Joan Baez, the music legend, hit the Cambridge, Massachusetts folk scene when she made the round of cafes there in 1960. Cambridge, the Berkeley of the East Coast because Harvard University is located there, is a culturally rich enclave of intellectual Left progressivism.
Born Joan Chandos Baez to a Mexican father and Scottish mother, Baez lived in Palo Alto, California with her family until 1958 when her father, Albert, joined the faculty at MIT. The religiously diverse Baez family—her grandfather was a Catholic turned Methodist, while her mother was the daughter of an Anglican priest—converted to Quakerism while Joan was still a child.
Quakerism, with its Left progressive secular theology, barely qualifies as a religion but it helped mold Joan into what she would later become: an activist who spoke out on behalf of non-violence, civil rights and opposition to the Vietnam War. Baez’s first public act of civil disobedience was her refusal to leave her Palo Alto high school for an air raid drill.
The Palo Alto Times reported on February 7, 1958, that:
“Miss Baez stayed at the school until the normal end of classes at 3 p.m. She told school officials that she is a ‘conscientious objector’ and does not believe in the drill.
Later in the afternoon she told the Times: ‘I don’t see any sense in having an air raid drill. I don’t think it’s a method of defense. Our only defense is peace.’
She said she did not see any sense in a two-hour warning system when a missle can get to this country in half an hour.”
Fast forward to Club 47 in Cambridge and Baez’s first concert where she sang English murder ballads and sad Appalachian love dirges. Her mellifluous soprano voice caught on; she introduced audiences to Bob Dylan, and the rest is history.
When Baez was invited to sign her first recording contract with Columbia, she went into the posh corporate Columbia offices and immediately felt sick. What to do? She headed over to an independent label, Vanguard, where she signed a deal in 1960. Vanguard, she said, made her “feel safe.”
After she became famous, she refused a ride in a Cadillac limousine, calling it too capitalist, but when a truck was sent to pick her up, she reconsidered. “Maybe a limousine isn’t too bad.”
When I interviewed Baez by phone in the 1990s for a Left-oriented magazine, I was mostly charmed by her stories, many of them personal, but there was little of the political in our conversation. By then the activism of the 1960s and ’70s had passed, and Baez, the troubadour-activist, had been mostly silent when it came to “issues.” She had also cut her epic long hair and now had a stylized helmet-feminist cut reminiscent of a zillion and a half suburban women.
Things just weren’t the same with her. In many ways, it seemed as if “the guts” of Joan Baez had been torn out, meaning that any conversation with her would only be about the issues of the past.
The Christian Science Monitor summed up that time in a September 1995 article, stating that,
…By 1990, both ’70s-style liberalism and ’80s-style conservatism had failed. Unfortunately, no new political force within or outside of the two parties, representing ideas of the 1990s, has appeared. The result is an American electorate that tries to change the channel every few years – and finds nothing but reruns….
Then came Cancel Culture and the extreme leftward turn of the Democrat party. The Monitor’s view that in the 1990s “no new political force within or outside of the two parties…has appeared” was rendered null and void. The Times they were a changing….The Democrat party had become the counterculture, but even more so.
Suddenly, Joan Baez re-emerged, the soprano phoenix having waited out the intervening years in relative obscurity. As an activist, how could she “top” what came before when she sang barefoot in Harvard Square?
Certainly, there had been nothing as newsworthy as her 1963 singing of “We Shall Overcome” at the March on Washington where Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.
There were also no New York Times photo ops as grand as the image of her holding hands with King as the two escorted schoolchildren into a desegregated school in Grenda, Mississippi.
In April 1993, Baez did manage to travel to Sarajevo to give a concert as a way to show her support for the people there. The Baez website will tell you that she spent “11 days running in and out of shelters” as bombs fell, although Susan Sontag, who was in Sarajevo at the same time staging a Samuel Beckett play, writes that Baez left the city in a terrified panic as soon as the first bomb exploded.
What’s a little virtue signaling among leftists, after all?
Donald Trump’s election in 2016 reactivated Joan Baez’s activism.
Baez, despite her reputation for humane disagreement and empathic understanding of “one’s enemies,” fell into all the leftist traps: Trump was a white supremacist, anti LGBT, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim. Racism was also a national pandemic and it was destroying the United States from within, etc.
Not only that, but democracy was being threatened with permanent extinction.
Yet there was nothing from Baez when it came to Cancel Culture. Nothing about conservative thinkers and writers being banned from American campuses; nothing about erasing the distinction between legal and illegal immigration (in fact, Baez once arrived at a concert in London’s Royal Albert Hall wearing a t-shirt that read, “Make America Mexican Again”); nothing about the Marxist street revolutionaries who burned down cities in the U.S. in 2020 to the tune of $2 billion in damages; nothing about the toppling of statues of historic figures because they were perceived as having despicable opinions; nothing about the illogic of biological men competing in women’s sports.
If Baez had any feelings about these things, she kept them to herself. Image is everything, after all.
Would she really welcome being perceived as another David Horowitz, a traitor to progressivism?
Baez being Baez, it was crucial that she keep up the Baez mythology and act out her former activist role of righteous protest and “doing good.”
She began a secondary career as a portrait painter, capturing the likenesses of Patti Smith, Stacey Walker, Greta Thunberg, Bernie Sanders and Ukraine President Zelensky. These unframed prints, signed and numbered, go for upwards of $350.00 (shipping not included). She calls the series, ‘Mischief Makers,’ or portraits of people “changing the world.”
Name your leftwing personality, even the most remote, and Baez has a portrait for you. Like football? Well, there’s Colin Kaepernick. Have an obsession with the Supreme Court? There’s [Saint] Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Like a good political cackle? There’s a lovely portrait of Kamala Harris for your spare bedroom wall.
Let’s not forget Anthony Fauci, whose portrait includes the word ‘Trust’ printed alongside it in eerie Flavor Aid Orwellian doublespeak.
On Baez’s website, referring to the portrait of Zelensky, one can read: “Joan Baez never imagined painting a portrait of a war hero.”
Well, frankly, neither can most of us. It appears that Baez-ian nonviolent principles and anti-war rhetoric don’t apply to Ukraine.
No longer a solitary visionary with minority “barefoot” views, Joan Baez is now a status quo member of the Biden-Democrat establishment, fully certified and enshrined like a star in the heavens, with more international accolades than I could possibly list here — nearly all of them having been awarded since her second albeit ‘shadow’ phase of political activism.
I just wonder where she has been hiding out better learn that both our World wars Korea and Vietnam was started under Democrats and Vietnam because of Wally Cronkite’s lies
Hitler, not Roosevelt, started World War II.
Russia invaded Ukraine and slaughtered its civilians, not the other way around.
The irony is not that Baez supports Ukraine’s right to self-defense. It’s that a faction of Republicans “blame America first” and blame America’s allies as warmongers for not being pacifists in response to the Russian invasion.
One corrupt Mafia invading another Mafia’s turf. To hell with both of them, it’s not in America’s interest to save either Mafia from the other. But corrupt Joe Biden and Hunter Biden, and who knows which other Democrat-Communists and RINOs, are in Zelensky’s money laundering pocket
What America should be doing for her own self-interest and self-preservation, if it were still America, is invading and destroying the Mafia in Cuba and the Mafia in Venezuela, but America is not America any longer.
With the left it’s never about peace and love, it’s always about communism. Leftists loved Russia when it was communist, hate it now that it is not. She had no problem with Maidan and the oppression and mass murder of ethnic Russians since 2014. That’s the other thing about leftists, they can’t stand it when you contradict their narrative.
Well, there’s much for which to chide and criticize Baez. That’s for sure. But she must be given kudos for her newspaper ad criticizing the North Vietnamese for their mistreatment of the South Vietnamese and creation of the “boat people.” None, or almost none, of her co-travelers would sign it but she stood strong on the issue and criticized her cowardly compatriots for their refusal. And for that she deserves a thumbs up.
Yes, I remember that and she does deserve credit. Leftists were against her as she stood alone sympathizing with the boat people.
While I have no problem with her abandoning pacifism and supporting the Ukraine’s fight against the barbaric invasion, the traditional leftist opposition to our involvement abroad has vanished. All of a sudden our military might is a good thing.
Of course, once they get us into a war, they tend to stab our men and women in the back. They were for the Iraq war before they were against it. LBJ, a Dem, counted on their support in Vietnam until they turned on him.
Since she was a good pacifist, North Vietnam let her visit with the American POWs that they were holding. She and her companions would memorize the names and hometowns of every POW they met. After leaving NV, they would give the information to American authorities. Baez also had a comeback in the late 80s. Her songs were on the radio. Then she spoke out against the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. Her songs were pulled from the playlists.
Baez seemed to be more independent than most lefties. Pete Seeger never spoke up against the Russians.
Baez should hang up her guitar and her politics.
Few people change their politics, their thinking, or their character after 30 and Baez is 82.
“It is only in romances that people undergo a sudden metamorphosis. In real life, even after the most terrible experiences, the main character remains exactly the same.” – Isadora Duncan
Whoa! Some women don’t age well, but at least they don’t feel they have to advertise it.
It should be remembered that Vladimir Putin using the Russian military to invade and destroy Ukraine didn’t happen when President Trump was in the White House he kept Putin under control. If Donald Trump would still of President this Putin disaster in Ukraine would not have occurred. Now with Joe Biden masquerading as a genuine US President Putin has become totally out of control, irrational and very dangerous.
About Russia and Ukraine, this current situation is obviously very serious.
Putin is very willing to have the Russian military murder many people of Ukraine to conquer that nation the more Ukrainians who are killed the greater will be the resentment and hate for the Russians invaders and the more resistance the Putin’s invaders will have.
If Putin does conquer, have to kill even more people and destroy the entire infrastructure of Ukraine.
Therefore, if Putin “wins” this war he stated it would be an empty victory for him because he will lose the respect of all the leader of the different countries of the world and by all the people in those countries will detest him.
All the people of the Ukraine will despise him for being responsible for the deaths of their family members and friends and taking their beauteous nation and making a total ruin out of it.
It’s amazing that someone as intelligent Putin can also be so very blind to this obvious reality.
Putin has already lost all respect; next, he will lose his position power and end up imprisoned or being dead
That prison or death awaits for Putin because he did make it for himself by his ordering all those horrendous bloody murderous violence by his wanting to invade and conquer Ukraine.
”All the people of the Ukraine will despise him for being responsible for the deaths of their family members and friends and taking their beauteous nation and making a total ruin out of it.”
That one is easily solved by displacing or murdering the rest of Ukraine.
Putin can suffer the loss of more dead Muslim soldiers, that is no setback
to him. Given enough time he will (sadly) pull this off.
Rather Vladimir Putin be better and more fittingly categorized as a sociopath or a psychopath, the fact remains that he’s the one with the supreme power in the mighty nation of Russia and he is very dangerous.
The brave and Ukrainian people are foiling Putin’s scheme to violently and murderously conquer their nation. Furthermore, on the news program American First the former adviser to President Trump, Sebastian Gorka, during an interview he spoke about Putin’s using the Russian military to invade Ukraine. Dr. Gorka explained that invasion this what happens when there is a “weak feckless senile old man in the White House.”
Of course, he was speaking of Joe Biden.
Dr. Gorka doesn’t want any American soldier sent to Ukraine but be does believe that “We need to help the self- determinists of Ukraine as a strong people with military supplies”. Furthermore, he also said, “We need to supply them with information gathered from the different US intelligence agencies.”
One terrible reality is the Joe Biden ,in spite of all his talk about aiding the people of Ukraine will in the end come to nothing. This is because Biden is “all talk” and “empty words”.
Even though Vladimir Putin is a terrible man, it’s important to keep thing in perspective when it comes to the heads of the different nations of this area of the world.
For Volodymyr Zelnskyy who is the President/dictator of Ukraine is also a terrible man.
As he as a tyrant had ordered government persecution of the Ukraine Orthodox Church and its monasteries.
Zelenskyy didn’t dare order government persecution of the mosques and madrasas’ along
with harassment of its imams.
Zelenskyy well understands what and who it’s safe to pick on, and what and who it’s not safe to pick on.
An insightful, well-written essay worth reading. If it’s accurate, Miss Baez’s idea-world is not unusual, but rather commonplace for the Generation of ’68. No wonder, aside from obvious talent and skill, she was so popular.
However, as a listener, speaking only for myself, one tries not to first consider the idea-world, which is generally unrelated to the music, of the person through whom the music is delivered. Take the music on its own basis. Imagine not listening the Beethoven’s music because he was a rather miserable sort, etc.
I’ve always found much of the folk music of the 1960s to amount to little more than singing propaganda, thus making it seem as if it is not, at its core, propagandistic. But there was also much beauty Baez discovered in her music, especially in her thrilling voice. That is what I’m looking for. I don’t have to (and to) succumb to the blatant political messaging of some of it.
So Ms Baez is on the side of the Nazis fighting the Communists… Go figure huh?.
Just like Neil Young and his merry gang of anti War folks she hates the ONLY President that claimed, loudly and openly, that ”We must get out of these endless Wars”… ”We should not be paying for the defense of Nations around the World with Taxpayer money”… ”We must stop invading and attacking countries”… ”We must stop sending money off to countries that openly despise us while our own people sleep on the streets across America”.
Trump welcomed the King of Saudi Arabia to the White House the day after his, ”muslim ban speech”…
He was the first President to agree with Gay Marriage and even invited some Gay Married couples to a White House Dinner, Donald Trump has a Scottish Mother just as Ms Baez has a Scottish Father, Donald Trump is actually married to a immigrant,
Ms Baez said NOTHING about ”men” competing and destroying young girls Sports Events, Trump spoke out against that craziness…However Ms Millionaire is defending a wee soy boy in Ukraine who has shut down media and Church outlets, but Trump is, in her mind, still the bad guy, while she lives in a Mansion surrounded by a Wall.
Hypocrisy and stupidity knows no bounds.