Joan Baez

There was a time when Joan Baez was “just” a promising, shining folksinger. Not “above all” Bob Dylan's storied girlfriend, or the fiercely committed political activist for civil rights who sang “We Shall Overcome” at Martin Luther King's March on Washington and recorded albums in support of the Chilean cause and in memory of Salvador Allende; not to mention her contribution, emblematic to say the least, to countless other causes, such as safeguarding the rights of gay men and lesbians, the environmental movement, opposition to the death penalty, and opposition to the US invasion of Iraq back in the now-distant 2003.

It's 1960, and the future icon of the human rights struggle has yet to taste the flash of photographers' cameras or the applause of hippie communities. Having sung the year before, at just eighteen, at the Newport Folk Festival, young Joan decides to shut herself away for a handful of days in the ballroom of Manhattan's Towers Hotel in New York to record her self-titled debut album. Her only company is the strings of her inseparable Martin and Fred Hellerman of The Weavers, ready to back her on second guitar for the songs the singer-songwriter wants to reinterpret in her own way. Yes, because "Joan Baez" is a covers album, mostly of traditional songs rearranged according to her own gospel — that is, stripped down entirely to make room for her gorgeous, unmistakable voice, capable of spanning three octaves, and for a guitar that sounds as though it's combing the hair of an angel.

Popular songs, then, carefully chosen by the nineteen-year-old Joan, who often varies their lyrics as well, as in the opening "Silver Dagger", reinterpreted from a female (and feminist) perspective, thus delivering what would become the most famous version of an English ballad that exists in countless variants, sometimes blended with other songs, and dating back to the early 19th century.

My daddy is a handsome devil

He’s got a chain five miles long

And on every link a heart does dangle

Of another maid he’s loved and wronged.

Go court another tender maiden

And hope that she will be your wife

For I’ve been warned and I’ve decided

To sleep alone all of my life

Baez's style is one of a kind. Not so much, obviously, for the guitar/voice setup, but for a voice that floods everything with lightness, passion, joy and lament, thanks to a set of pipes with a gift for always taking flight, no matter what. We're light years away from the piano/voice intimacy of Molly Drake or the lulling jazz of Blossom Dearie. And even further from the fiery spirit of Connie Francis. In Joan Baez's interpretations, the Christian spiritualism at the root of her childhood takes on flesh and blood — a faith that would later lead the young Joan to convert to Quakerism.

Her singing, then, often becomes prayer. Though never, it should be said, contemplative or devotional. Joan sings of cruel, unfaithful fathers, and brings back to life the most emotionally intense ballads of the rich Anglophone tradition. Starting with the following "East Virginia", later also performed by Sandy Denny, which Baez makes her own in an intimately flawless version, her voice once again that of a wounded but unbroken nightingale, over the guitar's characteristically mournful arpeggio. Her voice then rises from the stage of a New York dance hall to reach the exosphere in "Fare Thee Well (10,000 Miles)", an English ballad dating back to the early 18th century, later covered over the years by the likes of Pete Seeger, Fred Neil, Bob Dylan and Dave Van Ronk. Joan Baez's singing foreshadows that of other "nightingales" of the American folk scene. Above all Joni Mitchell. But also lesser-known singer-songwriters — no less inventive or precious for it — such as the largely unknown Collie Ryan and the often-forgotten Buffy Sainte-Marie. Beyond the well-documented influence Baez had on Bob Dylan, which alone would earn her a place among the milestones of music history, it is above all her singing style (and the way she accompanies herself on guitar) that would go on to inspire hundreds of folk singer-songwriters in the decades to follow.

There are also covers of somewhat "younger" songs, meaning those that differ from the so-called "child ballads" and therefore date back, according to various studies, at least to the early twentieth century, such as "House Of The Rising Sun", a traditional song that spread through the Appalachian region. Another folkloric gem — which many will remember in the version by The Animals — which Baez makes her own in a variant that is once again magically understated.

We were talking about a Baez not yet twenty, untouched as of yet by the sacred fire of civil activism, inherited — like her religious faith — from her family, specifically from her father Albert, a renowned physicist who would refuse to take part in the Manhattan Project, forever nourishing his daughter Joan's pacifist spirit. And of a radiant young woman, still shining like the sun, unaware of the shadows soon to haunt her because of a love, never fully reciprocated, for a man named Bob. A singer who had not yet shown her potential as a songwriter, giving free rein instead to her innate gift for interpretation. And yet it is precisely this that allows her, evidently, to seal the arrival of a winning formula. If albums like Cat Power's "The Covers Record" exist — where the original versions are first dried out and then crumpled with an arcane fury through a perpetually grieving, inconsolable voice — it's also because, in 1960, exactly forty years earlier, a masterpiece like "Joan Baez" had already surfaced, released through Vanguard, a then little-known label that the American singer preferred over the more prestigious Columbia.

And then there's the pastoral "All My Trials", pleading with God for freedom. In the book "The Joan Baez Songbook" (1964), Maynard Solomon (musicologist and co-founder of Vanguard) suggests that it may be an American gospel song dating back to the first half of the nineteenth century, which later reached the Bahamas, where it turned into a lullaby, while the original version was forgotten. In the mid-twentieth century, during the folk music revival, the song then made its way back to the United States from the Bahamas.

Country-tinged folklore, meanwhile, emerges clearly and in all its boundless splendor amid the arpeggios of "Winwood Flower", a song written in 1860 by Joseph Philbrick Webster and made famous in 1928 by The Carter Family trio, who released a historic version considered one of the songs that helped popularize country music. Baez offers an almost faithful rendition, placing emphasis on lyrics that speak of rebirths, falls, dark hours to be mourned, and wildflowers lost forever. There's also "Donna Donna", the English version of a Yiddish song written in 1941 by two members of New York's Jewish community, composer Sholom Secunda and writer Aaron Zeitlin, originally titled "Dos Kelbl", which Baez partly reshapes in its words without touching the ideological soul that locates the calf's inevitable fate within its very nature — a metaphor written to explain Mother Earth's supreme indifference.

On a wagon bound for market

There’s a calf with a mournful eye

High above him, there’s a swallow

Winging swiftly through the sky

How the winds are laughing

They laugh with all their might

Laugh and laugh the whole day through

Eternal, unbreakable love, one that fears neither betrayal nor trial by fire, could hardly be missing, and it lies at the heart of "John Riley", lyrics inspired by Homer's Odyssey and delivered through the tradition of the seventeenth-century English popular ballad, which Baez sings with her usual pathos. Bluegrass touches and echoes of the Old Testament then surface in "Little Moses", confirming her Christian faith, just as Celtic folk song is celebrated in the drama that led to the death of Mary Hamilton, sealed by the nursery-rhyme cadence of the sixteenth-century Scottish song of the same name, or in the notes of the famous "Henry Martin", which instead recounts the epic deeds of a sailor, Andrew Barton (1466-1511), who turned to piracy to support his two older brothers, in a kind of historical Robin Hood meets John Dillinger.

Raising the bar even further is a tribute to South American folklore, which Baez would go on to amplify fourteen years later on the landmark "Gracias a la vida", an album that also includes covers of Violeta Parra and Victor Jara. It happens here on the closing "El preso numero nueve", a canción ranchera written by Mexican singer and composer Roberto Cantoral, first recorded in 1956 by Ana María González.

It's the final marvel of a record whose purity remains unmatched in Joan Baez's career, one that would soon set her on the path to becoming a towering figure of American popular music. Many will of course remember her most famous single, "Diamonds & Rust", and others perhaps the lesser-cited "Here's To You", a song composed with Ennio Morricone in 1971 and featured in the soundtrack of Giuliano Montaldo's film "Sacco e Vanzetti". One could certainly go on for another hundred thousand words about Joan Baez's career, records, retirements, comebacks, and personal, social and political affairs. But one thing is certain: nothing could ever illuminate the folk scene quite like the intrinsic purity of her self-titled debut. The Arch of a singular career.

* Thanks to Federico Romagnoli for his invaluable contribution

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18/08/2024