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Continued from last week
Dylan embraced electric music, folk-rock, and apolitical songwriting, leaving the banner of “the cause” to Baez.
She became known as the “moral center of the anti-war and social-justice movements that rose up in the sixties.” She sang “We Shall Overcome” at the 1963 March on Washington on the very steps upon which the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his pivotal “I Have a Dream” speech.
She went to jail for her protests against the war in Vietnam, and she performed for benefits, rallies, and demonstrations for free speech and against the war that captured the public’s—and politicians’—attention. She blocked entrances to draft induction centers and symbolically withheld a portion of her federal taxes to protest U.S. military spending.
Joan Baez’s music continued to chart well through the 1960s. “We Shall Overcome” reached the Top 40 in the U.K. in 1965, and she scored Top 10 singles in the U.K. with “There But for Fortune” and Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.”
In 1968, she married draft activist David Harris, and the following year, she released her 11th album, called David’s Album. Recorded in Nashville, David’s Album takes a turn toward a more country sound, a nod toward her husband’s preference for country music. This, along with her ten other albums released, would be the Joan Baez catalog by which the Woodstock audience would know her in the summer of 1969.
To be continued…..
Everything else is just history
