Joan Baez
BORN: JANUARY 9, 1941, IN NEW YORK, NEW YORK
In 1959, eighteen-year-old Joan Chandos Baez nervously picked up her Goya guitar at the Newport Folk Festival. She unleashed her soprano voice and awakened the folk song movement, lifting the hearts of a new generation. It was a new time—she offered them electrifying words of hope, peace, and change.
By the age of ten, with her parents and her sisters, Pauline and Mimi, Joan had already lived in many places. She often felt lonely. Her mother gave her a copy of The Diary of Anne Frank. “It was lodged inside my heart and soul,” she said. Joan began to ponder questions about justice and freedom.
In junior high, in Redlands, California, the melancholy-eyed girl with the Mexican name, skin, and hair, sang in the choir and was bullied for her different views. As a daughter of Quakers, Joan had attended Quaker work camps, listened to arguments about “alternatives to violence,” and talked about the Cold War and the arms race. Classmates avoided her. One summer she picked up a ukulele, trained herself all that season, and changed her “sweet . . . thin and straight” voice into a vibrant, magnetic cascade. “Powerless to change my social standing, I decided to change my voice,” she said.
In 1954, living in Palo Alto, California, Joan heard Pete Seeger, a folk song pioneer, with his banjo and his high-pitched conversations on workers’ rights. Three years later, at a conference organized by the Quakers, she listened to a young Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speak about fighting injustice with “weapons of love”—nonviolent acts like boycotts and “walking to freedom.” Joan stood up, cheering and crying. Now, Joan’s voice had purpose—to help bring about equality, peace, and unity.
The family moved again, this time to Cambridge, Massachusetts, after her father, Albert Baez, accepted a teaching position at MIT. In Boston, Joan began to sing in coffeehouses, tiny stages with rough, brick walls, cinnamon-apple cider, and cigarette smoke filtering through the half-lit cafés. In this atmosphere, with college youth longing for change as she did, she recorded her first album. It was 1960, a year after her appearance at the Newport Folk Festival. Her soulful, soprano voice, her kind, deep, dark eyes, and her brave speeches on nonviolence helped inspire a movement.
Other young folksingers, like Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs, finger-pickin’ their six strings and blowin’ into their “harps,” made the rounds, too. Bob Dylan was a scruffy songwriter sizzling with new songs. “It was as if he was giving voice to the ideas I wanted to express, but didn’t know how,” Joan said of him. She invited the unknown Dylan to go on tour with her and became a songwriter in her own right.
Hearing her songs, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. invited her to the March on Washington. It was 1963. At the march, arm in arm with Martin Luther King, Joan sang “We Shall Overcome.” Her heart strengthened, her voice opened like a rainbow. Joan became a lead figure of the Civil Rights Movement.
And she kept on marching. Along with a friend, she set up the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence in Carmel, California, in order to teach “Peace Studies.” With her mother, Joan was imprisoned for forty-five days at the Santa Rita Rehab Center for blocking doorways of the Armed Forces Induction Center in Oakland, California. In 1972, during the Vietnam War, Joan headed to North Vietnam on a peace mission to bring mail to POWs. Joan sang, “No more bombing, Lord, save the children, Lord . . . ”
Throughout the years, Joan kept on recording, with more than fifty albums since 1960; she used her songs to “defend whoever is in the right.” Her voice soared in Sarajevo at the height of the shelling during the Bosnian War for Independence; rang through audiences in Argentina and Chile in support of the mothers of “Los Desaparecidos”; and as she stood with Lech Walesa in Poland and Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia for freedom from Soviet invasions.
Joan Baez’s gliding, golden voice sings for all time. Her heart is blazing with life.