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Joan Baez’s name has resonated with the folk music world for decades. From the moment she took the stage at the Newport Folk Festival in 1959, she was considered folk royalty.
Her clear, strong voice and political activism helped define the growing Greenwich Village folk scene. For a season, she and Bob Dylan were seen as the king and queen of the folk music world. She performed at the Lincoln Memorial the day the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his riveting “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington, and she lent her voice to immigrant labor demonstrations, anti-war protests and other causes she believed in.
Joan was born on January 9, 1941, on Staten Island, New York, one of three daughters of a Mexican-born physicist father and a mother with Scottish roots. The family moved to California, where Joan spent much of her childhood. Her father, Albert, graduated from Stanford in 1950 and is considered a co-founder of the X-Ray microscope.
The family relocated to Cambridge, Massachusetts, so her father could join the faculty at MIT. Joan enrolled in Boston University’s theater school, but that didn’t last long. Instead, she was drawn into the developing Boston folk music scene.
Her early influences included Harry Belafonte, Odetta, and Pete Seeger. Based on her club performances around Boston, musician Bob Gibson invited the eighteen-year-old Baez to perform at the Newport Folk Festival in 1959, and her strong, beautiful soprano voice captured the audience.
Impressed by her Newport performance, representatives at Vanguard Records and Capitol Records rushed to sign Joan to a recording contract. She chose Vanguard, believing that the less-corporate label would give her more freedom.
Her first album, the self-titled Joan Baez (Vanguard, 1960), reached the Top 20, an improbable feat for an album of traditional folk ballads at that time. Joan’s premier album and her next two albums, Joan Baez, Vol. 2and the live Joan Baez in Concert, all achieved Gold Record status, establishing Joan Baez as a star.
End of part 1. (to be continued…..)
Everything else is just history
