"A half century into her career, folk icon Joan Baez is making a return of sorts-not to vintage material, but to songs that evoke the spirit and message of her defining early work...Baez has never sounded wiser, or more deeply human." - The Boston Globe
Singer, musician, social activist, and goodwill ambassador Joan Baez has had a profound and durable influence on American and international music for 50 years. She celebrates that anniversary with a 2008 Grammy nomination for Best Contemporary Folk/Americana Album for her 24th studio album, Day After Tomorrow, and a tour stop at Columbus' Southern Theatre.
CAPA presents An Evening with Joan Baez at the Southern Theatre (21 E. Main St.) on Monday, March 9, at 8 pm. Tickets are $52.50, $47.50, and $42.50 at the Ohio Theatre Ticket Office (39 E. State St.), all Ticketmaster outlets, and www.ticketmaster.com. To purchase tickets by phone, please call (800) 745-3000 or (614) 469-0939. The Southern Theatre Ticket Office will open two hours prior to the performance. Students between the ages of 13-19 may purchase $5 High Five tickets while available.
In 1958, a 17-year-old Joan Chandos Baez moved with her family from Palo Alto to Boston where she entered Boston University School of Drama. At 18, she was introduced onstage at the first Newport Folk Festival.
Baez recorded her first solo LP for Vanguard Records in 1960. Her earliest records-with their mix of traditional ballads, blues, lullabies, Carter Family, Weavers and Woody Guthrie songs, cowboy tunes, ethnic folk staples of American and non-American vintage, and much more-won strong followings in the US and abroad.
In 1963, Baez began touring with Bob Dylan and recording his songs, a bond that came to symbolize the folk music movement for the next two years. At the same time, she began her lifelong role of introducing songs from a host of contemporary singer-songwriters.
Baez sang about freedom and Civil Rights from the backs of flatbed trucks in Mississippi to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial at Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King's March on Washington in 1963. In 1964, she withheld 60% of her income tax from the IRS to protest military spending and participated in the birth of the Free Speech movement at UC Berkeley. A year later, she co-founded the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence near her home in Carmel Valley. In 1966, Baez stood in the fields alongside Cesar Chavez and migrant farm workers striking for fair wages and opposed capital punishment at San Quentin during a Christmas vigil. As the Vietnam War escalated, Baez traveled to Hanoi with the US-based Liaison Committee and helped establish Amnesty International on the West Coast.
In the wake of the Beatles, the definition of folk music-a singer with an acoustic guitar-broadened and liberated many artists. Rather than following the pack into amplified folk-rock, Baez recorded three remarkable LPs with classical instru ment ation. Later, she began recording in Nashville. The "A-Team" of Nashville's session musicians backed Baez on her last four LPs for Vanguard Records including her biggest career single, a cover of the Band's "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" in 1971 and her first two releases on A&M.
Within the context of those albums and the approaching end of hostilities in Southeast Asia, Baez turned to the suffering of those living in Chile under the rule of Augusto Pinochet. To those people, she dedicated her first album sung entirely in Spanish. One of the songs on that album, "No Nos Moveran" (We Shall Not Be Moved) was banned from public singing in Spain for more than 40 years under Generalissimo Franco's rule and excised from copies of the LP sold there. Baez became the first major artist to sing the song publicly when she performed it on a controversial television appearance in Madrid in 1977, three years after the dictator's death.
In 1975, Joan's self-penned "Diamonds & Rust" became the title song of an LP with songs by Jackson Browne, Janis Ian, John Prine, Stevie Wonder & Syreeta, Dickey Betts of the Allman Brothers Band, and Bob Dylan. His Rolling Thunder Revues of late ‘75 and ‘76 (and resulting movie Renaldo & Clara, released in 1978) co-starred Baez.
In 1978, she traveled to Northern Ireland and marched with the Irish Peace People, calling for an end to violence. She appeared at rallies on behalf of the nuclear freeze move ment and performed at benefit concerts to defeat California's Proposition 6 (Briggs Initiative), legislation that would have banned openly gay people from teaching in public schools. Baez received the American Civil Liberties Union's Earl Warren Award for her commitment to human and civil rights issues and founded Humanitas International Human Rights Committee, which she headed for 13 years. She won the San Francisco Bay Area Music Award (BAMMY) as top female vocalist in 1978 and 1979.
