Joan Baez

Last night, I watched a program about Joan Baez aired by the local PBS station. All that was familiar to me was the picture I had in my mind of her: playing folk music and wearing her hair short. Actually, more than that is her very name, which is more familiar to me than anything else about her... Joan Baez.

The show was fascinating - it had wonderful early footage of her before she was famous. What really caught my eye was how she looked with long hair. If I didn't know it was her, I wouldn't have recognized her. I wouldn't have told myself, "Oh, that's Joan Baez, but with long hair." I really enjoyed the parts that I watched, particularly the early years. Seeing the home movies of her and her sisters running around on their travels when they were young was especially touching; they even had snippets of them being filmed while they sat in their car during these trips. It took away her celebrity and showed a typical American family on vacation.

I learned a lot about her such as her work with Bob Dylan which I hadn't seen before. There was fantastic footage of them with a bunch of people gathered in a room, her playing her guitar and singing, and him sitting in front of his typewriter typing (what might have been) lyrics. That it was shot in black and white only added to the fascination of what I was watching, a time capsule.

Although I was vaguely familiar that she was an activist back in the 1960's, this program showed a lot of that footage as well. There were protests and defining walks with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and sitting next to and participating with him as he gave speeches to congregations. She also protested the Vietnam draft and went to jail for it.

Another snippet that was shown was of her (on black and white film and her with long hair) singing a song that was familiar to me as a song that Nirvana sang during their Unplugged performance: "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?" which I looked up is an old folk song that dates back to the 1870's.