It’s refreshing and reassuring to realize there are women like Joan Baez.
When I was coming of age in the ’60s her music and political activisim were a fixture of American culture and politics during the American imperialist Vietnam war and closer to home, the civil rights movement.
Joan Baez must be appalled but not surprised at the coup d’etat attempt by Trump and his unhinged nihilistic Nazi like bands of thugs.
Excertped from Deutsche Welle 1.9.2021
DW’s Susanne Spröer recalls how Baez changed her life. –
Joan Chandos Baez was born on January 9, 1941 in Staten Island, New York to Albert Baez, a Mexican-born physicist, and Joan Bridge, born in Scotland. She was the second of three daughters.
Her father’s work led the family to move often; they lived on the East Coast of the US, then in Baghdad, Iraq (where the 10-year-old Joan read The Diary of Anne Frank), and later in California. Throughout her childhood and youth, Joan suffered from anxiety attacks and found it difficult to connect with her peers. Her family was her refuge.
That all changed when Joan was given a ukulele. All of a sudden, the outsider — who had been marginalized in school by the white kids because her skin was too dark, and by the Mexican kids because she couldn’t speak Spanish — found her place by playing songs in the schoolyard for the other school children.
Her first act of civil disobedience came at around that time too: She boycotted a nuclear war exercise she felt was ridiculous. From then on, she remained committed to music, and to social activism. She enjoyed being the center of attention.
To become a top singer in her school choir, she’d invent exercises to train her voice at home. A voice that Time magazine later described “as clear as air in the autumn, a vibrant, strong, untrained and thrilling soprano.”
Joan Baez also had a key experience at the age of 13. In the spring of 1954, her aunt and uncle took her to a concert by folk singer Pete Seeger. An exception in the dazzling music industry of the ’50s, Seeger stood for anti-elitist music.
“Sing with me. Sing for you. Make your own music,” he told the audience. His message was that we should forget big stars — and that everybody should be one.
Joan was electrified. She wanted to make music, and the music she wanted to make was folk. She started practicing folk songs.
In 1958, her family moved to Boston, which was at the heart of the folk revival scene. Joan studied acting, worked on the side — and got her first gig at Club 47 in Cambridge. She was paid $10, and 12 people showed up — mostly family or friends.
Barefoot and in a long dress, she accompanied herself on the guitar, an exotic beauty with a voice clear as a bell, concentrated, intense and natural. It was nothing like the often overdressed showbiz blondes of the time.
Soon more and more people wanted to hear her sing songs such as “John Riley,” “Silver Dagger” or “All My Trials.” In July 1959 she performed at the Newport Folk Festival. Her short performance was a bombshell.
Cover Time Magazine – 1962
Outdoing each other with superlatives, newspapers described her as the “musical Madonna” — long before the other Madonna would stir the music scene. It was the beginning of a six-decade career with more than 30 multi-award winning albums.
The 22-minute piece, “Where Are You Now, My Son?” (one side of the album of the same name), is a unique depiction of the Vietnam War, a collage of sounds, conversations and singing accompanying the lament of a mother who has lost her son.
Joan Baez – Vietnam war protest. Frankfurt, 1966
The sounds were recorded in Hanoi, where Joan Baez was stuck with a delegation of the peace movement around Christmas 1972. While the bombs were falling, Joan Baez was singing “Silent Night“ with the people around her.
The “Christmas Bombings” were the heaviest bombardments by the US Air Force since the Second World War. Baez later wrote in her memoir, And a Voice to Sing With, that the album “is my gift to the Vietnamese people, and my prayer of thanks for being alive.”
When the album was released in 1973, Joan Baez was 31 and a world star. Her performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1959 had launched her meteoric career. Many of her records went gold. She was onstage at the legendary Woodstock Festival in 1969 and also made Bob Dylan and his songs world famous (“Forever Young” is one of them). Those were just a few of her musical achievements.
Joan Baez at Civil Rights march in Washington, DC August 1963
Inseparable from Joan Baez’ music was her political activism: In 1963, she marched side by side with Martin Luther King against racial segregation. She was later arrested during protests against the Vietnam War.
In 1966, right in the middle of the Cold War, she was invited to perform in East Germany on May 1, International Workers’ Day. Rather than serving as the poster child of Communist authorities, she had dissident songwriter Wolf Biermann join her unannounced onstage at the East Berlin cabaret, Distel.
The state had already blacklisted and banned Biermann from performing publicly. But Baez wouldn’t toe any ideological line: She opposed oppression, whether from the right or the left. The concert was filmed for East German television but never broadcast.
If there’s one surprising thing in her career, it’s that she wasn’t inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame until 2017.
https://www.dw.com/en/joan-baez-turns-80-how-she-made-me-a-political-person/a-56038716
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