Joan Baez: The Last Leaf (Hardcover) by Elizabeth Thomson
Palazzo Editions Ltd – 1 October 2020 (ISBN 9781786750969)
Over the past sixty years, there are few musicians and activists who have stood the test of time as well as Joan Baez. She has influenced and mentored generations of singers and is living proof that music can cross boundaries and move people to change. A voice for social justice and change, she is an encouragement to others to do the same, having reached 80 this year and, having completed her farewell tour, she has placed down her songwriting pen and taken up paintbrush for a new chapter in her life. It’s an ideal time as any to take look back on her life and Joan Baez: The Last Leaf, the new biography by Elizabeth Thomson is the perfect place to start.
Many people of my generation will remember We Shall Overcome; her performance at Woodstock, singing for her then husband who was languishing in jail for draft-related offences; marching with Martin Luther King; and all that stuff with Bob Dylan. Is there more to her than that?
Thankfully, Thomson takes us on a guided journey through Baez’s career from her Quaker origins, through the hippy cafe culture of Greenwich Village and on to world-wide fame. Throughout her life Baez combined music and activism. And did so with success, but not easily and it was hard keeping up her commitments to humanity, her personal life and her music.
We learn that the first known recorded footage from 1958 shows her 17 year old self ‘ramrod-straight, half in shadow, her hair long and wavy’, to all intents and purposes ‘fully formed as a talent’. She was not, however, so amenable on stage as she later became, stopping singing if the Club 47 audience so much as made a sound. And even off stage she was difficult to befriend.
Baez’s musical career took off pretty quickly. Before her twentieth birthday her 1960 release Joan Baez entered the Billboard chart at 20, more importantly staying in the charts for 64 weeks, eventually earning her a Gold Disc. The same year she had made her television debut, on one occasion watched by Robert Zimmerman who eventually travelled to New York to seek her out.
The Dylan theme weaves its way through a large part of the book, though like all of her content, Thomson does not make large of it. The detail is there, and the subtle undercurrent or hint of critical commentary on the relationship is sympathetic to Baez yet contains no Red-Top style of ramp up. If you want a dish-the-dirt exposé, this is not the book and I suggest that you would be hard put to find one. Having said that, a bit more detail on how the story of Baez helping Dylan got turned into one of Dylan helping Baez might be useful, but it is, as my parents would have said, ancient history.
Thomson does give more critical analysis of the music, which is only to be expected for someone who contributed to the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and who has attended Joan Baez concerts for fifty years. Baez’s voice, at the start of her career ‘too polished’ for some folk followers, has changed over the decades. Thomson acknowledges that Baez, the consummate performer, nurtures and alters to fit the ageing process and only on a few tracks of her later albums does she point out the weaknesses.
If Baez’s music is the warp of her life, the activism has been the weft, such have the two been knitted together. It was only into the new century did Baez look to concentrate primarily on music, deciding that her final decade of performing would terminate about 2000 but actually continued for the best part of the next 20 years. The new century also brought about some form of political peace for her, for a few years at least, when the only President she actively promoted, Barack Obama, was elected to the White House. Assiduously apolitical, or perhaps non-partisan, it was always the cause, not the political party that needed to be fixed. From the Vietnam War, the subsequent fight of the Vietnamese Boat People, the Race Riots (her sallow complexion and facial features always made her feel different at school), to her friendship with Václav Havel, her visits to worn-torn Sarajevo, the vicious dictatorships in South America, all were causes worth standing up for, debating and arguing against, promoting non-violent dissension, disarming the opposition by asking them what they thought and what would they do. If you think that the music output is staggering in quantity as well as in quality, the list of dangerous places Baez felt the need to visit to support the downtrodden, the forgotten and the innocent must be greater and more important.
And that makes me think that Thomson has crammed so much into a relatively short book of some 170 or so pages. There is more in this book that I didn’t know than I did, and has painted a picture of a person of whom I knew relatively little, and most of that knowledge stopped at 1980 at the latest. Baez’s later work needs interrogating further. The artists she took under her wing, supported and helped fly, pepper her albums, as co-performers, writers, producers. She takes a song from someone else, or rather people send songs her way, and she makes them her own, her voice and her guitar work as distinctive as ever.
Baez gave her last concert, in Madrid, on July 28, 2019. Thomson was there with her sister, and notes that the reviewer in El Pais described the concert as “emotional, serene, humble and extraordinarily generous”. The emotion, Thomson says, was ‘palpable’. I bet it was. And thankfully Thomson was there to complete the circle. Joan Baez: The Last Leaf presents us with a lot of detail, with a fair number of questions and with a picture of a woman who has given so much to the world, to music and to activism that it is surprising how little has been written about her. However, Thomson’s book is an excellent starting point.
The Last Leaf is published on 1st October – just ahead of Baez’s 80th birthday in January 2021.