Joan Baez – The Protest Years
April 9, 2011Joan Baez is not just a musician she is also a political icon. The artistry of her music comes second to her political conscience. Joan Baez employs music to communicate and advertise important political values. She could be identified as the mother of female singer songwriters she was one of the first women to have the songs that she wrote taken seriously and put to use by her peers.
Her 1st album called simply Joan Baez was released on the Vanguard label in 1960. It was released after her fantastic performance at the Newport Festival the previous year. Incredibly, it took only 4 days to record that album with some tunes being put down in just one take.
Joan Baez Vol 2, released in 1961, was the album that truly lit a fire under her career. On that album her crystal-clear soprano singing voice reinterpreted traditional folk tunes accompanied only by an acoustic guitar. The album got onto the best seller list and made Baez a minor celebrity; it reached No. 13 on the Billboard album chart. It was nominated for a Grammy in the Best Contemporary Folk Performance category. The Greenbriar Boys played on 2 of the tracks on the album.
Joan Baez 5 released in 1965 is the album with which she publicised the message of the Greenwich Village Movement. The album had far fewer traditional folk tunes on it than her previous albums. At this point Joan Baez became the poster girl for protest songs, sadly this lead to her writing very little non-protest related work during the next few years. However, when you consider that folk music has for centuries recorded the struggles of ordinary people Joan Baez during that period was being true to the roots of folk music.
Joan Baez is far less public about her political views than she used to be, but is still very politically active.
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