Over the past 50 years, Joan Baez has been celebrated, denigrated, loved and hated. She stood up to foes and friends alike for causes she believed in. She was the first great star of the folk-protest movement of the early 1960s, championed Bob Dylan when he was still a bony kid in Greenwich Village and had her most successful album more than a decade after appearing on the cover of Time magazine. She marched with the Rev. Martin Luther King and founded the human-rights organization Humanitas International.
Throughout her now-50 years as a professional performer, Baez has gone onstage and captivated audiences. And, she says, she's having the most fun of her career, traveling with her band, which includes her son Gabe on percussion.
"Funny, I was 68 before I really got it together," says Baez in a warm voice.
Baez is touring in support of her 2008 album "Day After Tomorrow," which was produced by Steve Earle. She slips a few new songs into her shows, but audiences still expect her best-known work, including "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" (originally by The Band), "Diamonds and Rust" and "Sweet Sir Galahad."
A new generation seems to be picking up on Baez and the other greats of the folk movement. She says she can see some evidence of that in her shows.
"Before, I think it was just the parents dragging them there," says Baez. "The younger faces I see now, I think are on a journey of their own self-discovery. They might have been through their parents' old records or something."
She points to stories of young Americans going to work in orphanages in Romania and working with the poor in Uganda.
While it's commonplace for entertainers today to champion causes, it was a risky venture when Baez was a young star.
She was attacked regularly by "Lil' Abner" cartoonist Al Capp, who lampooned her as the recurring character Joanie Phoanie. Examples of the strip are reprinted in updated version of Baez's autobiography, "And a Voice to Sing With." While the sting has long passed, Baez says she was bothered by the comics when they appeared.
"It was demoralizing and I reacted stupidly to it at the time," she says.
Baez made comments that were interpreted as that she was going to sue Capp, which she had never intended to do. She says she passed by Capp years later at a hotel and still regrets not at least introducing herself.
Anyone who had doubted Baez's sincerity probably wasn't paying close enough attention.
Unlike Jane Fonda and some others, Baez always made her sympathy for the U.S. troops clear while she protested the Vietnam War. When Baez visited North Vietnam in 1972, she took along Christmas mail to the prisoners of war.
"People in the military, some very high ranking, have come up to me and said things like, 'I hated you in the 1960s, but, boy, was I wrong,' " says Baez. "Some have even given me medals (that they were awarded) as souvenirs."
Likewise, when the war was over, Baez alienated herself from former allies by criticizing atrocities committed by communist regimes in Vietnam and Cambodia. Her support of the plight of the "boat people" (Vietnamese escaping from the country) raised the ante even more.
Baez's most recent political act was simple: She sang a bit of "We Shall Overcome" in Farsi, the language of Iran, and put it on YouTube in support of the political dissidents. E-mails of thanks poured in.
Yet Baez finds time to get away in her tree house at her home outside of San Francisco. She says her 96-year-old mother has always been a little piqued that she couldn't join her daughter in the tree, but a new hoist created by the house's builder will soon remedy the problem.
"A lot of mothers would want diamonds or emeralds or something," says Baez. "Not my mom. She wants to get in that tree house."
(Contact Wayne Bledsoe of the Knoxville News Sentinel at bledsoew(at)knews.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)
High Profile
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