CREDIT: Associated Press
IN 1956, as a high school student, Joan Baez attended a conference on world issues sponsored by the Quakers. There she heard twenty-seven-year-old Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. speak about the Montgomery bus boycott and the strategy of nonviolence, a talk that brought tears to her eyes. The following year, Baez committed her first act of civil disobedience, refusing to leave her Palo Alto High School classroom during a mandatory air-raid drill.
It was the height of the Cold War. In affluent Palo Alto, students were expected to go home and hide in their cellars or in family air-raid shelters in the event of nuclear attack. The night before the drill, Baez checked her father’s physics books. As she suspected, Soviet missiles would reach Palo Alto in less than half an hour, not giving students sufficient time to get home. At the start of the drill, Baez was in French class. As she recounted in her autobiography, And a Voice to Sing With, she told her teacher, “I’m not going,” explaining that the drill was government propaganda. The next day the local newspaper ran a front-page story about her protest and quoted her as saying, “I don’t see any sense in having an air raid drill. I don’t think it’s a method of defense. Our only defense is peace.”
Since then, Baez, a celebrated folksinger, has been an activist for civil rights, human rights, environmental justice, peace, and nonviolence, participating in protest actions, raising money, speaking out, and using her musical fame to draw attention to these issues.
In 1962 she appeared on the cover of Time magazine, the folk music revival’s first superstar. She has consistently helped the careers of others, including Bob Dylan, by introducing their songs and inviting them to tour with her.
Joan’s parents were Quakers, and from an early age she displayed a strong social conscience. She inherited her father’s dark complexion—he came to the United States from Mexico at a young age and became a physicist—and faced taunts and prejudice growing up. Blessed with a beautiful singing voice, she performed frequently for family and friends and at school events. When she was thirteen, her aunt took her to a Pete Seeger concert, and she was hooked. “It’s like they gave me a vaccine, and it worked,” she recalled in a Rolling Stone interview in 2009.
After her graduation in 1958, the Baez family moved to Boston, where her father had another faculty position. There she quickly became part of the Cambridge folk music scene, dropping out of Boston University after a few weeks.
Singer Bob Gibson introduced the eighteen-year-old Baez at the first Newport Folk Festival in 1959, where her haunting soprano voice, shy demeanor, and physical beauty mesmerized the crowd. This led to her first solo album, simply labeled Joan Baez, in the summer of 1960. It was followed by Joan Baez, Volume 2. Both were huge successes. These albums featured traditional ballads like “Silver Dagger” and “Barbara Allen,” but her repertoire quickly expanded to include songs by Woody Guthrie and the Weavers, songs dealing with war and peace, civil rights, and spiritual redemption. Initially she mostly performed songs written by others, but she eventually started performing her own songs. She frequently recorded and performed songs in Spanish. She has had several popular hit singles, including her own “Diamonds and Rust,” Phil Ochs’s “There but for Fortune,” and the Band’s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.”
Although her commercial appeal has had its ups and downs through her more-than-fifty-year career, Baez has reliably been on the front lines of struggles for social justice, an unswerving advocate of nonviolence. In 1962, in the midst of escalating civil rights protests, she performed “We Shall Overcome” during a concert tour of colleges (including several black colleges) in the Deep South, insisting that blacks and whites be admitted to all her performances. In August 1963, at the March on Washington, she led the crowd of 250,000 in singing “We Shall Overcome.” Baez joined King on his 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, singing for the marchers at the City of St. Jude (a Catholic school and hospital complex on the outskirts of Montgomery) as they camped the night before arriving in Montgomery. Baez became a regular ally of King’s efforts. She later joined Cesar Chavez during his twenty-four-day fast to draw attention to the farmworkers’ union struggle, and she participated in a Christmas vigil outside San Quentin State Prison, California, to oppose capital punishment.
In 1963 Baez was the first folksinger to refuse to appear on the television show Hootenanny to protest ABC’s blacklisting of Pete Seeger, whom the network banned from the weekly broadcast. That year, with two gold albums already to her credit, she brought an unknown Bob Dylan to perform alongside her at the Newport Folk Festival (as Bob Gibson had done with her four years earlier).
In 1964, as the campus New Left was burgeoning, she sang at a Free Speech Movement rally in Sproul Plaza at the University of California, Berkeley. That year she also withheld 60 percent of her income tax to protest military spending. The next year she cofounded the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence near her home in Carmel Valley, California.
As the war in Vietnam escalated, Baez encouraged young men to resist the draft. In 1967 she was twice arrested for blocking military induction centers. “I went to jail for 11 days for disturbing the peace,” she said. “I was trying to disturb the war.” During Christmas of 1972, she joined a peace delegation traveling to North Vietnam, in part to deliver Christmas mail to American prisoners of war. While there, she was caught in the US military’s bombing of Hanoi.
She helped start Amnesty International chapters in the West Coast’s Bay Area in the early 1970s and has served on the human rights group’s national board. During the 1980s she spoke out against South Africa’s apartheid system and featured Peter Gabriel’s song about antiapartheid activist Steven Biko at her concerts. In 1985 Baez opened the Live Aid concert in Philadelphia. In 1987 she traveled to Israel, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank to sing peace songs with Jews and Arabs.
In 1993 she was invited by Refugees International to travel to Bosnia-Herzegovina to help draw attention to the suffering there. She was the first major artist to perform in Sarajevo after the outbreak of civil war in Yugoslavia. She has also lent her name to the gay and lesbian movement, performing at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force’s Fight the Right fund-raiser in San Francisco in 1995 and at other events.
In early 2003 Baez performed at two rallies of hundreds of thousands of people in San Francisco protesting the US invasion of Iraq. In 2005 she traveled to Crawford, Texas, to protest outside President George W. Bush’s ranch with antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan, whose son had been killed in Iraq.
In 2008 she joined South African singer Johnny Clegg at a ninetieth birthday concert in London for Nelson Mandela. Although deeply involved in social causes, she avoided partisan politics until 2008, when she endorsed Barack Obama for the presidency. In 2010 she sang at a White House celebration of civil rights music, with President Obama in the audience.
Not surprisingly, her activism has triggered controversy and scorn. In the 1960s, cartoonist Al Capp parodied Baez as “Joanie Phoanie” in his Li’l Abner comic strip. In 2007 John Mellencamp invited Baez to perform with him at a concert for injured soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC, but the army barred her from the event.
Baez’s personal life has been on full display throughout her career. In the early 1960s, she and Dylan had a two-year romance and were labeled the “queen” and “king” of folk music. In 1968 Baez married writer and antiwar activist David Harris. He spent the next twenty months in a federal prison in Texas for refusing induction into the military. They divorced in 1973. Her long career has ensured that Baez, like Pete Seeger, is now seen as the quintessential “protest singer.” But she has always recognized that she is a part of an ongoing tradition of troubadours involved in movements for change. In an essay for Michael Collopy’s Architects of Peace, a book on peace activists, Baez wrote, “Social change without music would be void of soul.”