Joan Baez, 'saint of the peace movement'

National Catholic Reporter, Jan 28, 2005 by Colman McCarthy

Fans of Joan Baez called out their favorite oldies as the singer-songwriter, now in her sixth decade of a career that began in high school talent shows in Palo Alto, Calif., was finishing a concert that drew, still again, an overflow crowd.

"Farewell, Angelina." "Diamonds and Rust." "Fairfax County." "Silver Dagger." "Carry It On."

As more songs were shouted out--front rows to back--a thunderclap voice from a side aisle put a loud end to it all: "Honey, you sing anything you want."

And so she did, easing into the high notes of "Gracia a la Vida," the next to last song of the evening at the Birchmere, an Alexandria, Va., music hall. At 63, the Baez voice, though huskier, retains the unaffected purity that has always been the mark of her 418 songs in 48 U.S.-released albums and CDs. Still intact, also, is the physical energy that brought her by bus and plane last summer to full houses in Europe--including Bucharest, Istanbul, Frankfurt, Genoa, Rome, Trieste, Dresden, Bonn, Hamburg, Paris--and followed with some 20 sold-out autumn concerts on, the U.S. East Coast.

At each site, audiences heard songs about migrant workers (Woody Guthrie's. "Deportees"), prisoners ("There But For Fortune," which was dedicated to Virginia inmate Joseph Giarratano), labor organizing ("Joe Hill"), antiwar beliefs ("Reunion Hill"). These songs, and others in the two-hour set, covered the range of Baez's spiritual and political liberalism, all of it grounded in her personal commitment to nonviolence. "I can't tell you how boring it would be for me," she said, "to give a concert and not have it connected with people's lives and suffering and real issues. There's no music for me outside of that."

After the concert, I spent some time with Joan in a backstage reception room. It was one of a couple of dozen visits we've had, going back to the early 1970s. Our friendship was cemented by a mutual interest in freeing political prisoners. She has always had a moral firmness that I have known in few others.

Returning from concert tours in countries where men and women were stashed or tortured in dungeons, she would often pass through Washington and give me the facts and stories about political prisoners. The information came from her own meetings with the well-known--Vaclav Havel, Mairead Corrigan, Adolfo Perez-Esquivel--and from the forgotten whose cases were documented by Amnesty International and Joan's own nonprofit Humanitas International. Primitivist governments run by dictators found Joan and her music too threatening. She was often denied permission to give commercial concerts. Banned in public, she sang in private. In Argentina, it was during a Mass for mothers of the disappeared. In Chile, it was in underground union halls. In Poland, in Lech Walesa's living room. In Southeast Asia, in refugee camps. Christmas 1972 found her in an underground shelter in Hanoi, huddled with people terrorized by modern warfare's heaviest bombing spree, as ordered by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.

The energy of Joan's folk singing flows from its only strength, the folk. I saw this often in Washington. One time, in 1983, she suggested I gather up my high school students and bring them to her concert at Constitution Hall: Afterward, we could have a backstage seminar on human rights and nonviolence. When she sent over more than $1,000 worth of tickets, the students brought them home. The parents--assorted Lefties, Woodstock rebels and Newport Folk Festival veterans with caches of Baez albums in the attic--had heartburn. Free tickets for the kids? What about us? A few of the more creative morns and dads revived their old crashing skills and, to their children's red-faced embarrassment, slipped into the seminar.

Joan, sitting atop a dressing table, began with stories about her Quaker childhood, her protesting with Martin Luther King Jr. in the South and her commitment to Gandhian nonviolence. A student asked why she sang "Goodnight Saigon" during the concert and dedicated it to the Marines in Lebanon and their families. "That might have sounded strange coming from me," she said, "but I really am a person who is committed to the sanctity of human life, especially young men who need not have died in their prime."

There were light moments. One of the more cerebral students, a 4.0 intellectual, asked Joan to explain the differences between the early Gandhi, the middle Gandhi and the late Gandhi. On that one, Joan winged it. A boy in the back row could take no more of his deep-thinking classmates. Dante Ferrando, 16, was the class musician, a wild-eyed drummer dressed in anarchist black and with his hair done in blond spikes. When he raised his hand for a question, a few of us thought, Oh God, what's coming now? "Joanie," he began sternly, "I watched you real close while you sang tonight. You were pretty good. But I was really puzzled about something." The whole class, including an ex-hippie mother who wore her old love beads just for the occasion, stiffened. "My question is this: How come you don't sweat when you sing? In my band, we all sweat."