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| August 7, 2002 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| JOAN BAEZ | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Joan was born January 9, 1941 to Albert and Joan Baez in Staten Island, NY. Joan and her family moved in 1951 to Baghdad, Iraq while her father worked. When her father finished his work in Iraq, the family moved to California. In California, Joan became more aware of the world that she was growing up in, and like most teenagers tend to do, she became aware that there were groups of people who were not given the same treatment by society. In 1956, Joan started to show signs of her life to come when she heard Martin Luther King, Jr. speak, and bought her first guitar. (Stewart) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Joan graduated from high school in 1958 and recorded her demo album before her family moved to Belmont, Massachusetts. Joan finds herself becoming a member of the folk scene while she attends Boston College. Although her college education did not endure for long, her budding career as a folk singer started taking off. Joan records her first album for Veritas Records (a local recording studio), Folksingers ?Round Harvard Square. With encouragement and help from others in the folk music scene, Joan performs as a surprise artist at the Newport Folk Festival in July 1959.& This surprise created a buzz about a new, exciting and talented folk singer. (Stewart) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| From this point Joan's career as a folk singer and later as an activist with the civil rights and the Vietnam War protest movement grew. Joan signed a contract with Vanguard Recording Society and releases her first nationally released album Joan Baez in 1960. The album becomes a quick and huge success. It is followed up with Joan Baez, Volume Two in 1961, which is supported by Joan?s first national tour. Both of these albums are recordings of mostly traditional folk songs; they provided her with a strong soundboard for when she would later venture off to lyrics that were about the troubles being faced and witnessed. To be true to her involvement in the civil right movement, in 1962 Joan performs three concert tours to southern college campuses, where she insists that her performances will not be segregated. (Stewart) This abandonment of the southern norms shows that Joan wants to make sure that her fans can practice the ideologies that she has adopted for herself. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| She met and started a romance that lasts for three years with Bob Dylan in 1963. Joan was impressed with Dylan's writings that spoke about current issues, Vietnam War and the civil rights movement. The first song that Dylan performed for her was "The Death of Emmett Till". Joan was blown away by the lyrics about a 14-year-old black boy who was murdered in Mississippi. Joan later said, "that song turned me into a political folk singer" (qtd. Perry) when she discussed her introduction into singing songs about "real-life relevance". (Perry) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| This union not only combines two separate acts, but leads to some notable collaboration on several songs. While Dylan and Joan did not necessarily collaborate on the writing of songs, Joan was able to vocalize Dylan's songs in ways that he would never be able to. Her voice has expression that Dylan's mumbled voice lacks. Dylan's writing about political issues is just the type of lyrics that Joan was looking for, while she had so far built her career on singing traditional folk songs, her drive to sing about what she has been witnessing and hearing about is just what she wants for her career. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Dylan is not the only songwriter who wrote songs for Joan. Joan's sister Mimi, a back up singer for Joan, married Richard Farina who wrote a couple of songs for Joan before his death in 1966. Joan included John Lennon's song "Imagine" on her 1972 album Come From the Shadows. She also sang songs that were written by some other notable folk songwriters, Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, and later she would write songs for herself. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Joan added Dylan to the lineup of artists that performed at her concerts. This introduced Dylan not only to her fan base but also to the growing folk music national audience as Dylan and Joan performed as the "king and queen of folk songs". (Perry) Joan joined the 1963 March on Washington with Martin Luther King Jr. and led the crowd of 250,000 to sing the spiritual "We Shall Overcome", which she had released on her Joan Baez In Concert/Part 2 album, 1963. (Perry) She went on to try and persuade President Johnson to abandon the conflict in Vietnam with the song, written by Dylan, "Blowin' in the Wind", which was first recorded on her Live in Japan album in 1967. (Perry) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| During her career, Joan took time off from recording music in order to participate more fully in her political activism. Those who listened to the lyrics of her songs would never be surprised by Joan's activism. She protested the Vietnam War by withholding sixty percent of her income tax; the amount that she felt matched the percentage of all taxes collected by the government. This lasted until the United States government finally abandoned Vietnam and Saigon fell in 1975. I don't really know how it was that Joan was able to do this and not end up being put in jail for tax evasion, but after reading about this and realizing that she did take this risk that could have ended her career, I am even more in awe of her activism. "My devotion to non-violence and social change formed long before I picked up a ukulele and will go until I fall into the grave." (qtd. Vanguard) This statement is pretty much the crux of Joan's political activism. Joan's political activism did put some snags into her musical career, she was banned in 1967 from singing in Washington's Constitutional Hall, arrested twice in Oakland, California for blocking a draft registration center and her albums were banned from Army bases worldwide because her music was viewed as being "Anti-American". (Perry) Still, she survived to become a political force to be reckoned with. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| In the 1960s she released more than 10 albums of traditional and contemporary folk music and founded the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence. She was jailed two times in the late 1960s for protesting the Vietnam War. 1970s saw an "impressive" 18 albums by Joan Baez, and her first top ten hit, a cover of the Bands "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" from her Blessed Are album, 1971. (Chonin) By changing her musical style from the traditional folk music to lyrics that talked about real life events, Joan's career was not as much in the spotlight as it could have been if she had chosen to sing "pretty" songs, but she was able to fulfill a strong desire to change the world she lived in. (Perry) Joan still released albums throughout the 1980s and 1990s with most of them being compilation albums of not only her hits but also her purpose in life. Joan's latest album is Gone From Danger, 1997, for this album, Joan poured over songs composed by several different artists. She decided on several songs from some new artists whose songs spoke of concerns for modern American Life. (Stewart) Which not in anyway different than from her previous albums, she has always used her music to make her audience aware of the world around them. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| I am not sure when I first became a fan of Joan's but I have admired her songs since I was young. I think that the first song I heard of Joan's was "Blowing in the Wind". Bob Dylan wrote this song. I remember singing it when the music teacher in my elementary school years. It was a song that affected my own young views of the world, there were very few lyrics that I actually paid attention in my youth, but this was one of them. The lyrics carry a powerful message, not only about the senselessness of bombing and killing each other, but also about people turning a blind eye and ear to the fact that many people are suffering. These lyrics speak volumes about the issues that Joan fought and is still fighting. The idea of the United States spreading the war on terrorism into other parts of the world should make the lyrics of this song valid today. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Today Joan is still touring, although on a more limited scale than when folk music was at its height in popularity. She will be performing in Portland this upcoming Saturday, I am hoping that I will be able to attend, but my school schedule may get in the way. She has been a powerful inspiration to many of her fans. Her fans were able to show some thanks when Joan lost her sister, Mimi, to cancer in 2001. (Stewart) Joan was touch by this outpouring of sympathy to the point that she had a letter of thanks published on her web page. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| When I was a child growing up in the 1970s, listening to the radio for hours on end because my family did not have television, I grew to love lots of different musical styles. Then and now I enjoy listening to the words of Joan Baez's songs. I have sometimes thought that I was born a generation to late and I would have loved to immersed myself into the civil rights and anti-Vietnam movements that Joan was a part of. Obviously, "Blowin' in the Wind" touched me to my soul, but several other songs that I have previously mentioned like "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down?"open my eyes to take a better look outside the narrow world that I was living in. Music can be for more than just entertainment, it can also be an inspiration. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Today the United States government is threatening to increase our military presence and power in the world through the creation of the "Axis of Evil" list; this would be the first time in our short history we might very well be the first to strike a blow to begin a war. This threat of possible deadly actions makes me wonder if anyone paid attention to the opposition against United States involvement in Vietnam. The lack of an organized opposition has astounded me, especially since I have been looking into the past, where there were several different artists, like Joan, who chose to use their musical talent to enlighten the American youth to take action, but they put their own careers on the line to show their audience that their words were more than just a call for action of others. Have people forgotten, how in a decade, portions of the American society united in order to create change? Although they were not always successful, changes did happen and I believe that Joan's music and activism played a significant role in these changes. Maybe the first decade in this new millennium will bring musical artists who chose to inspire the youth of today to question the actions and decisions of our government, in the same way that the folk music movement did before. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Works Cited | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Charlton, Katherine. Rock Music Styles: A History, Third Ed. McGraw Hill Companies, Inc. Boston, Massachusetts. 1998. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Chonin, Nevia, Brigitte Lacombe. "Joan Baez". Rolling Stone. Issue 773, November 13, 1997. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Doherty, Brian. "The Free-Floating Bob Dylan: The wonderfully inauthentic art of America's most vital singer-songwriter". Reason. November 2001, Volume 33, Issue 6. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Perry, Joellen. "In Diamonds and In Rust". U.S. News & World Report. July 8, 2002. Volume 133, Issue 2. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Stewart, Jim. "Joan Baez Web Pages". http://baez.woz.org/ .(Accessed July 26, 2002) (All biographical dates were obtain from this website.) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Vanguard Records. http://www.vanguardrecords.com/Baez/Home.html (Accessed July 27, 2002) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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