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Joan Chandos Báez (born on January 9, 1941)
is an American folk singer and songwriter, known
for her distinctive vocal style as well as her
outspoken political views.

== Life ==

Joan Baez was born in Staten Island, New York,
into a Quaker family. Her father Albert Baez, a
physicist, refused lucrative war industry jobs,
probably influencing Joan's political activism in
the American and international civil rights and
anti-war movements of the 1960's to the present.
The family, frequently having to move by reason of
his work, lived in different towns across the US,
in France, Switzerland, Italy, and the Middle
East, where they stayed in 1951. Baez, at the time
only ten years old, was deeply impressed by the
poverty and the inhuman treatment the local
population in Bagdad suffered from. In the late
1950s, Dr. Baez accepted a faculty position at
MIT, and moved his family to the Boston area, at
the time the epicenter of the up-and-coming folk
music scene, and Joan began performing locally in
Boston/Cambridge, Massachusetts|Cambridge area
clubs, and attended Boston University.  Her most
noted venue was the Club 47 Mount Auburn, in
Cambridge, where she performed twice a week for
$20 per show.  It was with other performers from
the same club that she recorded her first album,
Folksingers 'Round Harvard Square.


Baez' true professional career began at the 1959
Newport Folk Festival and she recorded her first
album for a major company, Joan Baez (album)|Joan
Baez, the following year on Vanguard Records.  The
collection of traditional folk ballads, blues and
laments sung to her own guitar accompaniment sold
moderately well.  Her second release, Joan Baez,
Vol. 2 in 1961 went gold, as did 1962's Joan Baez
in Concert, parts 1 and 2.  From the early to
mid-1960s, Baez emerged at the forefront of the
American roots revival, where she introduced her
audiences to the less prominent Bob Dylan (the two
became romantically involved in late 1962,
remaining together through early 1965), and was
emulated by artists such as Joni Mitchell and
Bonnie Raitt.

During this period, as the Vietnam War|war in
Vietnam and the Civil Rights struggle in the
American south both became more prominent issues,
Baez focused more of her attention on both areas,
until eventually her music and her political
involvement became inseperable.  Her performance
of "We Shall Overcome" at Martin Luther King's
March on Washington permanently linked her with
the anthem, and she frequently joined Civil Rights
marches in the south.  She also became more vocal
about her disagreement with the U.S. war in
Vietnam, publicly disclosing that she was
withholding sixty percent of her income taxes (as
that was the figure commonly determined to fund
the military), and encouraging Draft-dodger|draft
resistance at her concerts.  In 1965 she founded
the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence.

Like Dylan, Baez was profoundly influenced by the
British Invasion and began augmenting her acoustic
guitar on 1965's Farewell Angelina just after
Dylan began experimenting with folk-rock.  Later
in the decade, Baez experimented with poetry
(1968's Baptism:  A Journey Through Our Time) and
country music (1969's David's Album and  1970's (I
Live) One Day at a Time|One Day at a Time). 


In 1968, Baez married David Harris, a prominent
anti-Vietnam War protester eventually imprisoned
for draft evasion.  The couple divorced in 1973. 
Harris, a country music fan, turned Baez toward
more complex country rock influences beginning
with  David's Album. That same year, Baez'
appearance at the historic Woodstock
Festival|Woodstock music festival in upstate New
York afforded her an international musical and
political podium, particularly upon the successful
release of the like-titled documentary film.  Her
1971 cover version|cover of The Night They Drove
Old Dixie Down by (The Band) was a top 10 hit in
the US.


Meanwhile, Baez' political involvement had by no
means ceased.  During Christmas of 1972, she
joined a peace delegation traveling to North
Vietnam, both to address human rights in the
region, as well as to deliver Christmas mail to
American POW's.  During her time there, she was
caught in Richard M Nixon|Richard Nixon's
"Christmas bombing" of Hanoi, during which the
city was carpet bombing|carpet bombed for eleven
straight days.  She also devoted a substantial
amount of her time in the early 1970s to helping
establish a U.S. branch of Amnesty International,
and has since worked on improving human rights,
both in Latin America and Southeast Asia.  She
toured Chile, Brazil and Argentina in 1981, but
was prevented from performing in any of the three
countries, fearful her criticism of their human
rights practices would reach mass audiences, if
she were given a podium.  (A film of the ill-fated
tour, There but for Fortune, was shown on PBS in
1982.)

With 1972's Come from the Shadows, Baez switched
to A&M Records, flirting with mainstream pop music
as well as writing her own songs for her
best-selling 1975 release Diamonds & Rust.  She
switched to CBS Records briefly  during the late
1970s, but found herself without an American label
for the release of 1984's Live -Europe '83.  She
didn't have an American release until 1987's
Recently on Gold Castle Records, and then switched
to Virgin Records for 1992's Play Me Backwards. 
Her 2003 album, Dark Chords on a Big Guitar, found
her performing songs by composers half her age,
while a November 2004 performance at New York's
Bowery Ballroom was recorded for a 2005 live
release, Bowery Songs.


Baez played a significant role in the 1985 Live
Aid concert for African famine relief, opening the
U.S. segment of the show in Philadelphia.  She
also has toured on behalf of many other causes,
including Amnesty International.

Baez toured with Bob Dylan in 1964 and 1965,
during his 1975 and 1976 Rolling Thunder Revue
tours, and, abortively, in Europe in 1984.  At one
time she was romantically linked to Steve Jobs.

In August 2005, Baez appeared at the Texas
anti-war protest that had been started
by Cindy Sheehan.

Joan Baez has a son, Gabriel Harris.  Her sister
was the singer and guitarist Mimi Farina (born
Margarita Mimi Baez 1945-2001).  The mathematical
physicist and Usenet guru, John Baez (b. 1961), is
her cousin.  She is a resident of Woodside,
California.

==Discography==
# Folksingers 'Round Harvard Square (1959)
# "Joan Baez", Vanguard (November 1960) 
# Joan Baez, Vol. 2, Vanguard (October 1961)
# Joan Baez in Concert, Vanguard (September 1962) 
# Joan Baez in Concert, Part 2, Vanguard (November
1963)
# Joan Baez/5, Vanguard (November 1964) 
# Farewell Angelina, Vanguard (September 1965) 
# Noel, Vanguard (December 1966)
# Joan (album)|Joan, Vanguard (August 1967)
# Baptism:  A Journey Through Our Time, Vanguard
(June 1968)
# Any Day Now (album)|Any Day Now (Songs of Bob
Dylan), Vanguard (December 1968)
# David's Album, Vanguard (May 1969)
# (I Live) One Day at a Time|One Day at a Time,
Vanguard (January 1970)
# Blessed Are..., Vanguard (1971)
# Come from the Shadows, A&M (April 1972)
# Where Are You Now, My Son?, A&M (March 1973)
# Gracias A la Vida, A&M (July 1974)
# Diamonds & Rust, A&M (April 1975)
# From Every Stage, A&M (February 1976)
# Gulf Winds, A&M (November 1976)
# Blowin' Away, CBS (July 1977)
# Honest Lullaby, CBS (April 1979)
# Live -Europe '83, Gamma (1984)
# Recently, Gold Castle (July 1987)
# Speaking of Dreams, Gold Castle (November 1989)
# Play Me Backwards, Virgin  (October 1992)
# Ring Them Bells, Guardian (August 1995)
# Gone From Danger, Guardian (September 1997)
# Dark Chords on a Big Guitar, Koch (October 2003)
# Bowery Songs, Koch (September 2005)

==Compilations==
# The First Ten Years, Vanguard (November 1970)
# The Joan Baez Ballad Book, Vanguard (1972)
# Hits:  Greatest and Others, Vanguard (1973)
# The Contemporary Ballad Book, Vanguard (1974)
# The Joan Baez Lovesong Album, Vanguard (1976)
# The Joan Baez Country Music Album (1977)
# The Best of Joan C. Baez, A&M (1977)
# Joan Baez: Classics, A&M (1986)
# Rare, Live & Classic (boxed set), Vanguard
(1993)
# Greatest Hits, A&M (1996)
# Best of Joan Baez: The Millennium Collection,
A&M/Universal (1999)
# The Complete A&M Recordings, Universal/A&M
(2003)

==References==
Baez, Joan. 1988. And a Voice to Sing With: A
Memoir. Century Hutchinson, London. ISBN
0-7126-1827-9 

== Further Reading ==
*Baez, Joan. 1968. Daybreak - An Intimate Journal.
The Dial Press, New York.
*Hajdu, David. 2001. Positively 4th Street. The
Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi
Farina|Mimi Baez Fariña And Richard Fariña.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York.

== External links ==



* http://www.joanbaez.com/ Joan Baez official
website
* http://www.richardhess.com/joan/ Joan Baez Main
Page by Richard L. Hess
* http://launch.groups.yahoo.com/group/BaezFans/
BaezFans on Yahoo! Groups
* http://groups.yahoo.com/group/joanbaezlinks/
Joan Baez Links Yahoo Group
* http://joan-baez.cjb.net/ Joan Baez French
website