Legendary artist called the 'Barefoot Madonna' of music: Who is Joan Baez?

Joan Chandos Baez, with her full name, was born on January 9, 1941, in Staten Island, New York. Her father, Albert V. Baez, was a physicist who came to the United States from Mexico at a very early age and is considered the co-inventor of the x-ray microscope. Her mother was of Western European descent. Baez had two sisters, Pauline Thalia Baez Bryan, also known as Pauline Marden, and Margarita Mimi Baez Farina, better known as Mimi Farina. Both were political activists and musicians.

Growing up, Baez faced racial slurs and discrimination because of her father's Mexican heritage. As a result, she became involved in various social causes early in her career. Her father's research and teaching positions took the family to various American and foreign cities. Early in her career, Baez became involved in a variety of social causes, including civil rights and nonviolence. Baez attended high school in Palo Alto, California, where she excelled in music rather than academic subjects.

A friend of Baez's father gave him a ukulele. She learned four chords that enabled her to play Rhythm and blues, the music she was listening to at the time. When Baez was 13, her aunt took her to a concert by folk musician Pete Seeger, and Baez realized that he was very impressed with his music. Soon she started practicing the songs in her repertoire and performing them in front of everyone. A few years later, in 1957, Baez purchased her first Gibson acoustic guitar.

Shortly after graduating from high school in 1958, her family moved to Boston, Massachusetts, where Baez is located. At the time, she was at the center of the up and coming folk music scene, and Baez began performing near her home in Boston and near Cambridge. Baez briefly attended Boston University, where she befriended several semi-professional folk singers, from whom she learned a great deal about the arts.

A few months later, Baez and two other folk enthusiasts made plans to record an album in the cellar of a friend's house. Baez later met Bob Gibson and Odetta, two of the foremost vocalists who sang folk and gospel music at the time. Gibson invited Baez to perform with him at the 1959 Newport Folk Festival. This performance was highly praised and made her a star for young people.

With this performance, Baez signed with Vanguard Records the following year and recorded her first album, Joan Baez (1960). Her collection of traditional folk songs, blues and elegies, which she sang to her own guitar accompaniment, sold moderately well.

She made her New York concert debut at 92nd Street Y on November 5, 1960, and on November 11, 1961, Baez performed her first major New York concert with a sold out performance at the Town Hall. Although primarily an album artist, many of Baez's singles topped the charts. Eight gold albums and one gold single showed her popularity as a singer.

Baez added other instruments to her recordings for "Farewell, Angelina" (1965), which featured a few Dylan songs interspersed with more traditional fare. Deciding to experiment with different styles, Baez turned to classical composer Peter Schickele, who provided the classical orchestration for her next three albums.

Supporting those who opposed the Vietnam War, she went on speaking tours in the United States and Canada, urging the public to resist conscription. Baez's distinctive vocal style and political activism had a significant impact on American popular music. She was one of the first musicians to use her popularity as a tool for social protest, singing and marching for human rights and peace.

Baez has been considered "the most successful interpretive folk singer-songwriter of the 1960s". Of the fourteen Vanguard albums, thirteen hit the top 100 on Billboard's mainstream pop chart, eleven in the top forty, eight in the top twenty, and four in the top ten.

After eleven years at Vanguard, Baez decided in 1971 to cut ties with the record label that had released her albums since 1960. Baez wrote "The Story of Bangladesh" in 1971. This song was based on the Pakistani army's crackdown on Bengali students sleeping unarmed at Dhaka University on March 25, 1971 and sparked the nine month Bangladesh Liberation War. Around this time in late 1971, she reunited with composer Peter Schickele to record two tracks "Rejoice in the Sun" and "Silent Running" for the science fiction film Silent Running.

Since 1959, she has released more than 30 albums and numerous forty five records. Especially the 1975 album "Diamonds & Rust" had great success. This album included songs by famous names such as Jackson Browne, Janis Ian, John Prine, Stevie Wonder & Syreeta, Dickey Betts of the Allman Brothers Band and Bob Dylan. Despite being a songwriter, especially after the second half of the seventies, she made covers of songs by The Beatles, Jackson Browne, Paul Simon, The Rolling Stones, and Stevie Wonder.

Baez was best known for her seventies hits "Diamonds & Rust", "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down", "We Shall Overcome", "Sweet Sir Galahad" and "Joe Hill". Baez also played a major role in the 1985 Live Aid concert to help the African famine. In 1987, Baez's second autobiography, "And a Voice to Sing With," was published and became a New York Times bestseller.

In May 1989, Baez performed at a music festival called "Bratislavská lýra" in communist Czechoslovakia. While there, she met the future president of Czechoslovakia, Václav Havel, whom she allowed to carry her guitar to avoid being arrested by government agents. In 1993, at the invitation of Refugees International and sponsored by the Soros Foundation, she traveled to the war-torn Bosnia and Herzegovina region of the former Yugoslavia to draw more attention to the suffering there. She was the first major artist to perform in Sarajevo since the outbreak of the Yugoslav civil war.

In 2003, Baez was also a judge at the third annual Independent Music Awards to support the careers of independent artists. In her album Dark Chords on a Big Guitar (2003), she included songs by composers half her age. On October 1, 2005, she performed at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.

On June 29, 2008, Baez performed on the acoustic stage at the Glastonbury Festival in Glastonbury, UK. She played at the Montreux Jazz Festival held in Montreux, Switzerland on July 6, 2008. At the end of the concert, she danced spontaneously on stage with a group of African percussionists. On August 2, 2009, Baez performed at the 50th Newport Folk Festival, the 50th anniversary of her groundbreaking performance at the first festival.

On April 4, 2017, Baez posted on his Facebook page her first new song in 27 years, "Nasty Man", a protest song against US President Donald Trump, which went on to become a viral hit. As part of her farewell tour in 2018, she met her fans from Istanbul for the last time at Harbiye Cemil Topuzlu Open Air Stage on July 22, 2018. This concert was Joan Baez's sixth and last concert in Turkey. Joan Baez gave her last concert at the Teatro Real in Madrid on 28 July 2019, after the dates in Europe.

Baez currently resides in Woodside, California and lived with her mother until her death in 2013. She has devoted herself to portraiture since she left the stage. Baez stated that she was never part of the feminist movement in 2019 and was not a vegetarian due to false assumptions made about her.

Private life

Bob Dylan

Baez first met Bob Dylan in April 1961 at Gerde's Folk City in New York City's Greenwich Village. In 1963, Baez released three albums, two of which were certified gold, and invited Dylan to perform with her at the Newport Folk Festival. The duo sang the Dylan composition "With God on Our Side", which set the stage for many similar duets in the coming months and years. Typically, while on tour, Baez would invite Dylan to sing on stage, partly alone and partly with her, to the dismay of her fans.

During Dylan's 1965 UK tour, their relationship slowly began to deteriorate. Dylan and Baez have done many duets and toured together. Baez wrote and composed at least three songs specifically about Dylan. However, references to Baez in Dylan's songs were much less clear.

David Harris

In October 1967, Baez, her mother, and about 70 other women were arrested at the Armed Forces Promotion Center in Oakland, California, where they closed their doors to block the entry of young recruits and supported young men who refused to enlist. They were imprisoned in Santa Rita Prison, and it was there that Baez met David Harris, who was held by the men but still managed to visit Baez regularly.

The two bonded closely after their release and had known each other for three months when they decided to get married. The couple got married on March 26, 1968 in New York. Shortly after, Harris refused to be drafted into the armed forces and was charged. On July 16, 1969, Harris was imprisoned by federal cops. Baez was visibly pregnant in the months that followed, especially at the Woodstock Festival, where she performed several songs in the early morning.

Their son Gabriel was born on December 2, 1969. Harris was released from Texas prison 15 months later, but they broke up three months after her release. The couple divorced in 1973.

Steve Jobs

Baez dated Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple Computer, in the early 1980s. Baez mentioned Jobs in her acknowledgments in her 1987 memoir And a Voice to Sing With, and performed for him at the memorial service in 2011. Baez spoke fondly of Jobs after his death.