Born in 1941, on Staten Island, New York, one of three daughters of a Quaker family of Mexican, English and Scottish descent, Joan’s political activism was most probably influenced by her physicist father, Albert Baez. The co-inventor of the x-ray microscope and author of one of the most widely used physics textbooks in the United States, he declined lucrative defense industry jobs during the height of the Cold War. The family moved frequently and lived in different areas of the world before settling in Boston in the late 1950s. There he accepted a faculty position at MIT, and Joan attended Boston University while singing in local clubs.
This time marked the onset of the burgeoning folk music scene, and her professional career began in 1959 at the Newport Folk Festival. The following year, she recorded “Joan Baez”, which was her first album for a major company, on Vanguard Records. Although not a runaway smash, the album fared moderately well. In 1961, her second release, “Joan Baez, Vol.2” went gold. So did her next two albums as she became entrenched as a symbol of 1960s protest and activism. It was she who introduced early audiences to a lesser-known Bob Dylan, and the two were romantically involved for several years.
Eventually, her music and her politics became inseparable. She became very vocal about civil rights and US policy in Vietnam, encouraging draft resistance at her concerts. In 1965, she founded the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence and in 1967, she was arrested twice and jailed for a month for participating in civil disobedience against the Vietnam War.
In the 1970s, she began writing her own songs, the most famous being “Diamonds and Rust” which was recorded in 1977. Much of her time during this period was devoted to improving human rights in Latin America, Southeast Asia, Africa and the United States. She founded her own human rights group, “Humanitas”, whose purpose was to target oppression wherever it occurred.
She has one son, Gabriel, from her marriage to David Harris, which dissolved in 1973. Her beautiful voice still resounds and she remains a symbol for oppressed people everywhere. Only in a country as great as ours, could her voice of protest not only exist, but rock.
Long may it resonate everywhere.