Bid to win this Yamaha FG800 acoustic guitar, signed by folk music icon Joan Baez!
Eighteen months after the conclusion of Joan Baez's "Fare Thee Well" tour, she looks forward to the celebration of her 80th birthday in January 2021. Five years earlier, her 75th birthday was celebrated at New York’s Beacon Theater, where she was joined by Paul Simon, Jackson Browne, Emmylou Harris and more than a dozen other artists. The concert premiered on the PBS Great Performances series and was issued on DVD and CD. The intervening years have been a historic ride, beginning with Joan’s April 2017 induction into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame. Shortly after the event, she announced that in 2018, she would begin her last formal tour. The “Fare Thee Well” tour began in March 2018 in Stockholm, and concluded in Madrid in July 2019, after 134 sold out performances across the US and Europe.
Meanwhile, the first solo exhibi¬tion of Joan’s series of “Mischief Makers” paintings was presented in Mill Valley, California – portraits of risk-taking visionaries who have brought about social change through nonviolent action, ranging from Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Bob Dylan, to Maya Angelou, John Lewis, and the Dalai Lama. “Mischief Makers 2,” including portraits of Patti Smith, Michael Moore and Dr. Anthony Fauci, opens at the Seager Gray Gallery in Mill Valley on January 6, 2021. As the “Fare Thee Well” tour began, Joan released her first new studio album in a decade, Whistle Down The Wind. Produced by Joe Henry, the album gathered songs by some of Joan’s favorite writers, from Tom Waits and Mary Chapin Carpenter, to Eliza Gilkyson and Josh Ritter. The Grammy®-nominated album prompted Rolling Stone to proclaim, “The takeaway from Joan Baez’s latest is how essential her work remains.” Whistle Down The Wind succeeded 2008’s critically acclaimed, Grammy®-nominated Day After Tomorrow, produced by Steve Earle. That release coincided with the 50th anniver¬sa¬ry of Joan’s arrival on the coffee house scene that first emerged around Club 47 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Day After Tomorrow and Whistle Down The Wind both under¬scored Joan’s long history of mutual mentoring, introducing songs by artists and songwriters, known and unknown, a hallmark of her recordings and performances ever since the early 1960s. Early on, she focused awareness on songwriters ranging from Woody Guthrie to Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Richard Fariña, Leonard Cohen, and Tim Hardin, among others. Her repertoire grew to include songs by Jacques Brel, Lennon-McCartney, Paul Simon, Johnny Cash and his Nashville peers including Kris Kristofferson and Mickey Newbury, South American composer Violeta Para and more. Songwriters whose work was recorded or performed by Joan grew to encompass Jackson Browne, Janis Ian, John Prine, Stevie Wonder, Steve Earle, Tom Waits, and many others, including songs written by Joan herself. Many traditional songs that Joan presented on her earliest LPs found their way into the rock vernacular: “House Of the Rising Sun” (the Animals), “John Riley” (the Byrds), “Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You” (Led Zeppelin), “What Have They Done To the Rain” (the Searchers), “Jackaroe” (Grateful Dead), and “Long Black Veil” (the Band), to name a few. A multitude of British artists who trace their origins to Fairport Convention, Pentangle, and Steeleye Span were inspired by Joan’s versions of “Geordie,” “House Carpenter,” and “Matty Groves.” From the beginning, the life’s work of Joan Baez was mirrored in her music.
At a point when it was neither safe nor fashionable, she put herself on the line, singing about freedom and Civil Rights everywhere, from the backs of flatbed trucks in Mississippi to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial at Dr. King’s March on Washington in 1963. She participated in the birth of the Free Speech movement at UC Berkeley, and co-founded the Institute For The Study Of Nonviolence near her home in Carmel Valley. She stood in fields alongside Cesar Chavez and migrant farm workers striking for fair wages, and opposed capital punishment during a Christmas vigil at San Quentin. The soundtrack for the turbulent ’60s is heard on Joan’s remarkably timeless Vanguard LPs. In 1968, she began a four-year recording stint in Nashville, with Music City’s famed “A-Team” backing her biggest career single, a cover of the Band’s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” (1971). During this time, Joan traveled to Hanoi, and later helped establish Amnesty International on the West Coast. In 1975, her self-penned “Diamonds & Rust” began its course as a beloved (and frequently covered) American standard. Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue tours of late 1975 and ’76 (and resulting film, Renaldo & Clara, 1978) co-starred Joan Baez. Joan Baez has long been a musical and social force of nature of incalculable influence. She marched in Northern Ireland with the Irish Peace People in 1978, appeared at rallies on behalf of the nuclear freeze movement, and performed at benefit concerts to defeat California legisla-tion that would have banned openly gay people from teaching in public schools.
She received the American Civil Liberties Union’s Earl Warren Award for her commitment to human and civil rights issues; and founded the Humanitas International Human Rights Commit¬¬tee, which she headed for 13 years. She dedicated her first entirely Spanish album to Chileanos who suffered under the rule of Augusto Pinochet. In 1981, hostile authoritarian regimes across Latin America tried to prevent her concerts there – three decades later, her return tour of 1984 was heralded as a triumphant success. Joan was a fixture on Amnesty International’s Conspiracy of Hope tour in 1986, with U2, Peter Gabriel, Sting and others. Her 1989 concert in Czechoslovakia was cited by President-to-be Vaclav Havel as a tipping point in the Velvet Revolution that established the Czech Republic. In 1993, Joan was in war-torn Bosnia-Herzegovina, at the invitation of Refugees International. A year later she was singing to her friend and mentor Pete Seeger at the Kennedy Center Honors in Washington, D.C. The Four Voices benefit concerts with Mary Chapin Carpenter and the Indigo Girls that took place later on in the 1990s (reprised for eleven shows in 2017), reinforced Joan’s belief in the new generation of songwriters’ ability to speak to her. The 1995 live album Ring Them Bells expanded on the Four Voices format (featuring duets with Mary Chapin Carpenter, the Indigo Girls, Dar Williams, Janis Ian, and more). It was followed by Gone From Danger (1997), with songs from a new generation of songwriters including Dar Williams, Richard Shindell, Sinéad Lohan, and others. Into the new millennium, Joan received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 49th annual Grammy Awards® in 2007, where she introduced the Dixie Chicks (now known as the Chicks) and saluted their courage to protest the Iraq war. She stood with old friend Nelson Mandela in London’s Hyde Park as the world celebrated his 90th birthday in 2008.
The 50th anniver¬sa¬ry of her debut at the 1959 Newport Folk Festival was under¬scored by the PBS American Masters series premiere of her life story, Joan Baez: How Sweet The Sound (2009). She attended the first Presidential inauguration of Barack Obama that year, and returned to D.C. in 2010, for In Performance at the White House: A Celebration of Music from the Civil Rights Movement, an all-star concert broadcast live from the East Room. Joan’s landmark debut album of 1960 was honored by the National Academy of Record¬ing Arts & Sciences in 2011, who inducted it into the Grammy® Hall Of Fame; and by the Library of Congress in 2015, who selected it to be preserved in the National Recording Registry. That same year, the Ambassador of Conscience Award, Amnesty International’s highest honor was bestowed on Joan, in recognition of her exceptional leadership in the fight for human rights. At the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame induction in 2017, it was noted that amidst the Harry Belafonte and traditional folk covers that Joan recorded on her post-high school demos, she also had her way with Hank Ballard and the Midnighters’ “Annie Had A Baby,” the Coasters’ “Young Blood,” and Ritchie Valens’ “La Bamba.” The “Fare Thee Well” tour ended at Teatro Real in Madrid on July 28, 2019. In November, Joan received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 20th annual Latin Grammys® in Las Vegas. That same week, she attended the Folk Americana Roots Hall of Fame in Boston, where she presented the Club Passim aka Club 47 Lifetime Achievement Award to its longtime programmer Betsy Siggins, a close friend since their time as Boston University freshmen in 1958.
In the earliest days of the 2020 pandemic shutdown, Joan released a series of solo perform-ance videos of songs from her living room, done in a variety of languages for her fans around the world. In April, the prestigious American Academy Of Arts & Sciences (founded in 1781), announced her election to its membership, in the company of Henry David Thoreau, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Toni Morrison, President Jimmy Carter, and others. Throughout the year, Joan’s dedication to painting new “Mischief Makers” continued apace. Her self-portrait titled “Black Is the Color” was authorized for the book cover of Joan Baez: The Last Leaf (published October 2020), the first comprehens¬ive biography of her career, written by award-winning journalist Elizabeth Thomson, who has interviewed and reported extensively on her subject over the course of nearly four decades. Another portrait captured April Covid-19 victim John Prine, titled “Hello In There,” which benefited the Pandemic Resource & Response Initiative. Joan’s paintings join a lifetime of recordings and memorable concert performances that will reverberate long into the future.
