“I’m waiting to hear your accent. I don’t care what we talk about,” says Joan Baez on a Zoom call from her kitchen in California.
Baez is a legendary folk musician and a lifelong activist who was at the forefront of 1960s counterculture. She marched with Martin Luther King, opposed the war in Vietnam, attended peace marches in 1970s Belfast. A recent documentary about her life, Joan Baez: I Am a Noise, tells the story of her music and activism but also deals with her struggle with anxiety and some upsetting family secrets.
It’s all the more affecting given how powerfully Baez has moved through the world. The impression most fans would get from her is that she is someone who’s at peace and knows exactly what she’s doing. She laughs. “That’s true now.”
For much of her life, and throughout her childhood, Baez dealt with panic attacks and a sense of inferiority. Her father, Albert, was Mexican and she experienced racism at school. “I was a Mexican so they put me in the dumb class. And I didn’t do anything in the dumb class ... One day they said, ‘Oh, put her in the English class, the smart class.’ And I really came to life.”
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She was always socially conscious. It came partly because of her family. “I was eight when my father became a Quaker, joined the Quaker church, and that’s when I began hearing the discussions about non-violence and violence. All of it came to me in the household.”
Another significant early experience came when her father took a job in Baghdad and brought his family with him. Baez saw desperate poverty for the first time and it really affected her.
“I think often about how different people are,” she says. “We were three daughters who went to Baghdad. We saw the most awful stuff. My older sister [Pauline] didn’t talk about it. I don’t know what she felt. Mimi [Fariña, her younger sister, also a folk singer] ended up running an amazing organisation [Bread & Roses, which provides therapeutic access to music for marginalised people] for years ... Our little souls saw the same things and took different things out of it. I carried the weight of it.”
Baez’s career as an activist really began before her music career. As a teenager she staged a one-woman sit-in against nuclear war when her school was running drills. “The parents were terrified. They had a communist in with their kids so they were trying to keep their kids away from me.”
Singing was a comfort. “When I was hiding under the covers, playing the ukulele when I was 13, I really loved it. It was my salvation from all the stuff you see in the film. I was anxious so much of the time at school and it calmed me.”
How did she discover folk music? “What I loved and listened to [as a teenager] was rhythm and blues,” she says. “That music was coming from a very profound place. I didn’t know that then. I just loved the voices – Johnny Ace, the Temptations. They just carried me to a different place. They did not carry my parents to a different place.” She laughs. “And that’s when they took me to see Pete Seeger.”
Ironically, on discovering political folk music, she took a step back politically. “I had fallen in love with a guy from Harvard, which was my magnet for Harvard Square [Baez had a residency in Club 47 which was on that square]. So for those years, I was not openly politically active ...”
Her politics came back to the fore when she saw Pete Seeger sing at a National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy rally. Many musicians dabbled with politics in the 1960s, but for Baez it became integral to who she was. She was very involved with the US civil rights movement and marched alongside King. What was he like?
“He had terrific sense of humour and he couldn’t show it. If he wisecracked, they’d say ‘the guy’s a joker’. I got to see it because I was lucky. I got to see that fun, silly part of him. People should keep that in mind.”
Did her own experience of racism as a child have an influence on her activism for civil rights? “I’m sure it did. I’m sure I felt close to that issue and I also felt as though I didn’t have the credentials to really be part of it because I was brown and not black.”
Was it scary to march with King in the south? “Fear is a funny thing. In some ways I’m courageous, and in some ways, I think I’m just stupid.”
Dylan was not interested in street activism and I couldn’t respect that back then
Baez didn’t shy away from frightening things. She was jailed several times for her anti-Vietnam War activism and David Harris, her then-husband and father of her son, went to prison for nearly two years. She sang to human rights workers in Brazil in the early 1980s, despite being forbidden to do so. She played in Sarajevo during the siege in 1993. She showed up in Ireland,and London marching for peace in the 1970s.
“I marched with Mairead Corrigan right smack in the middle of it,” she says. “[Belfast was] one of the more dangerous situations I’ve ever been in. I had a concert in Belfast and they were going to pick me up and it got later and later and later and it turned there was a bomb scare, and there was a car blown up within range of where I was going to sing ...
“When I got there, there was another scare, and everybody had to leave. I didn’t realise I was nervous until I walked out on the stage. I was going to sing Blowin’ in the Wind and I couldn’t remember the words. I said, ‘Can somebody help me out here?’” She laughs. “Everybody knew how scary it was for this foreign person coming in.”
Why is music so important to activism? “I think music is the soul,” she says. “I can’t imagine being involved in social movement and activism without the music. I think sometimes activism without music happens, but I don’t want to be involved with that. Music is the strongest thing to connect opposite sides ... I was telling that to Mercedes Sosa who was very, very famous in Latin America. I said, ‘It’s music that crosses the boundaries.’ She said, ‘Yes, music and food’.”
She worries that there aren’t enough new protest songs. “The different movements, the women’s, the LGBTQ movement, they’re still using Bob Dylan songs. There are good songs out there but that new anthem has not been written.”
Dylan had a huge effect on her. They were singing partners and lovers. She was the bigger star initially and introduced him to a wider audience. He was sucked into super stardom and he broke her heart. She stayed in the folky activist fringes but continued to perform his songs. “He was not interested in street activism and I couldn’t respect that back then. I thought he should be doing that, which is ridiculous! I should have been grateful for the songs.”
She worked through a lot of her feelings about Dylan a few years ago when she painted his portrait. “I just cried and cried and listened to his music. Oh, my God, what a gift.”
Does she ever hear from him? “Not one word.”
Having learned about her issues with self-esteem, I wonder if her activism came from a compassion she wasn’t able to show herself. “I think that’s a good point. I occupied myself with everybody else because, as you see in the film, I couldn’t go within. I had to protect all that stuff until I was half a century old and was willing to look at it.”
Was her decision to open up about her life in this film linked to her decision to stop touring at around the same time? “I’ve never thought of it that way, but maybe [I did it] because I knew that was imminent. My voice was deteriorating. I was working so hard on it and it still wasn’t sounding like I wanted it to sound. The ease was not there. It was all a struggle. So maybe somewhere in my little radar, I was thinking, ‘Now is the time I’ll be honest.’”
As part of the process, she gave director Karen O’Connor, Miri Navasky and Irish woman Maeve O’Boyle access to the storage unit with all her archives. These include extensive home movies, tapes she sent her relatives in lieu of letters, and even recordings of her counselling sessions.
Baez herself had never even been at the unit. “In the film, when I walk in, that’s the first time.”
Even though I was a wreck when I was walking on stage, something switched when I started to sing, especially if it was political
One of the key stories the film tells was how, in middle age, Baez and Mimi realised they had been abused by her father. Their memories were hazy and fragmented but they knew them to be real. To their dying days their parents denied anything happened. This led to years of painful family discussions and therapy, all of which is presented in the second half of the documentary. It is emotionally difficult, deeply moving and thoughtfully told.
Why did Baez agree to recount that story now? “I think a number of things became clear to me at once. One was my age. It’s getting to the point where either I do it or shut up about it. My family was all gone. I couldn’t have made the film with my family still alive because it would have been too hurtful. I wanted to leave an honest legacy. People are so surprised that I’m honest, but they shouldn’t be. People should be honest.”
But it is brave to talk about these things, isn’t it? “We joked about all the courage I’ve had in all the places I’ve been and Karen [O’Connor] said this great thing, ‘But the real courage came when she would do the film with natural light’.” She laughs.
Was it difficult to see the finished film? “I would have said that it wasn’t difficult until about six months after it came out,” she says. “I managed to do it all, see it a number of times and have Q&As and not feel a thing. I said in the film, ‘Oh, I don’t have [anxiety] any more.’ But then all of a sudden, it came up and hit me in the backside. But that’s okay.”
She’s glad she talked about it, she says. “Every single person who comes up to me has their own, ‘Well, my mother did this’ or ‘I’ve been holding this in for decade’. I can recognise the people who have the same kind of abuse I had. I recognise them like that.” She snaps her fingers. “What it means to them is huge.”
Was fame difficult for her in the early days? “It was easier than what I was living,” she says. “School was so hard for me. It was panic attack, panic attack. And after fame I maybe went on having panic attacks but I was getting rewarded. Even though I was a wreck when I was walking on stage, something switched when I started to sing, especially if it was political. I mean, singing in Mississippi in 1963 or 64 was hugely meaningful to me. It was difficult but it was out of the trenches that I’d been living in.”
Baez says all this calmly, smiling, looking preternaturally young and powerful at 83.
She is still engaged in politics. (“My darkest joke is: if global warming gets us first, Trump won’t have time to build his death camps.”) She still makes public appearances and she comes to Ireland next week for a screening of her film at the invitation of Art for Human Rights; the Irish Refugee Council, Fighting Words and Narrative4 are among the invitees.
And she’s still making art. This year she published a book of poetry, When You See My Mother, Ask Her to Dance. Last year she published a collection of beautiful, funny, upside-down drawings called Am I Pretty When I Fly?. Art, like singing, has always been an escape for her.
“I don’t take credit for any of this shit, because I was born with it. The other wonderful gift that goes with it all was the desire to be involved, politically active and caring about people and doing. That’s a gift too. When people say, ‘What would you tell a young person?’ I can only tell them that where my life is most rich all has to do with activism and involvement with human beings.”
Then Baez blows me a kiss across cyberspace and she’s gone.
Joan Baez will participate in a Q&A with the directors of I Am A Noise after a screening at Dublin’s Lighthouse Cinema on December 11th. She will be interviewed by Paul Muldoon at the Seamus Heaney HomePlace in Bellaghy, Co Derry on December 12th
