JOAN BAEZ

Joan Baez was born in Staten Island, New York. Her father was a physicist, born in Mexico, and her mother of Scottish and English descent. She grew up in New York and California, and when her father took a faculty position in Massachusetts, she attended Boston University and began to sing in coffeehouses and small clubs. Bob Gibson invited her to attend the 1959 Newport Folk Festival where she was a hit.

Vanguard Records signed Baez and in 1960 her first album, "Joan Baez," came out. Baez was known for her soprano voice, her haunting songs, and, until she cut it in 1968, her long black hair. Early in her career she performed with Bob Dylan, and they toured together in the 1970s.

Subjected to racial slurs and discrimination in her own childhood because of her Mexican heritage and features, Joan Baez became involved with a variety of social causes early in her career, including civil rights and nonviolence. She was sometimes jailed for her protests. Joan Baez married David Harris, a Vietnam draft protestor, in 1968, and he was in jail for most of the years of their marriage. They divorced in 1973, after having one child, Gabriel Earl.

In 1967, the Daughters of the American Revolution denied Joan Baez permission to perform at Constitution Hall, resonating with their famous denial of the same privilege to Marian Anderson.

Early in her career, Joan Baez stressed historical folk songs, adding political songs to her repertoire during the 1960s. Later, she added country songs and more mainstream popular music, though always including many songs with political messages. She supported such organizations as Amnesty International and Humanitas International. Joan Baez continues to speak and sing for peaceful solutions to violence in the Middle East and Latin America.

Selected Joan Baez Quotations

• My concern has always been for the people who are victimized, unable to speak for themselves and who need outside help.

• Action is the antidote to despair.

• All serious daring starts from within.

• I've never had a humble opinion. If you've got an opinion, why be humble about it?

• Instead of getting hard ourselves and trying to compete, women should try and give their best qualities to men - bring them softness, teach them how to cry.

• It seems to me that those songs that have been any good, I have nothing much to do with the writing of them.

The easiest kind of relationship is with ten thousand people, the hardest is with one.

• Only you and I can help the sun rise each coming morning. If we don't, it may drench itself out in sorrow.

• You don't get to choose how you're going to die. Or when. You can decide how you're going to live now.

Fotos: Dana Tyman
Fonte: womenshistory.about.com