Joan Baez

For someone with a passion for the arts and a wife who is a professional violinist I have a rather paltry CD collection. I sometimes wonder how I would fare on a show like Desert Island Discs as I have never been conscious of listening to particular music at key moments of my life. After a burst of enthusiasm in my teens, which had as much to do with keeping up with my friends than a serious engagement with the artist’s work, I lost interest in the Rock and Pop scene and haven’t as yet developed a really discerning appreciation of classical music despite Rachel’s influence. Every so often I feel a vague sense of ‘must try harder’ about all this and go and buy a CD which someone’s recommended but I seem to lack the patience to sit and really listen for any length of time. More recently since taking up singing lessons I have begun to enjoy a range of mainly classical composers like Vaughn-Williams and Roger Quilter and I suppose this is as good a way as any to really engage with music such as this. However, following a fascinating television documentary the other day about the American folk singer and activist Joan Baez, I braved the Christmas crowds to buy her latest CD “The Day After Tomorrow.”

As a musical Philistine I knew very little about Joan Baez before seeing the documentary but I am now in awe of this extraordinary woman. She burst onto the burgeoning folk scene in the late fifties admired by the young Bob Dylan among others with whom she later developed an intense relationship. He was especially impressed by her guitar playing at the time which he tried and failed to emulate, but it is her voice which, as she nears seventy, still cuts through. Watching her on Utube singing some of those great peace anthems of the sixties ( ‘Blowin’ in the Wind,’ ‘Where have All the Flowers Gone,’ ‘We Shall Overcome’) I am struck by the total lack of self-consciousness with which she delivers those heady lyrics. She sings without vocal adornment; her face is equally clear of the strange contortions and mannerisms which performers sometimes adopt to persuade us how much they really mean it. Fifty years on little has changed in her simple yet powerful performance, though she has apparently lost the kind of stage-fright of her youth which left her feeling like she was walking to her execution every time she approached the microphone; how well she did to hide it! I suppose what she possesses as a folk singer is a moral authority without a trace of bigotry or self-adulation. This gives her a directness which transmits the essence of a song straight from her soul to the audience. Her ethical stance as an artist has been with her from the start of her career. It was shaped by her Quaker upbringing (her father was a pacifist) and it was further ignited by listening to Martin Luther King in the early sixties. Since then she has protested and campaigned and sung on behalf of minorities and victims of injustice around the world for half a century and still shows little sign of letting up. She was imprisoned for trying to persuade soldiers to defy the draft for Vietnam in the seventies, but this did little to deter her: ‘I came out a stronger pacifist.’ Recently she approached the vast memorial in Washington to that war and felt a scream of distress welling up from deep within her as she saw the endless list of names inscribed there. It is surely this profound sense of right and wrong which inspires her music. Interestingly she has always sold the most records (she has six Gold Albums) when singing about the issues closest to her heart. One of the most moving moments of the documentary was a piece of footage of her out in Sarajevo in the early nineties during the civil war there. (Baez was invited to do a concert there by Lionel Rosenblat from Refugees International) As she was walking through the war-torn city she witnessed a large man in a tuxedo playing Albinoni’s Adagio on his cello in a public square as a sort of lament over the city. When he finished she embraced him as a kindred spirit and as he got up from his chair she sat down in his place and quite spontaneously began to sing ‘Amazing Grace’ in her own inimitable style. The Catholic theologian Tina Beattie underlines the force of such gestures by artists in a recent book:

“Art has the power to change the world, for great art exerts a different kind of power – not the power of violence and revolution, but the potent vulnerability of imagination and memory, of mourning and hope. Art is powerless in itself, and yet it stands in the path of every destructive and oppressive force. That is why every tyrant and ideologue has sought to silence or control the artistic imagination."

In the Bible, St. Matthew records how Jesus summed up the challenges of following him in his parable of the Sheep and the Goats; to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the prisoner, refresh the thirsty and take care of the sick. This may be undertaken today more directly by front-line missionaries and activists, but as Baez has shown throughout a life-time as a singer, the artist may do so in less tangible but equally vital ways. For in a world of deprivation and hardship, especially, people hunger and thirst for a beauty which the arts at their best are able to conjure. They long to rediscover through songs and stories and images the freedom, dignity and wholeness which is the essence of their humanity.

Half-way through Advent, in this season of waiting patiently and hopefully for the coming of Christ, I am reminded of the words of the great Gospel song and Civil Rights anthem which Baez sung at Woodstock in 1969.

We shall overcome
We shall overcome
We shall overcome some day
Oh, I do believe deep in my heart
We shall overcome some day.

Earlier this year she recorded a new version of this anthem with additional Farsi lyrics and posted it on Utube to encourage the people of Iran in their peaceful protest against oppression. Forty years on from Woodstock Joan Baez’s faith in the coming Kingdom is apparently undiminished.