“When people come up to me, as they do, and say something about the voice, there is a ninety-nine percent chance that they will also say something about the activism,” Joan Baez explains about the two best-known aspects of her extraordinary life. “And what they say is very moving to me. They talk about the part my activism has played in their lives, how it helped move them from one point to another on their journey.
“The most affecting stories are from people who were in the military,” she continues, “how, when they were in Vietnam or another war zone, they got hold of an album, despite its being prohibited. They describe how they would play it at night, and what it meant to them. For some of them, it was part of their being able to leave the military. For others it was some kind of balm that helped them get through it all. When I hear stories like that, I’m glad I was there.”
As you read Joan Baez’s candid, comprehensive autobiography, And a Voice to Sing With, which originally appeared in 1987, it sometimes seems that, from the time her first album appeared in 1960, when she was nineteen years old, to her opening the Live Aid concert in Philadelphia twenty-five years later, she was not simply “there,” but everywhere. She marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in Mississippi and Alabama, and performed while pregnant in front of half a million people at Woodstock. She sang “We Shall Overcome” at King’s 1963 March on Washington, and she stood beside Vaclav Havel and Lech Walesa as they sought to free their countries from Soviet domination.
Baez spent decades traveling wherever she was most needed and could do the most good. She is a figure whose name is as indelibly linked to the ideal of nonviolence as those of King and Mahatma Gandhi. And despite the one-dimensional stereotype of her as a naïve dupe of the left that still occasionally rears itself in the media, Baez has proven herself a thorn in the side of every regime, of whatever political stripe, that fails to live up to a civilized code of ethics.
Her account in this book of battles with the American left in the late ’70s, after she criticized the government of Vietnam for human rights violations, should disabuse anyone of the notion that Baez is guided by anything other than a firm devotion to principle. If her values could lead her to visit North Vietnam during what turned out to be the most virulent bombing raids of the war—another completely riveting chapter of And a Voice to Sing With—those same values would not permit her to countenance the post-war regime’s brutality against its own people. For Baez, what’s right is, quite simply, what’s right.
For all those reasons, it’s very easy to gravitate toward her activism when discussing Baez; millions of people, in desperate situations all over the world, have had reason to be glad she was “there” for them. For many years that peerless degree of commitment was what mattered most to her. As she bluntly stated in 1970, “music alone isn’t enough for me. If I’m not on the side of life in action as well as in music, then all those sounds, however beautiful, are irrelevant to the only real question of this century: How do we stop men from murdering each other, and what am I doing with my life to help stop the murdering?”
But Baez made her mark as a singer, and such a view undervalues her distinctive talent. “I was born gifted” are the very first words of this book, and in many ways Baez took her singing for granted precisely because it was a gift. She will refer to “the voice,” as she puts it, in nearly impersonal terms, as if it were only incidentally her own. Baez goes on to say, “I can speak of my gifts with little or no modesty, but with tremendous gratitude, precisely because they are gifts, and not things which I created, or actions about which I might be proud.” The “voice,” then, was simply a presence in her life, something to which for decades she never gave much thought. Whenever she opened her mouth to sing, she believed, it would be there. Her activism, in contrast, constituted a series of moral imperatives, conscious choices to take a stand, an extraordinary string of “actions about which I might be proud.”
It would be a serious mistake, however, to underestimate Baez’s importance as an artist. She was a decisive figure on the American folk scene and helped bring that music to a huge mainstream audience. In addition, she introduced many superb songwriters to that audience as well, most notably Bob Dylan. Her relationship with Dylan, needless to say, is the stuff of history, and constitutes some of the most gripping passages in And a Voice to Sing With. And Baez’s impact extended far beyond the world of folk music. When Jimmy Page was forming Led Zeppelin, he sat Robert Plant down and played him Baez’s soul-wrenching version of “Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You” and explained that such haunting, acoustic interpretations of age-old material was part of his sonic conception for the band. Zeppelin covered the song on its groundbreaking debut album.
These days, Baez takes great delight in chronicling the many people, almost always men, who have approached her over the years to say that, though they detested her politics, they couldn’t help falling in love with her singing. Her voice has inspired a riot of adjectives over the years—“crystalline,” “bell-like,” and “spine-tingling” represent the merest skim of the surface. But those terms testify to how difficult it is to summon a language that does justice to the impact her singing has, particularly on first hearing.
Quite apart from her politics and her willingness to risk her life repeatedly for causes she believed in, Baez’s voice has always seemed to mean something. It made a powerful and immediate impression early on because the purity of her tone, the sunny heights to which her soprano could climb, the youthful strength of her vibrato, all caught a mood in the culture itself. The very yearning and ache in her singing sounded like a longing for a better world. Her singing mattered.
What we think of as the ’60s had not yet taken shape when Joan Baez burst onto the music scene while still in her teens. Still, something was in the air. The end of Dwight David Eisenhower’s two-term presidency felt distinctly like the end of an era, his World War II heroism still a bright badge of honor but somehow suddenly a relic from a distant time. However much subsequent history has caused us to reevaluate the presidency of John F. Kennedy, his campaign and election shot the country through with new energy and a sense of new possibilities.
After the lull of the ’50s, everything seemed to be at stake. The antinuclear movement made it clear that the issues confronting the world were no longer mere matters of policy, but the very survival of the planet. And the civil rights movement lent a new moral force to the old leftist challenge: Which side are you on? All these developments created an atmosphere in which Baez’s voice could resonate in ways it might never have been able to previously. It provided the soundtrack to an era.
The folk revival underway at the time, a revival in which Baez would play a critical role, was completely enmeshed in all of the political debates roiling the country. “There’s never been a good Republican folk singer,” Baez blithely explained to Time magazine in 1962, but party politics were only a small part of the story. Another significant change had taken place in the ’50s. Folk musicians defined themselves very much in opposition to rock & roll, which they perceived as childish, dumb, and corny. Baez herself frequently made jokes about such adolescent music onstage in her concerts.
But rock & roll, however distant and insignificant it may have seemed to its more serious elders and contemporaries, also helped set the stage for Baez’s ascent and instant acceptance. Rock & roll had galvanized a genuine youth culture that rejected, if only superficially, the claims of its parents. The true implications of that break would not be clear until a few years later, but the music had struck yet another blow against the old guard. The desire for the new was palpable. Rebellion was part of the zeitgeist, and rock & roll had reinforced it.
Enter Joan Baez. Respect for tradition and for older artists was one of the very points of the folk music scene, but at this particular juncture Baez’s youth was viewed positively. Her being a woman helped, too, though initially not in the feminist sense. Her breakthrough paved the way for countless female folk singers, but the importance of that would not become evident until later. Back then her femaleness read simultaneously as innocence and as the impossibility of innocence. Baez lacked the studied nihilism of the Beats, from whom she borrowed some aspects of her visual style. For all her rebelliousness, she seemed recognizable to the mainstream, like a daughter or sister who had gone off to college and grown serious and intense. If a young woman like her, a woman who would otherwise have been expected to be frolicking in a sorority on campus or preparing for marriage (or both), felt the need to sing with such conviction and speak out so bravely, we must be living in perilous times—and times of enormous potential change.
Even the particular character of her beauty seemed right for the moment. She was not a bosomy Fifties cuddle-doll like so many of the pop singers and Hollywood starlets of the period. She was slender and seemed at once vulnerable and strong. Her much-commented-on bare feet again suggested innocence (and a certain subtle eroticism), but also a rejection of more conventional notions about feminine propriety and self-presentation. Her hair was long, thick and lustrous, but simply parted and unfussy, the hair style of an attractive woman who had important things to do.
Even her relatively dark complexion set her apart from her paler female contemporaries in the world of entertainment (a term, predictably, that Baez despised back then). Her father’s Mexican heritage was a serious enough matter when she was growing up in California that, when they were girls, Baez’s younger (and fairer) sister Mimi would avoid being seen with her so that she wouldn’t be harassed. But when Baez became a successful singer, as she did very shortly after her first album came out, her looks seemed alluringly exotic, a reflection of an America that was just beginning to become aware of its multiracial makeup. She sometimes seemed to look Native American, an evocation of another culture that young people, in particular, were beginning to explore with passionate interest.
Beyond her undeniable talent, Baez, in short, represented a new kind of sex symbol, one who made folk music and politics hip and provocative. Young women across the country ironed their hair to look like her. (Of course, she herself wanted curls.) Baez would cheekily attempt to channel her appeal when, in 1968, she and her sisters, Pauline and Mimi, posed for a draft-resistance poster that read GIRLS SAY YES TO BOYS WHO SAY NO. It was a sly attempt to redefine notions of masculinity—it’s not the macho warrior guy who gets the girl in the new countercultural world that antiwar protesters were attempting to bring into existence, but the protester and the pacifist.
However, the gesture earned Baez the wrath of the women’s liberation movement that was just getting started and targeting, among more obvious offenders, sexism on the left. Baez would eventually be vindicated by a postfeminist generation forty years later, when four Brooklyn women created a poster during the 2008 presidential campaign that mimicked the poses of Baez and her sisters under the slogan “Girls Say Yes to Boys Who Say Obama.”
But the same social currents that propelled Joan Baez to national attention—and onto the cover of Time magazine in 1962—exerted enormous pressure on her. One of the most compelling aspects of And a Voice to Sing With is Baez’s honesty about the degree to which her excruciating insecurity occasionally caused her to sound shrill and humorless. She writes, for example, about the attacks on her as “Joanie Phoanie” by cartoonist Al Capp in his widely circulated comic strip “Li’l Abner.” In the autobiography, Baez recalls that Joanie Phoanie was “a slovenly, two-faced showbiz slut, a thinly disguised Commie, who traveled around in a limousine singing ‘songs of protest against poverty and hunger for $10,000 a concert.’ She put out albums like, If It Sounds Phoanie It’s Joanie, which included ‘Lay Those Weapons Down, McNamara,’ ‘Throw Another Draft Card on the Fire!’ and ‘Let’s Conga with the Viet Cong.’”
Frank Sinatra, whom Capp also satirized, made a point of personally calling him to say how much he enjoyed the caricatures, and gave him gifts of champagne. In contrast, Baez took it personally, and was furious. “Either out of ignorance or malice,” she complained at the time, “he has made being for peace equal to being for Communism, the Viet Cong, and narcotics.” For his part, Capp countered that Baez needed to “remember that protest singers don’t own protest. When she protests about others’ rights to protest, she is killing the whole racket.”
Make no mistake about it—Capp’s satire was cynical to the core. He became a prominent voice of the right-wing reaction to the antiwar movement that ushered Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew into the White House, and his career eventually melted down in the heat of various widely publicized sex scandals. (Evidently his contempt for the morals of young people did not preclude the married cartoonist’s nuzzling up to the coeds on his lucrative college lecture tours.) All that aside, however, twenty years later in And a Voice to Sing With, Baez viewed her response to Capp with fresh insight. “Looking back at both the strip and the situation, I have to laugh,” she writes.
She goes on to admit that “at the time my righteous indignation came from feeling guilty about having money, even if I was giving most of it away. In my heart of hearts, I thought I should not have anything. And that’s where he stung me. . . . Mr. Capp confused me considerably. I’m sorry he’s not alive to read this. It would make him chuckle.”
It’s difficult for those of us who have never taken the risks that Baez has, who have never faced the very real physical dangers that she repeatedly confronted, to imagine that she was insecure about anything. Performing onstage and speaking on camera, Baez has always seemed in complete command. If anything, her poise could sometimes be off-putting. How could she seem so certain at so young an age? How could she be so willing to put her life on the line?
Those questions, of course, are partly excuses to ourselves about our own embarrassing failures—our unwillingness to speak out, even when conditions may have clearly called for it, or our inability to rise to the occasion and not run from danger but face up to it if a principle is at stake. Baez has set a matchless standard in both those regards. As she stated in Rolling Stone in 1987, she stands as a symbol of being willing to “follow through on your beliefs.”
But that does not mean that she didn’t struggle with her own inner fears, a continual battle that this book makes painfully vivid. With a straightforwardness that she describes as “neurotically honest,” she discusses the paralyzing stage fright that she has combated her entire life, as well as her sense that, regardless of how much she tried to do in support of nonviolence and her other cherished causes, it somehow never seemed to be enough. Then there was also the sense of inadequacy that she could never quell in her most important relationships. Her poignant efforts to be a perfect housewife in her marriage to draft resister David Harris would shock anyone who viewed her, as Al Capp did, as a shrieking harridan of protest.
“I tried so hard to be a good wife,” she writes. When a group of feminists visited her to ask that she pull her antidraft poster off the market, she recounts, “I kept running back and forth to the kitchen, fixing them sandwiches and lemonade, while they nudged each other and looked in exasperation at the ceiling.”
It turns out that the shifting cultural values of the ’60s were as confusing on a personal level to Baez as they were for the millions of people who were looking to figures like her to provide them with direction. “When I got married and wanted to be the perfect housewife is exactly when the apron came out saying, ‘Fuck housework,’” she says now, laughing. “I didn’t know what to think. I’d seen my mother do all the things she did, and I guess I was thinking that’s what I’m supposed to do—just when there were all these people saying, ‘That’s a terrible way to waste your life.’”
Much later her public life underwent a similar reevaluation. More seriously than wondering if she had acted properly in a dustup with a cartoonist, by the end of the period documented in And a Voice to Sing With, Baez began to reexamine not the content of the many causes she supported, but the particular way she conducted her political life, and the psychological role that her activism fulfilled for her. It’s a process of introspection that has continued to this day.
“I had to stop the addiction of doing things for people,” Baez says now, speaking from her home in the hills outside Palo Alto. “That was my addiction. It wasn’t alcohol. It wasn’t drugs. It had been sex to a degree, as you can gather from the book. But it really was an addiction to keeping moving, to keeping myself on the front lines.
“Now if I want to do something out there in the world, it’s a choice,” she continues, citing as an example her 2005 performance at a rally in then-President Bush’s hometown of Crawford, Texas, in support of Cindy Sheehan, whose son was killed in the Iraq War. “I knew that was a place where I could do the maximum amount of good,” she explains. “But the element of mania about it is gone.” Baez also actively supported the candidacy of Barack Obama in 2008, the first time that she has ever endorsed a candidate for political office.
Baez takes great care to make it clear that her efforts to unravel her own complex motivations do not detract from the worthiness of the many causes she supported in the past. “The trick for me is to accept that there was an element of craziness to it—that was the addiction part,” she says. “I couldn’t help myself. I couldn’t stop myself. But at the same time I need to say that I’m glad I did it, and that it was meaningful, both to me and to other people.”
These days, Baez lives a quieter life, and, now that she’s sixty-eight, family has joined “the voice” and “the activism” among the most essential elements of her days. Her father and her sister Mimi, both major characters in this book, have died since it first appeared. Her mother, as lively and outspoken as ever, now lives in a house on Baez’s property. Of her older sister, Pauline, a more distant figure in the autobiography, Baez says that she is “coming to know her better and better, and that shadow in my life is taking on more form. I hope that there will be a way to bring her forward in the things that I do from now on.”
As she looks back on her life to this point, and on this book, Baez believes that she has learned to see herself as part of a larger world, and not necessarily as the person at the center of it. “The woman who reviewed And a Voice to Sing With for the New York Times said that I had a ’pre-Copernican’ view of life,” she recalls, chuckling. “I had to ask somebody what that meant, but it made me laugh because she was right. Because of my fame, my view of life was that I was the center of the universe. It really made me think. But that was an earlier part of my life. It doesn’t feel like me now.”
Her relationship with her son, Gabe, whose father is Baez’s former husband, David Harris, has deepened in the years since the publication of And a Voice to Sing With. “I thought I was protecting my son, by keeping him away from the book and away from too much public exposure,” she says. “Later, I regretted that I hadn’t created a fuller portrait of him. But Gabe is a huge part of my life now. He’s plays percussion with me sometimes when I’m on the road, and I find myself thinking, ‘How cool it is that I get to travel with my son!’ It’s heavenly to be able to hang out with him after all those years of my traveling and being away. We just revel in that time. He has a wonderful life—a beautiful wife and a beautiful child—and I’ve been able to hop on board and enjoy that life with him.”
As a corollary to her becoming more discriminating about her political activism, Baez has taken greater care to nurture her artistic career, and the past fifteen years have proven particularly fruitful in that regard. Such albums as Ring Them Bells (1995) and Dark Chords on a Big Guitar (2003) were powerful musical statements that connected Baez to a young generation of songwriters—the Indigo Girls, Richard Shindell, Natalie Merchant, and Dar Williams, among them—who had all felt her influence. Day After Tomorrow, the stirring album she released last year, was produced by Steve Earle, and earned a Grammy nomination in the category of “Contemporary Folk.”
In addition, Baez has grown more appreciative of the gift of her voice, and successfully taken steps to make sure its beauty lasts. “Right now, my career has gone beyond what I thought we’d be able to do at this point in my life,” she says. “I have to thank my manager, Mark Spector, and all the work he’s done over the past twenty years for that. Of course, Steve Earle did a great job on Day After Tomorrow. And my vocal coach, too. I mean, my voice is better now than it was a couple of years ago.
“This part of my life just astounds me, the way it keeps getting better,” she continues. “It’s just silly! It’s reached the point where my main concern before a concert is, ‘What am I going to wear?’ There’s no stage fright. There’s nothing to hinder me from walking out onstage and going, ‘What are we going to do tonight?’ The way I put it, with a nod to Archie Bunker, is we’ve reached a new level of whoop-de-do!”
Asked to convey a sense of what her home life is like, she says, “Well, right now, I’m perched on my couch, which looks out a big window onto the hills,” she says. “The other day I was talking to a Buddhist friend and we were sharing the same perspective on the stage of life that we’ve reached. It’s a lovely time, and I can still get to the barricades if I feel it’s the right moment. In the meantime, my mom is about fifty feet away, sleeping in her little house, and I want to be around her. And I want to be around Gabe and his family.
“It’s a big calming down,” she concludes. “Slowing down. A lot of emphasis on meditating. Learning what I can about what it’s going to be like getting older.” And preserving a voice to sing with.
Anthony DeCurtis
New York City