She has overcome – Joan Baez turns 80
From hanging out with Martin Luther King Jr to camping in a tree to stop the destruction of a Los Angeles urban farm, Joan Baez has led quite the protesting life.
The American singer, who turns 80 on 9th January, grew up in a Quaker household. Born in Staten Island, she spent her childhood in Europe, Canada and the Middle East thanks to her father's work with UNESCO.
She was a big advocate of social justice from an early age. And it was her singing voice that became her campaigning weapon, after she burst onto the US music scene with a performance at the 1959 Newport Folk Festival.
Hit albums followed and Baez became a leading figure in the civil-rights movement. She performed an epic version of We Shall Overcome at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Martin Luther King Jr, who delivered his ‘I have a dream' speech that day, was a good friend and ally. Indeed, an FBI report alleged they were lovers.
In 1964, Baez turned her attention to the Vietnam War, refusing to pay some of her taxes in protest. She later got caught in a bombing raid on Hanoi while delivering presents to American prisoners of war. Unbowed, she included audio clips of the explosions on the 1973 album, Where Are You Now, My Son?
She went on to take a stand on everything from gay rights to the environment, and helped establish Amnesty International in America. In 1981, she was even banned from performing in Chile, Brazil and Argentina, in case she said something unpleasant about the governments.
‘Joan has that rock-and-roll attitude toward life and freedom and love,' fellow folk singer Bob Neuwirth told Rolling Stone. Madonna reportedly put it much more succinctly: ‘She's a f***ing warrior hero.'
Baez seems to have lost little of her belligerent spirit in recent years: she has continued to campaign against capital punishment and in 2017 released a song called Nasty Man about Donald Trump. ‘Nobody in the 1960s could have imagined anything [so] f***ing awful,' she said.
Her private life has been high-profile, if chequered. She had a relationship with Bob Dylan and helped launch his career, before he unceremoniously dumped her. She also dated Steve Jobs. Baez did marry American journalist David Harris in 1968, but they divorced in 1973 and she's been single ever since.
‘I was terrified of intimacy,' she said in a 2009 Daily Telegraph interview, ‘That's why [performing for] 5,000 people suited me just fine.'
Now living a fairly simple life in a rambling Californian house, Baez, who's released 25 studio albums, supposedly retired from touring last year. But in October she was back on stage, singing with Lana Del Ray.
‘We went out clubbing [afterwards] and she f***ing outlasted me,' Del Ray reported.
‘I feel young,' Baez, whose mother lived to 100, has said. ‘[But it takes time] to maintain the body and the spirit. Stretching is not optional.'