Joan Baez is so ingrained in the collective consciousness as the archetypal coffeehouse folksinger that it's hard to remember that unless you happened to be hanging around Harvard Square at the close of the 1950s, you never got the chance to hear her perform in an intimate room. While still a teenager, Joan Baez appeared at the Newport Folk Festival in 1959, a musical watershed that - while lacking the galvanizing electricity of Elvis' hips, the Beatles' haircuts, or Bob Dylan's ellipsis and amplification - has had just as profound and durable an influence on American and international music mores. What makes the musical revolution Joan Baez pioneered so particularly remarkable is that it occurred so quietly and with so much personal restraint, grace, and humility that, to this day, as it continues to move forward in gentle organic rhythms, it seems too much in harmony with the natural order to feel like a cataclysm.
The 1960s were a period of cultural renaissance and political upheaval. Popular music, and especially rock and roll, began to articulate the exhilaration, conflict, yearnings and turbulence of the era. What Joan Baez introduced into the explosion was the strength, intelligence, and complexity of the feminine principal. Given an impossibly pure and crystalline soprano, a sense of personal integrity subject to confusion and endless questioning, acute intuition and painful instinct, Joan Baez, unlike the novas and divas of that, or any, era relied on something more deeply human that mere star-power. She could've been the big sister of everyone in the audience except she sang with the piercing clarity of an angel.
For the past nearly 50 years, as a singer, musician, social activist, and goodwill ambassador, Joan Baez has kept her pact with the spirit of her voice. Throughout her career, she has followed a pattern of mutual mentoring, begun when she first met Bob Dylan. She continues the pattern with striking results on recent tours that have included onstage collaborations with a range of talented young writers and performers, including Dar Williams, Eliza Carthy, and Josh Ritter among others.
