Events

[FOLK] Given today’s barrage of folk-influenced singer-songwriters, it seems inconceivable that Joan Baez was ever a singular entity. But at the dawn of her career, coming from a hearty pack of revivalist folkies that defined an era—Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton, Pete Seeger, and of course, her one-time paramour, Bob Dylan—there was nobody quite like her. Comparisons with Judy Collins don’t really hold water: Collins was a white girl from Seattle, while Baez came from Spanish-speaking Mexican stock, informing both her musical style and appearance with something remarkable for the time. Her political approach was also unusual, rooted in the pacifism that characterized her Quaker upbringing; the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome” became somewhat of a non-partisan trademark for Baez, and she sang the song at the White House in 2010. Now 75, (a Birthday celebration concert of duets held in January at NYC’s Beacon Theater was filmed for a future broadcast of PBS’s Great Performances), her career has come full circle, back to the folk idiom that launched it. Baez flirted with pop successfully in the 1970s, but became largely disenfranchised (and without a label) through the brash production trends of the 1980s. Emerging with brilliant folk-pop of Play Me Backwards (Guardian, 1992), she found herself surrounded by enthusiastic contemporaries (Dar Williams, Indigo Girls, Mary Chapin Carpenter) that embraced her as a maternal force. Many of them appeared on the follow-up, Ring Them Bells, a live recording released in 1995 that introduced her to an impressionable younger audience. 2008’s Steve Earle-produced (and Grammy nominated) Day After Tomorrow resonated with the burgeoning Americana crowd, featuring songs penned by Earle, Patty Griffin, Tom Waits, T-Bone Burnett, and Eliza Gilkyson. Meanwhile, both Vanguard Records—the now-revitalized folk label that released her 1960s records—and A&M, (her 1970s label), have reissued her most popular work. 2016 is a long way from her 1959 debut at Newport, but Baez sounds sturdy in her middle register these days, performing material from throughout her lengthy, storied career. She’s at Babeville’s Asbury Hall on Saturday, March 26.