Joan Baez… From her very first “hello, there!” Baez captivated everyone with her humbleness and generosity.
There were Baby boomers, followers of Baez since the ‘60s, and Gen Xers like me, whose mothers sang Baez songs to them when they were little. Those songs, and that iconic vibrato, have become the soundtrack of activism – the gentle voice of conscience that haunts us more than 50 years after her first recordings.
Striding on to the Royal Theatre stage, red scarf around her neck and a radiant smile, was the same Joan Baez who marched with Martin Luther King and who stood beside Mandela on his 90th birthday. She presented Bob Dylan to the world in ’63 and inspired Václav Havel to stir up the Velvet Revolution. Before she sang a note the audience was on their feet. We’d have loved Baez even if she’d sung her whole concert no better than a billy goat – but she didn’t.
Perhaps the biggest surprise was that Baez, at 74 years old, has a truly magnificent voice. Gone is the soprano tremolo of earlier years, the girlish folk timbres. Baez in 2015 is the very definition of soul. With her classic songs transposed down, her voice is controlled and secure. Characterised by striking cedar timbres, Baez’s voice is thick with emotions that a younger singer couldn’t even approach. She reminded me of Maria Callas at the end of her life, when her technical flaws only enhanced the emotional quality of the voice. Baez was joined on stage by multi-instrumentalist Dirk Powell, virtuoso banjo player, mandolinist, pianist, guitarist, singer and diatonic button accordionist, and her son, percussionist Gabe Harris.
From her very first “hello, there!” Baez captivated everyone with her humbleness and generosity. The same generosity that led her to sing back-ups so her tour-assistance/guitar technician Grace Stumberg could sing “I need you just the way you are” (Dirk Powell). The same humility that led her to mention the problems of aging vocal chords to the audience. It is rare for a performer to be so revered during their lifetime, and the audience’s affection for Baez was particularly evident during her stunning performance of the 1974 “Diamonds and Rust” about the end of her relationship with Bob Dylan.
But it was always Baez’s revolutionary spirit that has carried her career and that spirit has never been compromised. Unlike so many of her contemporaries, Baez at 74 is the same freedom fighter she was in the ‘60s. Urging Australia and the US to increase their refugee intakes, Baez gave us the 1961 Woody Guthrie song “Deportees”, following this with her own “Jerusalem” (2005), a prayer for peace in Palestine. Bringing the revolution to our own shores, Baez spoke aloud the lyrics of Goanna’s pro-land rights song “Solid Rock” (1982) in English and then in indigenous language.
One of the evening’s highlights was Baez’s performance of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”, the song she once used to wake Martin Luther King, who had overslept in Mississippi – “I believe I hear the voice of an angel” he commented on waking. And I could see his point – standing alone in a single red spotlight, Baez’s voice was reverent and full of conviction, angelic as King had said. You could’ve heard a pin drop as her last phrase rang out – words generously changed to “comin’ for to carry me, everybody, you, us, home. Amen.”
Continuing to advocate for social justice, Baez gave a passionate performance of “Gracias a la vida”, written by Chilean musician Violeta Parra in 1966 just before her suicide in 1967. Baez recorded this song in 1974 as “a message of hope to the Chileans suffering under Augusto Pinochet”. Gracias a la vida, Baez explained, “means thanks to life” and “thanks for my feet which are tired from too many marches”. And somewhere in the middle of those salsa rhythms I remembered
Garcia Lorca’s description of the duende, the elusive soul of music, and knew for the first time what I wanted to say about Joan Baez.
“The duende is not in the throat” Lorca writes “the duende surges up, inside, from the soles of the feet”. He goes on to describes how an 80-year-old woman defeated a room full of younger contestants in a flamenco dance competition, just by raising her arms, throwing back her head, and stamping her foot – this is the duende and Baez has it in spades. Her songs rocked the cradles of my generation and I hope we will hear them for a long time still.
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