• Genre: Folk
• Active: '50s - 2000s
• Instruments: Vocals, Guitar

Biography

The most accomplished interpretive folksinger of the 1960s, Joan Baez has influenced nearly every aspect of popular music in a career still going strong. Baez is possessed of a once-in-a-lifetime soprano, which, since the late '50s, she has put in the service of folk and pop music as well as a variety of political causes. Starting out in Boston, Baez first gained recognition at the 1959 Newport Folk Festival, then cut her debut album, Joan Baez (October 1960), for Vanguard Records. It was made up of 13 traditional songs, some of them Child ballads, given near-definitive treatment. A moderate success on release, the album took off after the breakthrough of Joan Baez, Vol. 2 (September 1961), and both albums became huge hits, as did Baez's third album, Joan Baez in Concert, Pt. 1 (September 1962). Each album went gold and stayed in the bestseller charts more than two years.

From 1962 to 1964, Baez was the popular face of folk music, headlining festivals and concert tours and singing at political events, including the August 1963 March on Washington. During this period, she began to champion the work of folk songwriter Bob Dylan, and gradually her repertoire moved from traditional material toward the socially conscious work of the emerging generation of '60s artists like him. Her albums of this period were Joan Baez in Concert, Pt. 2 (November 1963) and Joan Baez 5 (October 1964), which contained her cover of Phil Ochs' "There But for Fortune," a Top Ten hit in the U.K.

Like other popular folk performers, Baez was affected by the changes in popular music wrought by the appearance of the Beatles in the U.S. in 1964 and Dylan's introduction of folk-rock in 1965, and she began to augment her simple acoustic guitar backing with other instruments, initially on Farewell, Angelina (October 1965). It was followed by a Christmas album, Noël (October 1966), and Joan (August 1967), albums on which she was accompanied by an orchestra conducted by Peter Schickele. Baez continued to experiment in the late '60s, releasing Baptism (June 1968), in which she recited poetry, and Any Day Now (December 1968), a double album of Dylan songs done with country backing, which went gold.

In March 1968, Baez had married antiwar protest leader David Harris, who was imprisoned as a draft evader. Harris was a country music fan, and Baez's turn toward country, which continued on David's Album (June 1969) and One Day at a Time (March 1970), reflected his taste. Blessed Are... (August 1971) was a gold-selling double album that spawned a gold Top Ten hit in Baez's cover of the Band's "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down." It was followed by Carry It On (December 1971), the soundtrack to a documentary about Baez and Harris. Baez switched record label affiliation to A&M Records with Come from the Shadows (May 1972), which moved her in a more pop direction. Where Are You Now, My Son? (May 1973) included sounds taped during Baez's visit to Hanoi in December 1972.

In the late '60s and early '70s, Baez moved toward pop/rock music and also began to write her own songs, culminating in the gold-selling Diamonds & Rust (April 1975), which was followed by the entirely self-written Gulf Winds (October 1976). Baez moved to the Portrait label of CBS Records with Blowin' Away (June 1977), but she left the label after Honest Lullaby (May 1979), and her next album, European Tour (1980), was released only outside the U.S. It was another seven years before she found an American record label, Gold Castle, for Recently (1987), which was followed by the live album Diamonds & Rust in the Bullring (January 1989) and Speaking of Dreams (October 1989). Baez moved to Virgin Records for Play Me Backwards (August 1992).

In 1993, Vanguard released Rare, Live & Classic, a three-CD boxed set retrospective. Ring Them Bells, a live album on which Baez was joined by musical descendants like Mary Chapin Carpenter and Indigo Girls, came out on Guardian Records in 1995. Gone from Danger, her first studio album in five years, followed in 1997, and it was another six years before the release of Dark Chords on a Big Guitar in 2003. A November 2004 concert in New York was documented on the 2005 release Bowery Songs. ~ William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide

Vanguard Visionaries Buy this CD	Ring Them Bells [Collectors Edition] Buy this CD	Any Day Now [Bonus Tracks] Buy this CD	David's Album [Bonus Tracks] Buy this CD	Any Day Now [Original Art Bonus Tracks] Buy this CD
Bowery Songs Buy this CD	One Day at a Time [Bonus Tracks] Buy this CD	Blessed Are... [Bonus Tracks] Buy this CD	Joan [Bonus Tracks] Buy this CD	Dark Chords on a Big Guitar Buy this CD

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• Born: Jan 09, 1941 in Staten Island, New York City, New York
• Occupation: Actor
• Active: '70s-2000s
• Major Genres: Music, Culture & Society
• Career Highlights: Don't Look Back, Renaldo and Clara, Sacco and Vanzetti
• First Major Screen Credit: The Big T.N.T. Show (1966)

Biography

While her contributions to motion pictures have been minimal, American singer/composer Joan Baez is perhaps the best known and most influential contributor to the field of 1960s protest songs. The daughter of a Mexican-born physicist father and a Quaker mother, Joan scored her first public success at age 18, when she was featured at the Newport Festival. Her fame was furthered by the first of several tours with Bob Dylan in 1963. Joan was popular enough in the late 1960s to be cruelly parodied by cartoonist Al Capp, who created a folksinger named Joanie Phoanie who sang for the oppressed while tooling around in a Rolls Royce. This caricature couldn't have been farther from the truth: while many other prominent protest singers succumbed to the trappings of money and fame, Joan remained steadfastly true to her causes. In 1965, she helped create the Institute for Non-Violence in California; a few years later, she willingly made herself persona non grata on network TV by dedicating a performance on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour to her husband David Harris, then in prison for evading the draft. Baez' movie contributions have included her producing chores on the 1982 There but for Fortune (the title was taken from her 1965 song hit), a semi-documentary about the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. Joan Baez has appeared as herself in a handful of concert films (1966's Big TNT Show, 1967's Don't Look Back), and was seen as an interviewee in the 1984 Woody Guthrie documentary, Hard Travellin'. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Smothered: The Great Smothers Brothers Censorship Wars Buy this Movie	Message to Love: The Isle of Wight Festival Buy this Movie	Berkeley in the Sixties Buy this Movie	Woodstock: Lost Performances Buy this Movie
To Kill a Priest Buy this Movie	Folk City: 25th Anniversary Concert Buy this Movie	Dynamite Chicken Buy this Movie	Woodstock Buy this Movie

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American folk singer Joan Baez (born 1941) was recognized for her non-violent, anti-establishment, and anti-war positions. She used her singing and speaking talents to denounce violations of human rights in a number of countries.

By the age of 22, Joan Baez was already known as the "queen of folk singers." Her rich and varied early experiences contributed significantly to her later "anti-establishment" attitudes. Her father, Albert V. Baez, was a physicist who came to the United States from Mexico at a very early age, and her mother was of West-European descent. Joan inherited her father's dark complexion, and the occasional racial prejudice she suffered as a child probably led to her later involvement in the civil rights movement. Although as an adult she claimed not to share her parents' Quaker faith, it undoubtedly contributed to what some called her keen "social conscience."

One of three sisters, Baez was born on January 9, 1941, in Staten Island, New York. She was exposed to an intellectual atmosphere with classical music during her childhood, but rejected piano lessons in favor of the guitar and rock and roll.

Her father's research and teaching positions took the family to various American and foreign cities. She attended high school in Palo Alto, California, where she excelled in music more than in academic subjects. Shortly after her high school graduation in 1958, her family moved to Boston where Baez's interest in folk music surfaced after visiting a coffeeshop where amateur folk singers performed.

From Boston Coffee Houses to Newport

She briefly attended Boston University where she made friends with several semi-professional folk singers from whom she learned much about the art. In addition to simple folk songs, she began to sing Anglo-American ballads, blues, spirituals, and songs from various countries. As she worked to develop her technique and repertoire, Baez began to perform professionally in Boston coffeehouses and quickly became a favorite of Harvard students. She was also noticed by other folk singers, including Harry Belafonte, who offered her a job with his singing group.

In the summer of 1959 she was invited to sing at the Newport (Rhode Island) Folk Festival. That performance made her a soaring phenomenon - especially to young people - and led to friendships with other important folk singers such as the Seeger family and Odetta. Although that performance brought her offers to make recordings and concert tours, she decided to resume her Boston coffeeshop appearances.

After her second Newport appearance in 1960, Baez made her first album for Vanguard Records, simply labelled Joan Baez, which was an immediate success. She was then such a "hot item" that she could tell CBS what songs she would sing and what props she would use in her appearance. In the following years Baez sang to capacity crowds on American college campuses and concert halls and on several foreign tours. Her eight gold album and one gold single awards attested to her popularity as a singer.

Her soprano voice has been described as "so clear and so luminously sensual that it reminded everyone of their first loves." She had no need to take lessons to enhance her voice, which ranged over three octaves, but she needed practice in order to achieve command of the guitar.

Politics a Source of Controversy

While many critics agreed that her untrained singing voice was unusually haunting, beautiful, and very soothing, they saw her spoken words, lifestyle, and actions as discordant and sometimes anti-American. In the turbulent 1960s, Baez became a center of controversy when she used her singing and speaking talents to urge non-payment of taxes used for war purposes and to urge men to resist the draft during the Vietnam War. She helped block induction centers and was twice arrested for such violations of the law. She had already studied, understood, and adopted non-violent strategies as a way to effect changes where she perceived injustices to exist.

She was married to David Harris, a draft resister, in March 1968. She was pregnant with their son, Gabriel, in April 1969 and three months later saw her husband arrested for refusing induction into the military forces. (He spent the next 20 months in a federal prison in Texas.)

Baez Creates A Stir Among American Left

In the early 1970s, Baez began to speak with less stridence and by the end of the decade had offended dozens of her former peace-activist allies, such as Jane Fonda and attorney William Kunstler, when she publicly denounced the atrocities in Vietnam's Communist "re-education" centers. As she had done in the case of Chile and Argentina (without public outcries from former associates), Baez called for human rights to be extended to those centers in post-war Vietnam. Although her position seemed similar to that of Western intellectuals, it nevertheless created a stir among the American left (some of whom called for her own re-education). When some asked what right any American had to criticize the Communist government for anything it was doing after what the United States had done to the Vietnamese, she responded: "The same right we have to help anyone anywhere who is a prisoner of conscience."

Baez' Career Through the 1980s and '90s

In later years Baez' singing career faltered despite various attempts to revive it. Her 1985 effort featured a more conventional hairstyle and attire. Her supporters believed she would regain her prominence in the entertainment industry because her voice, although deeper, retained the same qualities which earlier made her so successful. Meanwhile, she was quite busy throughout the world as the head of the Humanitas International Human Rights Committee, which concentrated on distracting (in any possible non-violent way) those whom it believed exercised illegitimate power.

Baez has continued to make music and to influence younger performers. In 1987, Baez released Recently, her first studio solo album in eight years. She was nominated for a 1988 Best Contemporary Folk Recording Grammy Award for the song "Asimbonanga" from the album. Also in 1988, Baez recorded Diamonds and Rust in the Bullring in Bilbao, Spain. The album was released the following April. In 1990, Baez toured with the Indigo Girls and the threesome were recorded for a PBS video presentation, Joan Baez In Concert. In 1991, she released a compilation album, Brothers In Arms, featuring two new tracks. In 1993, two more Baez recordings were released: Play Me Backwards, consisting of new material; and Rare, Live & Classic, a retrospective of her career from 1958 to 1989, featuring 22 previously unreleased tracks. Another compilation CD, Live At Newport, containing previously unreleased performances from the 1963, 1964 and 1965 Newport Folk Festivals was released by Vanguard records in 1996. Baez released another solo album, Gone from Danger, in early 1997.

The singer's interest in politics and human rights has continued as well. In 1993, she was invited by Refugees International to travel to Bosnia-Herzegovina in order to help bring attention to the suffering there. In September of that same year, Baez became the first major artist to perform in a professional concert on Alcatraz Island (the former Federal Penitentiary) in San Francisco to benefit her sister Mimi Farina's organization, Bread & Roses. She returned to the island for a second benefit in 1996 along with the Indigo Girls and Dar Williams. She has also supported the gay and lesbian cause, joining Janis Ian in a performance at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force's Fight the Right fund-raising event in San Francisco in 1995.

Further Reading

Bits of biographical data about Joan Baez may be found in her book Daybreak (1968) and in Coming Out (1971), which she co-authored with husband, David Harris. The latter chronicles a brief period after Harris's release from prison for draft evasion. The best sources for additional information about her anti-war activities are news and popular periodicals from 1968 to 1977.

Baez's 1987 autobiography, And A Voice To Sing With, isan excellent source of information as well. Other current sources include the January 17, 1997 issue of Goldmine in which she is profiled in an extensive 14-page cover story by Bill Carpenter.

Baez can be found on the web at http://baez.woz.org and on the A&E Biography site at http://www.biography.com/find/find.html.

For more information on Joan Chandos Baez, visit Britannica.com.

(bīpstr;ĕz, bä'–) , 1941–, American folk singer and political activist, b. New York City. Baez began singing traditional folk ballads, blues, and spirituals in Cambridge, Mass., coffeehouses in a clear soprano voice with a three-octave range. She made folk music, which had been largely ignored, popular. Baez's records were the first folk albums to become best-sellers. Her later albums include several of her own compositions, e.g., “Song for David” and “Blessed Are.” Among the first performers to urge social protest, she sang and marched for civil and student rights and peace. Since the late 1960s she has devoted time to her school for nonviolence in California and has performed at concerts supporting a variety of humanitarian causes.

Bibliography

See her autobiography, Daybreak (1968), and her memoir, And a Voice to Sing With (1987).

Quotes:

"Action is the antidote to despair."

"You don't get to choose how you're going to die, or when. You can decide how you're going to live now."

"Nonviolence is a flop. The only bigger flop is violence."

"The only thing that's been a worse flop than the organization of non-violence has been the organization of violence."

"The easiest kind of relationship is with ten thousand people, the hardest is with one."

"All serious daring starts from within."

See more famous quotes by Joan Baez