When praising lauded musicians, it can be easy to say that without them we wouldn’t have had X, Y or Z. It’s usually true: without Joni Mitchell, Ray Charles, Blondie or Fleetwood Mac we would have lost some of the greatest musicians of the 21st century.
But it can be a bit of a complex game: after all, even the people who inspired contemporary music were inspired by someone else. Not so much with Joan Baez. She was inspired by American and British folk music – which, in turn, is heavily inspired by the folk music of the Middle East before it – but without her, 20th-century folk music would be a very different place indeed.
A part of the 1950s folk scene, inspired by the gospel musicians she fell in with and a religious family, Baez is a principal player in the rise of Bob Dylan and perhaps the ur-folk chanteuse: without her, it is arguable that Mitchell, Judy Collins, Emmylou Harris and many more women would have had a very different sound (or, arguably, never have broken into a market where Baez pioneered.)
It’s odd, in some ways, to talk about how groundbreaking Baez is as a musician. Although she wrote her own material, she is perhaps best known for reimagining traditional folk songs and 1960s classics with that signature voice, as soft and angelic as Dylan’s isn't. But it's her many talents and voracious musical appetite that make her so crucial to modern music: she is a musical polyglot, who sang the ballads, protest songs and musical standards of great bands, songwriters, political movements and entire cultures and religions.
From Yiddish folk songs to French protest rallies and her reinvention of Dylan’s poetry, Baez is as much an anthropologist and social historian as she is a recording artist. To quote Langston Hughes in the liner notes of her album Joan Baez/5: “She does not try to be Brazilian in singing a Brazilian song, or Negro in singing a spiritual, or English in singing a British ballad. Maybe that is what is called ‘a work of art’, an individual work of art, a transmutation into self – so that for those moments of singing, Joan Baez herself becomes a work of art.”
Over dozens of albums and decades of work, Baez has produced so much music it is almost impossible to provide a selection that will describe her virtues and attributes perfectly. It's also hard, in over 50 years of recordings, to perfectly plate up a true, rounded display of her output. However, below we’ve gathered some of our favourites. If ever there was a time to dive into Baez, after all, it’s now.
1. ‘Virgin Mary Had One Son’ with Bob Gibson (from the 1959 Newport Jazz Festival)
With a pastor for a grandfather, it’s maybe no surprise that Baez fell in with the big names of gospel and folk of the 1950s, including Odetta and Bob Gibson. It’s thanks to them that Baez had her first big break, doing two duets with Gibson at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1959. While “We Are Crossing The Jordan River” is infectiously upbeat, Baez’s trill is best deployed on the downbeat “Virgin Mary Had One Son”, especially when it juxtaposes Gibson’s lower notes at the end of each chorus. When she sings alone, you can see how she transfixed audiences during her brief appearance: a show that earned her the title of “Barefoot Madonna” as word spread through the festival of the surprise arrival with a bewitching voice.
2. ‘Barbara Allen’ (from Joan Baez Vol 2)
Joan Baez's first albums were entirely composed of rearrangements of traditional folk songs from all over the world. What is interesting – and perhaps most important about Baez as a reinventer of other's music – is that Baez manages to make all the music she performs equally timeless: everything sounds antique and vital at the same time. While any track from her first records could be pulled out and analysed as a record of vital importance (her “House Of The Rising Sun” is out of this world), “Barbara Allen” is like meditation: a Scottish ballad of heartbreak and remorse made into something beautiful and romantic. Although the version from Vol 2 is the one we recommend, the performance above – of a youthful Baez strumming away in a quiet corner – is too delightful not to include.
3. ‘Birmingham Sunday’ (from Joan Baez/5)
Baez’s 5 was a crucial turning point: an album that was composed of roughly as many contemporary songs as it was of traditional folk, in part because she was running low on her old repertoire. The album is full of standout Baez moments – her rendition of the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos' “Bachianas Brasileiras” is practically operatic – but ”Birmingham Sunday" is a keen example of Baez’s political nous. Written by Richard Fariña, Baez’s brother-in-law, it documents the KKK bombing an Alabama Sunday school that killed four black teenage girls.
Later used by Spike Lee as the opening song for his documentary on the same killing, 4 Little Girls, it’s amazing to see how correctly Baez pitches this subtle, microcosmic song about American racism. “So beautifully understated… so softly sung,” says Langston Hughes in the liner notes, “Birmingham Sunday is a quiet protest song.”
4. ‘Sagt Mir Wo Die Blumen Sind’ (from Farewell, Angelina)
There’s no experience more transcendent than hearing Baez singing in a different language: whether it’s her version of French jazz standard “Autumn Leaves” or singing in Spanish on her first album’s “El Preso Numero Nueve”, hearing Baez in a foreign tongue shows that her voice conveys something to everyone, regardless of language. Our personal favourite is her German version of Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All The Flowers Gone”, from her album Farewell, Angelina. A major step for Baez, this album included an electric guitar in the arrangements and included more contemporary folk alongside her re-arrangements of traditional folk ballads. While her Dylan, Donovan and Woody Guthrie reimaginings here are all great, there is something so ineffable about this song that it had to feature. Originally by Seeger and first recorded in German by Marlene Dietrich, the actress’ performance of the song in Israel marked the country's first performance in German since the Second World War. A subtle, but fitting, continuation of Baez’s love of featuring songs from political hotspots across the globe.
5. ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’ (from Farewell, Angelina)
Joan Baez has long performed the music of Dylan and has perhaps unjustly become remembered as a supporting character in his story: in fact, she was already an internationally renowned musician while he was still in his early years and helped to popularise Dylan’s music in part by interpreting it herself. They were also romantically involved, which was perhaps inevitable when you read how Dylan described the first time he saw her on TV in Chronicles: Volume One: “The sight of her made me sigh. All that and then there was the voice. A voice that drove out bad spirits.”
When Baez does Dylan, she gives some of his most melancholy songs a chance to sound a bit more lilting, soft and rhapsodic, rather than… well, we’ve all heard Dylan’s voice. It has its place and while the original “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” is great, Baez’s seraphic voice on her version takes it to a whole other level. You can feel the world ending as she sings.
6. ‘North’ (from Joan)
Joan is an album full of Baez flourishes: full of orchestrated covers of folk and rock staples of the time – Simon & Garfunkel's “Dangling Conversation”, The Beatles' “Eleanor Rigby”, multiple Donovan numbers – a French anti-war anthem and a tribute to her late brother-in-law Richard Fariña, there's lots to pluck out here. But “North”, which she cowrote with Nina Dusheck, feels like it's both the album's smallest and oddest moment. A song about a woman wishing to find the lover who made her life feel like summer, her guitar is plaintive, the strings gothic, the imagery verdant. It's in songs like this that you can hear how complex and interesting Baez's music is when she chooses to write for herself (something she became increasingly uncomfortable with towards the end of her recording career.)
7. ‘We Shall Overcome’ (from her Woodstock set)
Joan Baez’s version of Pete Seeger’s “We Shall Overcome” is one of her best known songs. Personally, we love it live – it’s a song that is improved infinitely by engaging in a dialogue with the audience it seeks to soothe. The encore of her Woodstock set, this performance brings together three levels of Baez’s voice: her robust speaking voice, as she informs the audience what line to repeat for the next verse; her forceful lower register, loaded with defiance; and those high notes, turning it into a spiritual song in praise of human tenacity. When she says, “We are not afraid today, ha ha,” there’s few anxieties that won’t be dispelled.
8. ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down’ (from Blessed Are…)
Blessed Are…, as an album, is heavy with excellent Baez songs. Her last with Vanguard before she moved to A&M, it contains all of the things that make Baez great by this point: she rejuvenates and re-examines The Rolling Stones’ “Salt Of The Earth” and The Beatles’ “Let It Be”; she explores the country music stylings her Nashville recordings of the late 1960s often engaged with; and there’s some excellent protest music here: the farm worker-sympathetic “Deportee”, her blistering version of “Heaven Help Us All” and her own composition, the title track “Blessed Are…”.
If one track from this album transcends this record – and that’s a high bar – then it’s probably “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”. It is a barnstorming performance by Baez, big and ballsy and almost up tempo in a way her music rarely is (which might explain why it was such a commercial success for her as a single.) Also worth listening to is when she performed it with Bob Dylan and the Rolling Thunder Band in 1975 while in New Orleans: the audience go wild, the venue is packed and Dylan's band really give the song even more chutzpah than normal.
9. ‘In The Quiet Morning’ (from Come From The Shadows)
Having picked the indie label Vanguard over Columbia at the start of her career, Baez went to A&M in a move to make music that could be both commercially and politically astute. It is probably her most Billy Joel album – and the start of a fuller, more piano-inclusive sound – but that doesn’t mean it lacks in the blistering rage her Vanguard albums displayed.
While her matriarchal ballad “All The Weary Mothers Of The Earth (People's Union #1)” (her own song) is a rare moment of maternal musicality with a nice Procol Harum organ in the background, it’s her sister’s “In The Quiet Morning” – a tribute to the late Janis Joplin – that might be the album’s best track. It is so lush and so big and while perhaps lyrically a bit trite, it is still a powerful oomph of a track worth listening to.
10. ‘Diamonds & Rust’ (from Diamonds & Rust)
Arguably Joan Baez’s opus, her poetry has never been more laser-keen and powerful than it is here: "As I remember your eyes/ Were bluer than robin's eggs/ My poetry was lousy you said/ Where are you calling from?” The story of the “original vagabond” calling up “the Madonna” to discuss his work on Blood On The Tracks, their relationship is portrayed here with such love and such rage that it deserves to be remembered as one of the greatest break-up records of all time, if only because it so completely transcends that description – this is Baez’s In The Wee Small Hours, her Lemonade, and truly a masterpiece.
11. ‘Lily, Rosemary And The Jack Of Hearts’ (from From Every Stage)
Baez has said that the conversation she recounts having with Dylan in “Diamonds And Rust” involved Dylan reciting "the entire lyrics to 'Lily, Rosemary And The Jack Of Hearts' that he'd just finished from a phone booth in the Midwest,” she recounted. Some have argued that the character of Rosemary in Dylan's nine-minute long opera was inspired by Baez, and the clear similarity in energy – when Dylan recited the song to her – helped fuel the rage that led to her writing her aforementioned skewering of him. Whatever the knotty history of this song, Baez included a performance of it on her 1976 live album From Every Stage and it gives the song a completely different energy. If Bob Dylan's original song is like Bertolt Brecht's original “Mack The Knife”, Baez's version is every jazz performer who refined and luxuriated in the potential of the source material.
12. ‘Dida’ with Joni Mitchell (from Diamonds & Rust)
“Dida” first appeared on Baez’s Gracias A La Vida, an album of Spanish and Catalan songs written as a balm for those suffering under Augusto Pinochet (US foreign policy in Latin America has long been a major issue for Baez). The version of the song there is slow and melancholy, but in its second iteration it is light and breezy: as much a Burt Bacharach number as it is something from Court & Spark-era Mitchell. That makes it sound like she is subjugated by other sources, but that is probably inaccurate: not only were Baez's A&M years a chance for her to run riot with musical influences, but there's jazz all over this album (just listen to the exceptional “Children And All That Jazz” to hear that this was a very purposeful avenue she explored).
This version of “Dida” has to be celebrated as the perfect embodiment of two of the greatest voices to ever grace folk music. While they both performed on “The Rolling Thunder Revue”, sometimes in the same line-up, Mitchell has said that the women of folk were not the sorority that the laughing, hugging photos of the two of them might suggest. "I always thought the women of song don't get along and I don't know why that is,” she told Mojo. "Joan Baez would have broken my leg if she could, or at least that's the way it felt." Here, though, they couldn't sound more harmonious.
This is beautiful music and a moment of two great talents coming together, a celebration of the women who shaped American folk in the 1960s and 1970s. Joan’s honeyed singing on the melody and Joni’s wailing riffs around the edge are heaven when left to their own devices – then come the horns. The result sounds like when you pierce a perfectly cooked egg yolk on a perfectly sunny morning.
13. ‘The Altar Boy And The Thief’ (from Blowin’ Away)
A tribute to Baez’s gay fanbase and a passionate rebuttal of an attempt to ban LGBTQ people from working in California schools, “The Altar Boy And The Thief” is both a tribute to her local gay bar (The Pink Elephant in Santa Monica) and also a tribute to queer culture at large. It’s truly astonishing to hear a folk musician, even on a poppier album, write such a powerful microcosm of a particular moment in gay culture and yet which still sums up so many metropolitan queer dance floors today: “Finely plucked eyebrows and skin of satin/ Smiling seductive and endlessly Latin/ Olympic body on dancing feet/ Perfume thickening the air like heat/ A transient star of gay bar fame.” What a Grindr bio.
14. ‘Let Us Break Bread Together / Oh Freedom’ (from The Complete Gold Castle Masters)
There’s something beautiful about this performance by Baez, included on the Complete Gold Castle Masters, in which she performs the hymn “Let Us Break Bread Together” for a live congregation, starting with a monologue about the black civil rights movement in America and her own faith. Her prose is as stunning as her voice here – lower than when she sang about the Virgin Mary at Newport around 30 years earlier – the production including a full gospel choir. It feels like vintage Joan given a new sound, continuing her engagement with the music of marginalised groups, religious demographics, politics and traditional arrangements.
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