Joan Baez, she of the olive complexion, white smile and straight hair, was among the most photographed singers of the 1960s, a female icon of the protest movement.
She was friends with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., sang at the March on Washington and marched with him from Selma, Alabama, barefoot and arm in arm with James Baldwin. At age 21 she was on the cover of Time magazine. One of the few women invited to perform at Woodstock, she was one of its highest-paid performers ($10,000).
And, of course, she mentored Bob Dylan, introducing him to her audience when she was a star and he was merely an up-and-coming songwriter.
“She provided him a national platform,” biographer Elizabeth Thomson explains. “She’s never claimed he would not have been a star on his own, but she sure gave him a jet-propelled start.”
Dylan is the subject of a bookcase full of books. Thomson’s newly published “Joan Baez: The Last Leaf” may have the distinction of being the first biography of Baez, at least in English — apparently bios have been written in French and German.
Can it really be that Baez, who’ll turn 80 on Jan. 21 and who’s in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, had never been the subject of a biography? Now there’s something to take to the streets about.
“I find it surprising,” Thomson tells me in a video interview from London, “given how many people who don’t merit biographies have one. For much of that time she was too unfashionable” — she made air quotes — “to be written about. I had trouble selling magazine articles about her.”
Sexism may be one reason Baez’s achievements have been downplayed. And yet, Thomson says, “any woman who’s picked up a guitar after 1963 was influenced by her.”
Baez has a couple of local connections.
Her parents, Albert and Joan Sr., and sisters Mimi and Pauline lived in Redlands in the 1950s while Albert taught physics at the University of Redlands.
Redlands High is where Baez learned to sing, joining the choir and performing “Earth Angel” solo in the talent show. “In my dreams, our tiny one-story white house in Redlands is the one I return to most often,” Baez wrote in her memoir “And a Voice to Sing With” of their 920 Campus Ave. home.
Baez was the subject of a 2017 column of mine about her long-vague connection to Claremont.
While Albert taught at Harvey Mudd College in 1960-61, the family — minus Joan, who had already launched her professional career — lived at 12th Street and Berkeley Avenue. Baez is known to have visited Claremont three or four times, including a performance at Bridges Hall of Music four days before Christmas 1960. And photos for her second album, “Joan Baez, Vol. 2,” were shot at their home by William Claxton.
And, she is represented by Mill Valley’s Seager Gray Gallery, which put on the first solo exhibit of her artwork in 2017
Local angles aside, it’s astonishing that Baez hasn’t been more documented given all she’s done. And with Thomson willing to be interviewed across the Atlantic about her book, I was in.
A writer specializing in folk music, Thomson, 63, attended a Baez concert in London with her parents in 1971 and waited outside in the rain afterward for a chance to meet her.
“I was thrilled. I got an autograph,” Thomson says. “I thought that would be it.” But no, she’s interviewed Baez numerous times and now has penned this modest 224-page biography, published in America and the United Kingdom by Palazzo Editions.
A few things struck me about Baez’s life. One is that she’s half-Mexican and half Scots-English. An early review referred to her as “a Mexican songstress with sad eyes, long tresses and a steady guitar,” and of course there’s her surname. She recorded a 1974 album, “Gracias a la Vida,” in Spanish and has toured Latin America.
But with her mainstream success and glamorous looks, and her affair with Dylan, I wonder if people generally perceive her as a Mexican American, as a Latina.
“She’s never pretended to be otherwise. But she’s never been pigeonholed,” Thomson says.
Looking at the song titles on her 1960s albums, I was likewise startled by her unusual repertoire. Not just Dylan compositions and traditional folk ballads, but songs from various other lands. Was Baez recording world music decades before such mavens as Tom Schnabel or David Byrne ever dreamed of such a thing?
“That struck me, too,” Thomson says. “She recorded songs in Brazilian, Portuguese, Spanish, French and German. She did explore world music before that was a term.”
Lastly, there is the extent of her activism. She toured Black college campuses in the South and insisted that Whites and Blacks sit together rather than in separate sections, as was the custom. She refused to pay 60% of her taxes to protest defense spending during the Vietnam War.
Here’s one that stunned me: When she was jailed for blocking an Army induction center, MLK visited her. He must have been relieved to be the visitor for a change, not the visitee.
There’s much, much more, extending into later eras with her aid for the Vietnamese Boat People (earning her uncharacteristic praise from then-Gov. Ronald Reagan), Nicaragua, Poland’s Solidarity movement, the Nuclear Freeze movement and the United Farmworkers. Few 1960s musicians have kept the activist flame alive into the 21st century. Her ideals go back to her Quaker upbringing and its focus on peace, justice and nonviolence.
Although she retired from the stage in 2019, she’s continued to speak out in recent years about Bernie Sanders, the Brett Kavanaugh hearings and George Floyd. She was at it again earlier this month with a post that earned almost 8,000 shares on social media.
“On her Facebook page,” Thomson says, “she posted a video of herself dancing in the grocery store after the results of the election.”
