Women's History Month: Joan Baez

Here's to folksinger and activist Joan Baez.

Her family converted to Quakerism during Joan's early childhood, and she has continued to identify with the tradition, particularly in her commitment to pacifism and social issues.

When she was a child, a friend of her father gave her a ukulele. Joan learned four chords, which enabled her to play rhythm and blues, the music she was listening to at the time. Her parents, however, were fearful that the music would lead her into a life of drug addiction.

In 1957, at age 16, Joan committed her first act of civil disobedience by refusing to leave her Palo Alto High School classroom for an air-raid drill. After the bells rang, students were to leave the school, make their way to their home air-raid shelters, and pretend they were surviving an atomic blast. Protesting what she believed to be misleading government propaganda, Joan refused to leave her seat when instructed and continued reading a book. For this act she was punished by school officials, and was ostracized by the local population for being a supposed "Communist infiltrator."

In 1958, Joan's father accepted a faculty position at MIT, and moved his family to Massachusetts. At that time, it was within the center of the up-and-coming folk-music scene, and she began busking near home in Boston and nearby Cambridge.

Joan and two other folk enthusiasts recorded an album in the cellar of a friend's house. The three sang solos and duets, a family friend designed the album cover, and it was released on Veritas Records as Folksingers 'Round Harvard Square.

Her true professional career began at that 1959 Newport Folk Festival; following that appearance, she recorded her first album for Vanguard Records, Joan Baez (1960). The collection of traditional folk ballads, blues, and laments sung to her own guitar accompaniment sold moderately well.

Joan's second release, Joan Baez, Vol. 2 (1961) went "gold," as did Joan Baez in Concert, Part 1 (1962) and Joan Baez in Concert, Part 2 (1963). From the early-to-mid-1960s, she emerged at the forefront of the American roots revival, where she introduced her audiences to the then-unknown Bob Dylan (the two became romantically involved in late 1962, remaining together through early 1965).

Joan was one of the first musicians to use her popularity as a vehicle for social protest, singing and marching for human rights and peace. The early years of her career saw the civil-rights movement in the U.S. become a prominent issue. Joan's performance of "We Shall Overcome", the civil-rights anthem, at Martin Luther King's 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom permanently linked her to the song.

In 1966, she stood in the fields alongside César Chávez and California's migrant farm workers as they fought for fair wages and safe working conditions, and performed at a benefit on behalf of the United Farm Workers union that year.

In 1964, Joan founded the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence and encouraged draft resistance at her concerts.

She was arrested twice in 1967 for blocking the entrance of the Armed Forces Induction Center in Oakland, California and spent over a month in jail.

In 1969, Joan's appearance at Woodstock in upstate New York afforded her an international musical and political podium.

During Christmas of 1972, she joined a peace delegation traveling to North Vietnam, both to address human rights in the region, and to deliver Christmas mail to American prisoners of war. During Joan's time there, she was caught in the U.S. military's "Christmas bombing" of Hanoi, North Vietnam, during which the city was bombed for 11 straight days.

In 1978, she performed at several benefit concerts to defeat the Briggs Initiative, which proposed banning all gay people from teaching in the public schools of California. Later that same year, Joan participated in memorial marches for the assassinated San Francisco city supervisor Harvey Milk, who was openly gay.

She dated Apple Computer co-founder Steve Jobs during the early 1980s.

Joan continues to be socially and politically active, recently performing for the protesters and Occupy Wall Street.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Baez