Joan Baez

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Joan Baez was singing at a music festival called Bratislavská lýra in Communist Czechoslovakia in May 1989 when someone cut off her microphone. From the stage, she had just greeted members of Charter 77, a dissident human-rights group. Officials answered by silencing her amplification. Baez kept going anyway, singing a cappella to nearly four thousand people.

  During that same visit she met Václav Havel, who would later become president of the country. She let him carry her guitar, so that government agents would be less likely to arrest him. Havel later cited her as a great inspiration and influence in the Velvet Revolution, which overthrew the Soviet-dominated Communist government.

  Baez is an American singer-songwriter and activist who has performed publicly for over 60 years and released more than 30 albums. On the PBS series American Masters, she said that social justice is the true core of her life, "looming larger than music". That claim raises questions. How did a girl with a Mexican-born father and a Quaker upbringing become one of the most recognizable voices in American folk music? Why did she mostly sing songs written by other people? And what did a life of marches, jail cells and public feuds leave behind?

  1125113

• 2. A Restless Childhood

  ›

  Joan Chandos Baez was born in the Staten Island borough of New York City on the 9th of January 1941. Her father, Albert Baez, was born in Puebla, Mexico, and grew up in Brooklyn. His own father, Alberto, had left the Catholic Church to become a Methodist minister who preached to a Spanish-speaking congregation. Albert first considered the ministry too, but he turned to mathematics and physics instead. He earned his doctorate at Stanford University in 1950 and was later credited as a co-inventor of the X-ray microscope.

  Her mother, also named Joan Chandos Baez, was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, as Joan Bridge. The family called her Big Joan or Joan Senior. Her father was an English Anglican priest who claimed descent from the Dukes of Chandos. She was born on the 11th of April 1913 and died on the 20th of April 2013, at the age of 100.

  Joan was the second of three sisters, and all three became political activists and musicians. Pauline, the eldest, was born in 1938 and died in 2016. The youngest, Margarita Mimi Baez, was born in 1945, died in 2001, and became known as the singer Mimi Fariña. The family converted to Quakerism during Joan's early childhood, and she still identifies with the tradition, especially in its pacifism.

  Racial slurs and discrimination followed Baez through her youth because of her Mexican heritage. That experience pushed her toward social causes early in her career. She refused to play at any segregated white student venue. On tours of the Southern states, that meant she performed only at black colleges.

  Her father's work with UNESCO kept the family moving. They lived in towns across the United States and in England, France, Switzerland, Spain, Canada and the Middle East, including Iraq. She spent much of her youth in the San Francisco Bay area and graduated from Palo Alto High School in 1958. There she committed her first act of civil disobedience, refusing to leave her classroom for an air raid drill.

  1415162123

• 3. Cambridge and Newport

  ›

  A ukulele from a friend of her father's gave Baez her first instrument. She learned four chords, enough to play the rhythm and blues she was then listening to. Her parents worried that the music would lead her toward drug addiction. At 13, she went with her aunt to a concert by the folk musician Pete Seeger and was strongly moved. She soon began practicing his songs and singing them in public. One of her earliest audiences was a youth group from Temple Beth Jacob, a Jewish congregation in Redwood City, California, at a retreat in Saratoga. In 1957 she bought her first Gibson acoustic guitar.

  After she graduated in 1958, her father accepted a faculty position at MIT, and the family moved to Boston, Massachusetts. The city was at the center of a growing folk-music scene. Baez attended Boston University for only about six weeks before giving her first concert at Club 47 in Cambridge. While designing the poster, she considered performing as Rachel Sandperl, using the surname of her mentor Ira Sandperl. Another option was Maria, from the song "They Call the Wind Maria". She dropped the idea, fearing people would say she had changed her name because it sounded Spanish.

  That first audience numbered eight patrons, including her parents, her sister Mimi and her boyfriend. She was paid ten dollars. Soon she was asked back and began playing twice a week for $25 a show. A few months later, she and two other folk enthusiasts recorded an album in the cellar of a friend's house. A family friend designed the cover, and Veritas Records released it as Folksingers 'Round Harvard Square.

  In Boston, Baez met Bob Gibson and Odetta, then two of the most prominent singers of folk and gospel music. She names Odetta, Marian Anderson and Pete Seeger as her primary influences. Gibson invited her to join him at the 1959 Newport Folk Festival, where they sang two duets, "Virgin Mary Had One Son" and "We Are Crossing Jordan River". The performance drew substantial praise for the "barefoot Madonna" with the otherworldly voice. The nickname Madonna has been attributed to her clear voice, long hair and natural beauty, and to her role as an "Earth Mother".

  Columbia Records tried to sign her first, but she chose Vanguard Records in 1960. She later said she expected more artistic license from a more "low key" label.

  144493046

• 4. The Interpreter

  ›

  Her first album for Vanguard, Joan Baez, was recorded in just four days in the ballroom of the Manhattan Towers Hotel in New York City. Fred Hellerman of the Weavers produced it. The songs were traditional ballads, blues and laments, including Child Ballads, sung to her own guitar. One track, "El Preso Numero Nueve", was entirely in Spanish, and she re-recorded it in 1974 for the Spanish-language album Gracias a la Vida. The record sold moderately well.

  On the 11th of November 1961, Baez played a sold-out concert at Town Hall, her first major New York show. She had made her New York concert debut a year earlier, on the 5th of November 1960, at the 92nd Street Y. Robert Shelton, the folk critic of the New York Times, wrote of the Town Hall night: "That superb soprano voice, as lustrous and rich as old gold, flowed purely all evening with a wondrous ease." Baez later laughed about her innocence. Her manager had mailed her a clipping reading "SRO", and she recalled: "I thought SRO meant 'sold right out.' I was so innocent of it all."

  Joan Baez, Vol. 2 in 1961 went gold, as did Joan Baez in Concert, Part 1 in 1962 and Part 2 in 1963. The two live albums were unusual because they held only new songs rather than established favorites. Part 2 carried her first-ever Bob Dylan cover. On the 23rd of November 1962 she appeared on the cover of Time magazine, a rare honor for a musician then. Her first charting single, a 1965 cover of Phil Ochs's "There but for Fortune", reached the top ten in the United Kingdom.

  The composer Peter Schickele supplied classical orchestration for three albums: Noël in 1966, Joan in 1967 and Baptism: A Journey Through Our Time in 1968. Baptism worked like a concept album, with Baez reading and singing poems by James Joyce, Federico García Lorca and Walt Whitman. In 1968 she traveled to Nashville, Tennessee, where one marathon session produced two albums. Any Day Now held nothing but Dylan songs. David's Album, released in 1969, leaned into country music.

  By the end of the decade Baez had begun writing her own material. "Sweet Sir Galahad" was about her sister Mimi's second marriage and appeared in 1970 on (I Live) One Day at a Time. Her Vanguard run was strong. Of her fourteen albums for the label, thirteen reached the top 100 of Billboard's pop chart, and four reached the top ten. She came to be considered the "most accomplished interpretive folksinger/songwriter of the 1960s".

  In 1971 she ended eleven years with Vanguard after one last gold album, Blessed Are... It included a top-ten cover of the Band's "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down". She then spent four years and six albums at A&M Records. Gracias a la Vida in 1974 took its title song from the Chilean folk singer Violeta Parra and did well in both the United States and Latin America. Diamonds & Rust followed in 1975, mixing her own songs with a flirtation with mainstream pop. It became the best-selling album of her career and gave her a second top-ten single with the title track.

  Gulf Winds in 1976 held only songs she had written herself. She then moved to CBS Records for Blowin' Away in 1977 and Honest Lullaby in 1979. Her American releases later thinned out. Live Europe 83 came out in Europe and Canada but not commercially in the United States, and Recently in 1987, on Gold Castle Records, ended the wait. Day After Tomorrow in 2008, produced by Steve Earle, became her first charting record in nearly three decades.

  4449304653

• 5. Marching for Rights

  ›

  In 1956, Baez heard Martin Luther King Jr. speak about nonviolence, civil rights and social change, and the speech brought tears to her eyes. Several years later the two became friends, and she joined many of the demonstrations he helped organize. As a high school senior, she had also met the anti-war activist Ira Sandperl. In 1965 the two founded the Institute for the Study of Non-violence in Carmel Valley, California. Sandperl ran the general operations while Baez supplied the funding.

  At the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Baez sang "We Shall Overcome", the anthem written by Pete Seeger and Guy Carawan. That performance linked her to the song for good. She sang it again in Sproul Plaza during the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, and at many other rallies. In 1965 she took part in the Selma to Montgomery marches for voting rights. Her 1964 recording of "Birmingham Sunday", written by her brother-in-law Richard Fariña, later opened Spike Lee's 1997 documentary 4 Little Girls. That film tells of the four young victims of the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church.

  In November 2017, documents released from the National Archives included a 1968 FBI report alleging that Baez had an affair with King. Clayborne Carson, director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University, described the claim as part of a smear campaign against King.

  As the Vietnam War grew, Baez became more outspoken. In 1964 she publicly endorsed tax resistance by withholding sixty percent of her 1963 income taxes. She also encouraged draft resistance at her concerts. Her first memoir, Daybreak, laid out her anti-war position and was dedicated to men facing prison for resisting the draft. She was arrested twice in 1967 for blocking the entrance of the Armed Forces Induction Center in Oakland, California, and spent over a month in jail.

  A free concert at the Washington Monument in 1967 drew a crowd of 30,000 to hear her message, despite opposition from the Daughters of the American Revolution. She also joined New York protests organized by the Fifth Avenue Vietnam Peace Parade Committee, starting with the March 1966 Fifth Avenue Peace Parade. In 1969 she took part in the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam protests. The long run of marches reached Phil Ochs's The War Is Over celebration in New York City in May 1975.

  At Christmas in 1972, Baez joined a peace delegation to North Vietnam. The group went to address human rights and to deliver Christmas mail to American prisoners of war. While there, she survived the eleven-day Christmas bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong. She turned the trip into Where Are You Now, My Son?, a 23-minute piece, half spoken-word poem and half tape-recorded sounds, which filled an entire side of her 1973 album.

  Baez did not spare Vietnam's own government. On the 30th of May 1979, she organized a full-page advertisement in four major U.S. newspapers describing it as having created a nightmare. Jane Fonda, her one-time anti-war ally, refused to join the criticism. The disagreement was publicly described as a feud.

  2881828793

• 6. Causes Across Decades

  ›

  In December 2005, Baez sang "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" outside San Quentin State Prison in California, at a protest against the execution of Tookie Williams. She had sung the same song at San Quentin in 1992, at a vigil for Robert Alton Harris, the first man executed in California after the death penalty was reinstated. She later lent her name to the campaign against the execution of Troy Davis in Georgia. In 2016 she backed the Innocence Project and Innocence Network, and she tells audiences at each concert about their work freeing the wrongfully convicted.

  In 1978, Baez performed at several benefit concerts to defeat the Briggs Initiative, which proposed banning openly gay people from teaching in California public schools. Later that year she joined the memorial marches for Harvey Milk, the openly gay San Francisco city supervisor who had been assassinated. She wrote "Altar Boy and the Thief", from the 1977 album Blowin' Away, as a dedication to her gay fans. In the 1990s she appeared with her friend Janis Ian at a benefit for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

  On Earth Day 1999, Baez and Bonnie Raitt visited the environmental activist Julia Butterfly Hill on her redwood treetop platform, 180 feet up. Hill had camped there to protect ancient redwoods in the Headwaters Forest from logging. On the 23rd of May 2006, Baez joined Hill in a giant tree at the South Central Farm in Los Angeles, the largest urban farm in the state. They were hoisted up and stayed overnight to protest the eviction of the farmers. Many of the farmers were immigrants from Central America, so Baez sang from Gracias a la Vida, including "No Nos Moverán".

  In early 2003, Baez sang at two San Francisco rallies of hundreds of thousands of people against the invasion of Iraq. That August she joined Emmylou Harris and Steve Earle in London for the Concert For a Landmine-Free World. In the summer of 2004 she joined Michael Moore's Slacker uprising Tour on college campuses, urging young people to vote for peace candidates. In August 2005 she appeared at the anti-war protest in Crawford, Texas, that Cindy Sheehan had started.

  On the 25th of June 2009, Baez recorded a version of "We Shall Overcome" with a few lines of Persian lyrics, supporting peaceful protests by Iranian people. She made it at home and posted the video on her website and on YouTube.

  Party politics had long made her wary. Then, on the 3rd of February 2008, she wrote to the San Francisco Chronicle endorsing Barack Obama, saying that changing her stance "feels like the responsible thing to do". It was the first time she had endorsed a major party candidate. By 2013 she was telling The Huffington Post: "In some ways I'm disappointed, but in some ways it was silly to expect more." She performed "We Shall Overcome" at the White House on the 10th of February 2010.

  On the 11th of November 2011, Baez played a three-song set for the protesters at Occupy Wall Street, including "Joe Hill". In July 2019 she called jailed Catalan independence leaders political prisoners. Five days later she visited Carme Forcadell, a former president of the Parliament of Catalonia, in prison.

  On the 12th of April 2025, Baez performed as a musical guest on the Los Angeles stop of the Fighting Oligarchy Tour, alongside Neil Young, before 36,000 people. On the 18th of October 2025, she made a surprise appearance at a No Kings rally in San Francisco. That December she appeared on a version of Jesse Welles's song "No Kings".

  97991006639

• 7. Dylan and Other Loves

  ›

  Baez first met Bob Dylan in April 1961 at Gerde's Folk City in Greenwich Village. She was already being called the Queen of Folk and was unimpressed by this "urban hillbilly". Still, she liked one of his early songs, "Song to Woody", and said she would like to record it. In 1963 she invited him on stage at the Newport Folk Festival, where they sang his "With God on Our Side". On tour she often had him sing partly alone and partly with her, which annoyed some of her fans.

  Baez later said Dylan's songs updated the topics of protest and justice. By his 1965 tour of the United Kingdom, their relationship was fading. The couple appeared in D. A. Pennebaker's documentary Dont Look Back. She described the ending as an abrupt halt that broke her heart. In the 2023 documentary I Am a Noise, she called the relationship "totally demoralizing", said she had forgiven him, and said they are no longer in touch.

  They reunited for his Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975-76, and she sang four songs with him on the live album from that tour. She also starred as "The Woman in White" in his film Renaldo and Clara. She wrote at least three songs about him: "To Bobby", "Diamonds & Rust" and "Winds of the Old Days". Dylan's songs are less clear. On "To Ramona", he wrote in the liner notes to Biograph that it was "pretty literal. That was just somebody I knew." Baez recalled that he called her Ramona. For other songs rumored to be about her, neither Dylan nor biographers such as Clinton Heylin and Michael Gray have said anything definitive.

  In the Santa Rita Jail, after the 1967 arrests, Baez met David Harris, a draft resister held on the men's side who still managed to visit her regularly. After their release she moved into his draft-resistance commune in the hills above Stanford. They had known each other three months when they decided to marry, and Time magazine called the coming wedding the "Wedding of the Century". They married in New York City on the 26th of March 1968, with vows blending Episcopalian and Quaker traditions. Judy Collins sang at the ceremony. Harris, a country music fan, turned Baez toward country-rock beginning with David's Album.

  The couple lived on a ten-acre commune called Struggle Mountain in Los Altos Hills, California, where they tended gardens. Harris then refused induction and was indicted. On the 16th of July 1969, federal marshals took him to prison. Baez was visibly pregnant at Woodstock that August, where she performed fourteen songs. Their son Gabriel was born on the 2nd of December 1969. Songs from this period include "A Song for David" and "Fifteen Months", named for the time Harris spent in prison.

  The couple separated three months after his release and divorced amicably in 1973. Gabriel lived mainly with his mother. Explaining the split, she wrote in her autobiography: "I am made to live alone." Gabriel is a drummer who sometimes tours with her.

  In the early 1980s, Baez dated Steve Jobs, the Apple Computer cofounder, who was then in his mid-twenties. Several sources say he considered proposing but worried that she was in her early forties and children were unlikely. After the relationship ended, they stayed friends. She performed at his memorial in 2011. Of Jobs she said: "Steve had a very sweet side, even if he was as... erratic as he was famous for being."

  4010343583

• 8. Legacy and Retreat

  ›

  On the 28th of July 2019, Baez gave her final concert at the Teatro Real in Madrid, after dates across Europe. She retired from touring because her vocal cords could no longer reliably meet the standard she set for herself. She still plays occasional special events. That April she told Rolling Stone that she had turned down Woodstock 50 because her instincts said no. Since leaving the stage, she has devoted herself to portraiture.

  The farewell had a run-up. On the 4th of April 2017, she posted "Nasty Man" on Facebook, her first new song in 27 years, a protest against President Donald Trump. Three days later, on the 7th of April 2017, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Whistle Down the Wind, released on the 2nd of March 2018, charted in many countries and earned a Grammy nomination. It was supported by her Fare Thee Well Tour.

  In 2003, Baez received the John Steinbeck Award for her civil rights activism. In February 2007 she was given a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2011 Amnesty International honored her at its 50th anniversary meeting in San Francisco and launched the Amnesty International Joan Baez Award, with her as the first recipient. In 2015, Amnesty jointly named her and Ai Weiwei Ambassadors of Conscience. She was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020 and honored at the Kennedy Center Honors in May 2021. Rolling Stone placed her at number 189 on its 2023 list of the 200 greatest singers. In February 2024, she received the Third Class of the Order of the White Double Cross.

  Not everyone was admiring. In the 1960s, the cartoonist Al Capp, creator of Li'l Abner, lampooned her as "Joanie Phoanie", a communist radical who sang about class warfare while riding in a limousine and charging high fees. Baez asked for a retraction. Capp replied that he saw no resemblance to her and that if she wished to prove it, she should. Years later she admitted to being more amused and wrote under one strip: "I wish I could have laughed at this at the time." On Saturday Night Live, Nora Dunn parodied her serious persona, notably in the 1986 mock game show Make Joan Baez Laugh. In 2024, Monica Barbaro played her in the Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown.

  In 2019 Baez also corrected some false assumptions about herself, saying she was not a vegetarian and had not been part of the second-wave feminist movement. She added that her stardom had shielded her from the everyday struggles of other women. In the 2023 documentary I Am a Noise, she spoke about her personal struggles. She said that she and Mimi had struggled with depression and, after years of therapy, came to believe their father had abused them. In her 2024 poetry collection When You See My Mother Ask Her to Dance, she said she has been diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder.

  Today Baez lives in Woodside, California, where she shared a home with her mother until her mother's death in 2013. Her backyard has a tree house, where she meditates, writes and spends time "being close to nature".

  7071747568