Search - Joan Baez :: Joan Baez

Long, Long Ago, Before the Beatles or even Bob Dylan...

Catherine Bargar | Ithaca, NY USA | 10/07/2002

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Before the Great Folk Scare of the 1960s, there was traditional music, songs that have triumphantly withstood the test of time and interpretation by thousands of singers both famous and of the back-porch variety. Folks have been singing these songs since before "music" was synonymous with "entertainment; they've been sung by mothers lulling their babies to sleep, and around campfires and kitchen tables, and as men (and a few women too!) went off to battle and to sea; they've been used to spread the news of palace doings and pirates and adventurers, and to tell the stories of regular folks going about their daily business. That's where these songs, sung so beautifully and cleanly by Joan Baez on her first album, come from, and the fact that these songs are still being sung and loved and passed on to the next generation is due in large part to Joan and Judy and Pete and even old Bob Dylan himself. They knew a good song, one that rings true to both the ear and the heart, when they heard one, and I remain perennially thankful that they saved them for us and our children and our children's children in such beautiful recordings as this.This album has been dubbed "essential" by the wise folks here at Amazon.com, and rightly so. It was first released way, way back in the very early '60s, before my generation of Baby Boomers had become world-weary and relentlessly politically correct. All of the songs on this album predate our 20th-century woes and wars, and most of them have their origins in "the old country", whether that be England or Africa or Spain or deepest Apalachia. But that doesn't mean that these are sweet, wimpy, wispy little ditties, and don't let the spine-tingling purity of Joan Baez's voice lull you into overlooking the power and substance of the material here! In the songs that Joan gives us on this album, we have the stuff of life itself: loneliness ("10,000 Miles), love ("Wildwood Flower"), adultery, rape, and betrayal ("Mary Hamilton") and revenge ("Silver Dagger"), prostitution and gambling ("House of the Rising Sun"), and the deep suffering of slavery and oppression. Bastard babies, wronged women, pirates on the high sea, heedless rounders, murderous lovers, even baby Moses and the pharoahs - they're all here, and they've got a lot to say!These songs were among the first I learned to play over 40 years ago on my old Montgomery Ward guitar with the hot pink "flower power" decals stuck all over it, and I'm still singing them today. My kids, now grown, know them from me & my friends singing them in the living room and the kitchen all of their lives, although I'd bet they've never heard this recording. In fact, I had forgotten about this album until I recently rediscovered it, and therein lies the incredible power of great "folk music": it is the song itself, more than any individual singer, that lives in the minds and voices throughout the years, decades, centuries. With this and the other earliest Joan Baez recordings, though, we have it all - enduring songs of the human condition and a singer whose simplicity and clarity of voice bring them to us in heartstoppingly beautiful form.It would be easy enough, from our perspective of the wearying decades since the '60s, to lump Joan Baez in with our memories of love beads and protest marches and "girls' dorm music" and even our own foolish younger selves. After all, it was she who brought us the now-dreaded "Kumbayah" that we've all sung at countless campfire singalongs, and who perhaps gave voice to the earliest seeds of our "political correctness". Easy, perhaps, but a gross underestimation (or, as our current president has said "mis-underestimation" - but don't get me started!). The songs, the voice, the symbol of an era, and the woman who brought them to us are all right here in this first of her many albums. Buy it for the hauntingly beautiful traditional songs Joan brings us, or for the pure clear voice that will lift the hairs on the back of your neck, or for the incredibly and appropriate simple guitar accompaniment she gives us; buy it to expand your own and your kids' grounding in traditional folk music - heck, you can buy it for nostalgia and the sweet pangs over your innocent or misspent youth for all I care, but buy it. This is an album that should be in every American's collection, for once it is in your collection, the music will be in your ears and your heart your mind, where it belongs."

The story world of these songs comes alive . . .

Phil Rogers | Ann Arbor, Michigan | 05/24/2002

(5 out of 5 stars)

". . . humming in your chest, and in your eyes . . .I didn't become aware of Joan Baez until the spring of 1970, when I moved into a communal house where several of the women my age played Joan, Judy and Joni a lot. Initially, I didn't like her all that much . . . the albums they had were 'Farewell Angelina', and 'Any Day Now', which are both collections of Bob Dylan songs. At the time, I much preferred the way Bob sang his own songs. I mean, these Baez albums were great mood enhancers, a/k/a background music, but I never considered buying them for myself way back then. This situation changed in the mid-90's when I bought and read the book 'Baby Let Me Follow You Down: the Illustrated Story of the Cambridge Folk Years'. The author, Eric von Schmidt, was one of the very folksingers whom he was writing about, and boy, did he ever do a job of transporting me back in time, as it were. I began hunting for some of the older material, from where the urban folk revival started. One of my first acquisitions was Joan's first album. I absolutely fell in love with it.Sure, Ms. Baez took a lot of flak for being in the habit of singing old traditional songs rather than the new topical protest material; and she didn't even write any of her own stuff. Then again, the artistry she summons when just singing is far more astounding than what many of the singer-songwriters were able to tap into while writing their own new tunes. Her voice is pure, and her dynamics (ability to go from soft to loud and back again) is unmatched in the pop world. And there is quite a large acreage of feeling that inheres in, adheres to, and rustles in the deep undergrowth of her softer passages, then dances in the powerful frescos of her soaring soprano. It's such that you don't dare listen to this on headphones--the alterations in volume are too great. It needs a relatively large, airy room to allow the attitude and ambience to emerge, for the delicately powerful sounds to swirl, grow into the strong, knowing organisms they are, then later to die away somewhere around the cornices (and other places). [Or at the edge of space where time begins to steal the music away . . . until the whispered beginnings of the next phrase, or the next song.]The person who recorded and engineered this did great work, by the way, not succumbing to the urge to compress the dickens out of the sound of this beautiful, amazing voice.Be sure to check out her first two live albums. When she has the audience sing along with her on "We Shall Overcome", tears well up in me every time I hear it."

A Rare Treat

Vyvyan Brunst | Fort Collins, CO USA | 10/19/2005

(5 out of 5 stars)

"The recent PBS American Masters presentation of Martin Scorsese's "Bob Dylan: No Direction Home" made one thing clear: rather than history being unkind to Baez, the opposite is true. On a stage filled with luminaries, her voice transcended, rising above humbler vocal talents like a temple bell at a PTA meeting squabble.



When Joan sings "All My Trials," and hits the word "cold" in the line "The river Jordan is muddy and cold ..." she creates another language altogether - something simultaneously sinuous, tender, and bitter. You may only have one life. Do yourself a favor - somewhere along the way see the Alhambra in May, sip champagne in an Epernay cellar, turn out the lights and catch a Myrna Loy & William Powell flick, and listen to early Baez. Only a critical tendency to disparage perfection - passing over the Raphael to enthuse about Hieronymus Bosch - can account for any characterization of that voice as "removed". If removed, then why the goosebumps? Some prefer the sow's ear of homey folk to the silk purse of Baez. That's fine. Just don't attribute that bias to history. History will be the one in the corner with the headphones, playing "Silver Dagger" for the thousandth time."