more or less the right direction, will not do it. You will actually have to catch the wall and clime back up to have half a chance of getting it right, and not destroying yourselves and the rest of the world in the bargain.
What you don't understand is that the reins are in other hands, of which Obama or the other "dangerous fascist" is only an apparent spectre, an expression, a personification, all because you have gave them that control. They framed the terms of your consent and you continue to be sheeple.
The one word that JB talkes about that requires revisiting by the "realists" of today is RESPONSIBILITY. Now that's a word for grown ups indeed.
I was in college in the 60's and everyone had a guitar and played and sang folk music. Joan Baez and Pete Seeger are two of my heros as they had the courage of their convictions and were willing to speak up and take the consequences, if there were any.
I hope Joan and others will take the stage again to help us find our way; to help bring together the good people of this nation so we can take it back.
Thank You Joan, for helping to recall those of us that remember the time of the 60's. I was a young teen of 14 when during the "Moritorium" in D.C. and 15 during Kent State. I have a cousin that sang with Woody Gutherie, and Pete Seeger in the California Farm Workers movement in the late 50's. Those of us from the Late 60's early 70's as well as other generations need to realize that we have been recalled to an important mission. Help get Barack Obama elected in November!!
If everybody against the war had refused to pay a portion of taxes, like she and her husband did, she would probably not have gone to jail. But she was alone, just like those who will vote for Nader. Do what you think is right, not what you think is realistic. lizard
Glad that Joan has kept her ego in check all these years.....that is certainly a huge difference between her and Bob. I am sad to see that she has taken up party politics....especially given how corrupt both parties are! Isn't that evident to her???? It is SO glaring in my eyes! She is too smart to back up Obama...maybe there is something in her tea that is the culprit. I'd like to think so anyway.
Two Parties....one ruler....CORPORATE !!!
What a joy to be in present time with Ms. Joan Baez. As relevant, or more relevant, than ever.
Cassandra was right too but she did not leave us with
Diamonds and Rust and memories of our youth.
Thankyou.
So glad you are back, Joan, to inspire a whole new generation singing, in your singularly beautiful and soulful voice, the anthem that says it all.
WE SHALL OVERCOME!
This time we must ... for all life on earth.
____ T H AN K ____ Y O U ____ J ☮ A N _____
That song is __ s o __ powerful for me,
__ that I cry today
__ recalling my inspired times in the 60s
__ realizing too many folks don't know that song
Namaste
"Ghosts of my history will follow me there,
And the winds of the old days will blow through my hair.
Breath on an undying emeber;
It doesn't take much to remember
Those eloquent songs from the good old days
That set us to marching with banners ablaze."
Sorry, Joan, you are a GREAT songwriter, still a love of my life, and yes, still right after forty years.
I usually end my posts with a quote from ferlinghetti ("i am constantly awaiting a rebirth of wonder...") Thank you, Ms. Baez, for being who you are - still. Thinking of you brings tears to this old hippie's eyes, and more than a little wonder to his life.
Sic-em, Joan, we still need you!