Joan Baez was 28 years old and six months pregnant when she walked out on stage to headline Woodstock in August 1969. It was late enough that Friday had become Saturday, so she greeted the tired and tripping masses with a bright: “Good morning everybody! Thank you for hanging around.” Over the next hour she held them spellbound with songs written by the likes of Willie Nelson, The Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan, having helped to usher Dylan into the limelight just a few years earlier when she invited him on stage with her at Newport to duet on the protest anthem “With God on Our Side”.
Only one song, “Sweet Sir Galahad”, was a Baez original. “It’s the only song I’ve ever written that I sing anywhere outside the bathtub,” she announced over the mud. “Because I’m just smart enough to know that my writing is very mediocre.”
Baez no longer thinks her writing is mediocre, but this revelation came to the 83-year-old only recently. “I started getting more confident about three months ago,” she says, with a musical laugh that lets me see the diamond embedded in gold in one of her teeth. It’s easy to think of Baez as the original long-haired folkie, but these days, with her silver pixie cut and twinkling tooth, there’s a touch of the rock’n’roll pirate about her. “People said to me so many times, ‘But they’re good songs!’ So I went back and listened… and they’re good songs!”
Baez released the last of her 25 albums in 2018, and retired from touring the following year. Today, she’s at her rural home in Woodside, outside Palo Alto in northern California, speaking to me over video call from in front of an antique wooden organ in her kitchen, surrounded by copper pots and candles. She is about to publish her first collection of poetry, When You See My Mother, Ask Her to Dance, which offers further evidence that Baez’s vivid, expressive soprano and unerring ability to fuel her activist politics with song are far from the sum of her talents.
Kevin EG Perry: Collected Works 