Joan Báez Mexico City Concert: Still Bringing Down the House!

Joan Báez, Folk Singer, in Mexico City
(Photo: Chino Lemus/Ocesa)

With one notable exception, I don't know any famous people. The exception is Joan Báez. Yes, she is still performing. In fact, she just gave a concert here in Mexico City. No, we didn't go because we didn't know about it until the review (translated below) appeared the next morning.

One year we were in the same gym class at Palo Alto High School. One of my favorite memories of Joan Báez was sitting on the floor one day waiting for the teacher to arrive. Joan was sitting on top of a table, which put her feet more or less at my eye level. I remember thinking clearly, "Boy, she's got really big feet." Reading that for her performance in Mexico City, Joan wore 'comfortable sandals' brought back the memory.

Another memorable moment was Joan's performance in our 1958 Talent Show. Put simply, she quite literally stopped the show. Our sextet of girl singers was waiting to go on. All of us were genuinely excited by the power of her performance, but even more excited by the audience response. Little did we know!

Joan Báez, Palo Alto High School Yearbook
(Courtesy of Eric Bigler, 1959)

Many, many years later, I was having lunch with my mother and sister at a restaurant in the San Francisco Airport when my mother noticed a woman sitting at a nearby table staring at me intently. Then mother suddenly recognized her: "It's Joan Báez!"

Taken aback and more than a little bit embarrassed, I nonetheless as a courtesy stopped at her table to greet her. With a warm smile, Joan offered, "We'd just figured out that I'm the only one who knows you."

After a brief chat about old times, I went on my way. Given my nervousness, I was grateful for Joan's total lack of pretense. Exchanging pleasantries with Joan Báez turned out to be no different from catching up with any other old Paly friend.

For this article, I found Joan's web page, where I read

"In the summer of 1958, Joan Chandos Baez, a 17-year old Palo Alto High School graduate (by the skin of her teeth) moved with her family—her parents Albert and Joan, older sister Pauline and younger sister Mimi—from Palo Alto to Boston [where her father became a professor at MIT]. ... She was an entering freshman at Boston University School of Drama, where she was surrounded by a musical group of friends who shared a passion for folk music."

Via the grapevine we heard that Joan had begun singing in Boston coffee shops and that she'd been told she had to improve her guitar skills. What we didn't know is that when she performed in our Talent Show, she'd only been playing the guitar for two years! We read press accounts of her performance at the 1959 Newport Folk Festival, which launched her as a folk artist.

I also found Joan's Wikipedia entry. At Paly High we'd been aware that Joan's father was a famous professor currently at Stanford, but we hadn't realized that Albert Báez was a co-inventor of the x-ray microscope or that he authored one of the most widely used physics textbooks in the U.S.

We knew about Joan's family's proud Mexican heritage, but we hadn't known that Joan's father, Albert, was born in Puebla, Puebla, Mexico, or that her grandfather had left the Catholic Church to become a Methodist minister and subsequently moved the Báez family to Long Island, New York, when Albert was only two. Not only did Joan's grandfather minister to the Spanish-speaking community, but he was a life-long activist committed to Latino causes.

Early in Joan's childhood, her parents converted to Quakerism. Joan has continued to identify with the tradition, particularly in her commitment to pacifism and social issues. My hunch is that this Quaker tradition is the source of Joan's total lack of pretension and her profound commitment to championing issues that threaten human dignity.

When I saw in La Jornada the review of Joan Báez's concert here in Mexico City, my first reaction was annoyance at having missed the concert. My second was a keen desire to translate the review and share it with all of you.

But mostly I was touched to discover that the Mexican reviewer also singles out the quality of Joan's voice, which others have described as:

"a stunning soprano, Joan's natural vibrato lends a taut, nervous tension to everything she sings."

This is the voice that stopped the show in 1958. By all accounts, Joan Báez is still delivering show-stopping performances. Enjoy the review!

La Jornada: Ernesto Márquez 

Thirty-three years after her first performance in Mexico yet with the same attitude of struggle and social commitment, Joan Báez, First Lady of Folk Song, presented a concert on Tuesday night, April 1, at the Metropolitan Theater in Mexico City. She delivered a nostalgic concert, random and enlightening, in which she revisited old ideological themes. 

Dressed simply in black trousers, white cotton blouse, red scarf and wearing comfortable sandals, Joan was accompanied by two excellent musicians (one, her son), and she brought the audience back to a time when song was urgent and necessary. 

The 73-year old U.S. singer presented a mix of old and new songs. Among the standouts were a selection from her best album, Diamonds and Rusts (1975), combined with those in Gracias a la vida (1974) and the most recent, Day After Tomorrow (2008). 

These are timeless songs, with a high degree of humanity performed by this possessor of a singularly deep, warm voice, such that her songs end up meaning more than their mere words. Joan began her concert by singing God is God, Steve Earle's song, which speaks of the smallness of man in the universe, of the blessing of life and the importance of not believing in more than what is:

"I believe in prophecy, I believe in miracles, I believe in God, and God is God. 

"I am not God, you are not God. He is He."

She continued with Farewell Angelina, a Bob Dylan song, whom Joan named as "the best writer of my time." Next came songs recalling an era: Flora, Baby Blue and Just the Way You Are. 

Onstage, Joan was accompanied by Dirk Powell, excellent instrumentalist on mandolin, guitar, bass, banjo, piano, accordion, and by her son, Gabriel Harris, on percussion. She was also joined by Grace Stumberg, who sang harmony on some songs. 

After the song to Joe Hill, the union leader shot in 1915, came the most intense moments of the concert with Joan singing the chilling verses of Sandinista Comandante Tomás Borge in Mi venganza personal, My Personal Revenge. 

One sees and hears this legendary woman sing with a steadfast conviction about issues she presents in song, infusing life into everything she sings. Her deep, earnest voice and the suggestive titles of her songs forged a special rapport with those listening in the audience, most of whom are the same age as the singer.

Joan's stage presence is characterized by ingenuous candor and spacious grace. A sense of closeness and warmth comes, especially when she delivers songs in Spanish that, in her words, "I learned along the way": La Llorona (The Weeping Woman), De colores (Of Colors), Gracias a la vida (Thanks to Life) ... and thanks to her ineffable voice they were performed with subtle nuance. 

In 1981 Joan Báez undertook a Latin American tour that included Mexico. Invited by the International Cervantes Festival, she performed at the Juárez Theater before an audience that was surprised both by her pure, sorrowing soprano voice and by songs that dealt with human rights, governmental abuse of authority and non-violence. At that time, the military ruled the Southern Cone, and Báez was viewed with zeal. After (or before, I don't remember), almost clandestinely, she visited Chile, Argentina and Brazil, encouraging those who opposed the military regimes. Her songs didn't move us then as they did now at the Metropolitan Theater, when we have gained some perspective and some distance on those events. But Báez sang with the same conviction of struggle and constancy. 

Ultimately, today Joan Báez is a kind of institution, a living legend, comparable to other figures like her admired Violeta Parra, her great friend Mercedes Sosa, and the English singers Judy Collins and Anne Sylvestre. Spanish original

Related Content Sent From One of Jenny's Readers: Joan Baez Diffuses Right-Wing Protest at Idaho Concert (Daily Kos).