Joan Baez - Music Legends Joan Baez : The Queen of Folk Music '2024

Tracks list

Tracklist:

1. Donna Donna (03:13)
2. House of the Rising Sun (02:55)
3. All My Trials (04:38)
4. El Preso Numero Nueve (02:47)
5. Little Moses (03:28)
6. O What a Beautiful City (03:13)
7. Pal of Mine (02:48)
8. Plaisir d'amour (03:05)
9. Silver Dagger (02:29)
10. So Soon in the Morning (02:06)
11. Rake and Rambling Boy (01:57)
12. Henry Martin (04:12)
13. Wagoner's Lad (02:12)
14. Wildwood Flower (02:34)
15. Barbara Allen (04:15)
16. East Virginia (03:41)
17. Careless Love (02:07)
18. Banks of the Ohio (03:07)
19. Mary Hamilton (05:55)
20. Lowlands (02:46)
21. The Cherry Tree Carol (03:27)
22. Old Blue (02:33)
23. Fare Thee Well / Ten Thousand Miles (03:18)
24. What You Gonna Call Your Pretty Little Baby (02:29)
25. Don't Weep After Me (02:47)
26. Railroad Boy (02:28)
27. The Lily of the West (03:18)
28. Sail Away Ladies (02:47)
29. Kitty (01:59)
30. Engine 143 (03:27)
31. Black Is the Color (02:25)
32. John Riley (03:51)
33. Lonesome Road (02:20)
34. Once I Knew a Pretty Girl (02:50)
35. Silkie (03:58)
36. The Trees They Do Grow High (02:57)


 moreJoan Baez was born on January 9, 1941 in Staten Island, New York. Her
father, Albert Baez, was born in Mexico, and his dad was a Methodist minister
who preached in both Spanish and English to congregations in Brooklyn, New York.
Her mother, Joan Chandos Baez (known in the household as "Big Joan") was also
the child of a man of the cloth, in her case an English Anglican priest. Joan
was the second of three children born to the couple, and her siblings Pauline
Marden (aka Pauline Thalia Baez Bryan) and Mimi Fariña (aka Margarita Mimi
Baez Fariña) would also earn recognition as musicians and activists. The Baez
family converted to the Quaker religion when Joan was a child, and the faith's
emphasis on non-violence and progressive activism would have a strong impact on
her thinking. When she was ten years old, the family relocated to California,
and at 13 she was introduced to folk music when an aunt took her to see Pete
Seeger in concert. In 1956, after learning to play rhythm & blues songs she
heard on the radio on a ukulele, she bought her first guitar. The following
year, her activism took root as she engaged in civil disobedience for the first
time, refusing to take part in an evacuation of her school during an air raid
drill.

In 1958, after completing high school, Baez recorded an album-length demo tape,
with her vocals accompanied by her acoustic guitar. No record labels were
interested at the time, but it focused her interest in making music a part of
her life. Later that year, her family relocated to Belmont, Massachusetts after
Albert accepted a teaching position at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. Baez began investigating the burgeoning folk music scene in Boston
and Cambridge and enrolled at Boston University, but she soon dropped out as her
passion for music overwhelmed her interest in academics. By 1959, Baez was
performing regularly at Cambridge's most celebrated folk venue, Club 47, and she
began sharing stages with Bill Wood, a folk singer who also hosted a radio show
on Harvard's radio station WHRB-FM. Baez, Wood, and Ted Alevizos cut a joint
album, Folksingers 'Round Harvard Square, which was issued by a small local
label, marking her first appearance on record. After landing a gig at the
Chicago folk club the Gate of Horn, Baez impressed fellow performers Bob Gibson
and Odetta, and when Gibson performed at the Newport Folk Festival that summer,
he brought her to the stage to duet on two songs, "Virgin Mary Had One Son" and
"We Are Crossing Jordan River." The audience and fellow artists were wowed by
Baez's vocals, and she was singled out in reviews of Gibson's set.

On the strength of her Newport performance, Baez signed a recording contract
with the Vanguard Recording Society, a label that had a strong reputation among
folk and classical listeners. Fred Hellerman of the Weavers produced her debut
album, Joan Baez, which was issued in 1960. By the time it appeared in stores,
she'd been invited to perform at the 1960 Newport Folk Festival as a solo act,
and in November she made her first concert appearance in New York City at the
92nd Street YMCA. Her debut album was a commercial and critical success, and a
second LP, Joan Baez, Vol. 2, was issued by Vanguard in 1961. She also met Bob
Dylan that year when he opened for John Lee Hooker at New York's Folk City. Baez
became an early champion of Dylan's songwriting, and the two would have an
on-and-off romantic relationship that came to an end in 1965.

Baez began touring extensively, and insisted that she would refuse to appear
before segregated audiences as the Civil Right movement was on the rise. In
1962, she brought out her first live album, Joan Baez in Concert, Pt. 1 (which
included a number of international folk tunes and featured her singing in
Spanish and Portuguese as well as in English), and her status as the leading
star of the folk music community was confirmed when she was the subject of a
cover story in Time Magazine's November 23, 1962 issue. The live album earned
her a Grammy nomination, she headlined 1963's Newport Folk Festival, and she
toured the country with Bob Dylan as her opening act. That year, she also took
part in the historic March on Washington for Civil Rights, and joined the
boycott of the television series Hootenanny, which had blacklisted performers
with a history of leftist views, in particular Pete Seeger. Before 1963 was out,
she'd delivered her follow-up to the live LP, Joan Baez in Concert, Pt. 2, and
her success received a different kind of confirmation when a bootleg reissue of
Folksingers 'Round Harvard Square began to circulate, as well as an unauthorized
edition of her 1958 demo album under the title Joan Baez in San Francisco.

1964's Joan Baez 5 saw her interpreting the work of contemporary songwriters
like Dylan and Phil Ochs as well as traditional material, and her version of
Ochs' "There But for Fortune" became a minor hit in the United States and
reached the Top Ten in England. Her U.K. success dovetailed with the arrival of
the Beatles in the United States and the subsequent British Invasion took much
of the focus off the folk movement. Baez would respond with 1965's Farewell,
Angelina, that not only featured a number of songs penned by Dylan, but was her
first project recorded with a backing band. She would also work on a collection
of contemporary pop/rock songs with singer, songwriter, and novelist Richard
Fariña (the husband of her sister Mimi) as producer, though the album would
never be completed after Fariña's death in a motorcycle accident in 1966.
Composer and arranger Peter Schickele (who later gained fame as the man who
"discovered" the work of forgotten classical composer P.D.Q. Bach) would
collaborate with Baez on her next three albums -- the 1966 seasonal effort Noel,
the 1967 folk-rock-influenced Joan, and 1968's Baptism, an ambitious experiment
in fusing music and poetry.

For 1968's Any Day Now, a two-LP set devoted entirely to Dylan songs, Baez
traveled to Nashville, where she recorded with many of the same players who
appeared on Dylan's Blonde on Blonde. Its release coincided with the publication
of her first book, a memoir titled Daybreak. In 1969, she went back to Nashville
to cut David's Album, a country-influenced collection dedicated to her
then-husband David Harris, who was serving time on draft resistance charges.
Baez also took the opportunity to speak about her husband's cause when she
performed before the biggest audience of her life at 1969's Woodstock Music and
Art Fair. 1970's One Day at a Time was another country-influenced project that
featured Baez covering Willie Nelson on the title track long before his
commercial breakthrough later in the decade. 1971's Blessed Are … was an
epic-scale release spread across two LPs and a bonus 7" single. It featured a
major hit single in her cover of the Band's "The Night They Drove Old Dixie
Down," and found Baez devoting more room for her own songwriting, with eight of
the 22 tracks from her pen. 1971's Carry It On was the soundtrack to a
documentary film about Baez and Harris' work in the draft-resistance movement,
featuring both music and spoken word pieces. (Baez would also contribute a song
to the soundtrack of the Italian drama Sacco and Vanzetti, and her performance
at the Big Sur Folk Festival became part of the concert film Celebration at Big
Sur.) Carry It On was also her last album for Vanguard.

Baez signed a new record deal with A&M Records, and her first album for the
label, 1972's Come from the Shadows, fused her interest in country sounds with
her impulses as an activist. She also stepped into the producer's chair for the
first time, managing the sessions for Jeffrey Shurtleff's album State Farm. In
December 1972, Baez was invited to travel to Hanoi as part of an activist
charity that was distributing gifts and letters to American Prisoners of War.
During her time in Hanoi, the city was subjected to massive bombing raids by
U.S. forces, and her experience formed the basis of her next LP, 1973's Where
Are You Now, My Son? While Baez had recorded numerous songs in Spanish over the
years, 1974's Gracias a la Vida marked the first time she recorded a full album
en español. She worked with producer David Kershenbaum and engineer Henry
Lewy for her next project, along with a number of respected session musicians
who had regularly worked with Joni Mitchell. The result was one of her most
accessible albums, Diamonds & Rust, which peaked at number 11 on the U.S. album
charts, while the title track (a meditation on the collapse of her relationship
with Dylan) was a hit single that became her best-known original composition.

Baez toured heavily in support of Diamonds & Rust, and the Los Angeles and
Philadelphia dates were recorded for the 1975 set From Every Stage, a live album
whose set list spanned her career to date. She also became part of Dylan's
Rolling Thunder Revue tour, which barnstormed the country for much of 1975.
(Footage of her appearances in the Rolling Thunder shows appeared in Dylan's
1978 film Renaldo & Clara.) 1976's Gulf Winds was her first album composed
entirely of her own original songs. It was her last album under her deal with
A&M, and she signed with CBS's Portrait imprint for 1977's Blowin' Away, an
especially polished effort which included the witty "Time Rag," depicting an
unfortunate encounter with a magazine reporter. Two years later, she issued
Honest Lullaby, which was her second and last album for Portrait, and her next
album, 1980's Live in Concert: European Tour, was initially released only in
Europe and Latin America. The following year, she took part in a fact-finding
project in Latin America that coincided with a concert tour; a documentary about
her journey, There But for Fortune: Joan Baez in Latin America, aired on PBS in
1982. She continued to perform regularly and devoted much of her time to
progressive causes, and she was part of the lineup for the 1985 benefit concert
event Live Aid.

In 1987, Baez brought out her first new album in eight years, a powerful
collection of contemporary covers and originals titled Recently, which was
released by Gold Mountain Entertainment. It was the same year that she published
her autobiography, And a Voice to Sing With, which became a New York Times
bestseller. 1989 brought two albums from Baez, Diamonds & Rust in the Bullring
(recorded during a performance in Bilbao, Spain) and Speaking of Dreams (which
included appearances from Paul Simon, Jackson Browne, and the Gipsy Kings). The
1991 compilation Brothers in Arms closed out her relationship with Gold
Mountain, and the following year, she delivered Play Me Backwards, released by
Virgin Records. In April 1995, Baez staged a series of shows at New York City's
renowned Bottom Line club, where she was joined on-stage by a number of friends
and admirers, including Mary Chapin Carpenter, the Indigo Girls, Janis Ian, and
Dar Williams. Highlights from the shows were featured on the 1995 live disc Ring
Them Bells.

As Baez found it harder to write new songs, she focused on interpreting the work
of current songwriters that she admired, and 1997's Gone from Danger would
include only one new composition, "Lily," a poem she'd penned set to music by
Wally Wilson and Kenny Greenberg. Teatro ZinZanni, a San Francisco performance
troupe that incorporates theater, comedy, music, and performance art, invited
Baez to join their show, and in 2001 she appeared in the role of "La Contessa,"
and she would return to ZinZanni several times in the next ten years. Her next
studio release was 2003's Dark Chords on a Big Guitar, which concluded with a
cover of Steve Earle's "Christmas in Washington." Earle enjoyed her
interpretation so much that he produced her next album, 2008's Day After
Tomorrow. Earle penned three of the ten songs; other writers included Elvis
Costello, Tom Waits, and Eliza Gilkyson. In between the two albums came another
live release, 2005's Bowery Songs, which documented an appearance at New York's
Bowery Ballroom.

The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences presented Baez with their
Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2007 Grammy Awards, and she devoted the next
nine years to touring, benefit performances, and activism. In 2016, Baez
celebrated her 75th birthday with a special concert at the Beacon Theatre in New
York. Joined by an all-star cast of musicians, including Emmylou Harris, Judy
Collins, Richard Thompson, and Jackson Browne, the show was captured for
posterity and issued a few months later as 75th Birthday Celebration. Baez was
inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2017, and she went into the studio
with producer Joe Henry to begin work on an album that same year. Whistle Down
the Wind was released in March 2018, and was followed by a concert tour that
Baez declared would be her last. Though she had retired from music, her recorded
legacy continued to interest music fans, and 2020's Timeless Classic Albums (a
budget-priced box set featuring her first five Vanguard albums), 2021's
Essential Works 1959-1962 (featuring highlights from Folksingers 'Round Harvard
Square and her first two Vanguard LPs), and Early Years: The First Albums
1959-1961 (an expanded version of Essential Works 1959-1962) confirmed she would
still command the respect of listeners for many years to come.

Biography by Mark Deming



Joan Baez - Music Legends Joan Baez.rar - 577.8 MB

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